Established Businesses
Established businesses have an existing client base and services their customers use.
As an established business, you could be looking to re-platform your current proposition, expand your current offering or get access to broader payment/ investment options with WealthKernel.
You are a deposit-taking institution and are looking to add an investment proposition for your customers, or already have one and are looking to re-platform from your current setup
You are a company enabling your customers to buy securities, and you are looking to add new security lines, diversify your brokers or re-platform away from your current provider
Riester Pension
The term “Riester pension” includes products ranging from insurance policies, savings plans, unit trust agreements and home loan to savings contracts.
The saver invests a certain amount each month and can withdraw capital after retirement. Low-income savers and families with children benefit from the 'Riester' allowances while higher earners benefit from the tax advantages. Under this account, contributions of up to €2,100 can be claimed as a special expense in the income tax return.
'Rürup'-pension
Designed for the self-employed and freelancers who are not covered by statutory pension insurance, Rürup'- pension benefits are taxed in the same way as the statutory pension, but initially only partially.
The taxable portion depends on the year in which the pension commences and is fixed for life as a fixed amount. It rises continuously with later years of retirement.
Piano Individuale di Risparmio (PIR)
PIR offers tax incentives to savers investing in small and medium sized Italian companies. It can be sold as mutual funds, discretionary accounts, life policies or security deposit accounts and carries full exemption from 26% income tax if savers stay invested for at least five years.
PIR plans are aimed at retail investors resident in Italy who can invest a maximum of €30,000 per year and up to €150,000 over five years.
At least 70% of assets must be invested in financial instruments (equities or bonds) issued by Italian and/or foreign companies (EU and EEA) permanently established in Italy under the domestic fiscal regime. Of this 70%, at least 30% (or 21% of total investable assets) must be in Italian small and mid caps not included in the main index (FTSE MIB).
Plan d’Epargne en Actions (PEA)
Created in 1992, PEA is a tax-efficient investment wrapper for residents, allowing French investors to buy and sell European securities with preferential conditions.
It is considered as a simplified stock savings plan because a PEA account contains both a securities account and a cash account. The cash account is debited when a security is purchased, and credited when a security is sold or a company pays dividends.
Livret A
Established in 1818, the product acts as a savings account for French citizens and residents, and the annual returns are not taxed.
As of 2015, only one account may be held by an individual, with an amount from €10 to €22,950.
European ISA (Spanish Compliant Bond)
Spanish compliant investment bonds are tax-efficient, unit-linked platforms for EU regulated funds such as collective investment schemes and unit trusts.
To avail tax benefits on the above, the resident must invest in a tax-saving life insurance bond that contains an element of ‘risk’ and pays out life insurance over and above the plan (around 101%).
You enable your customers to hold digital wallets and send money to other businesses, and are looking to add an investing proposition
You enable your customers to place their money on deposit in exchange for a fixed savings rate, and are looking to complement these savings with investments
You have your own range of fund solutions and are looking to distribute these through digital or hybrid channels with better technology
You provide insight into your customers' spending habits and are looking to add a rules-based investing solution as a next step for customers saving money
Regulatory
In order to offer an investment proposition to your customers, you will need the relevant permissions that match your business model.
The most common permissions in the wealth and investment space are:
- Arranging (bringing about) deals in investments
- Arranging safeguarding and administration of assets
- Dealing in investments as agent
- Making arrangements with a view to transactions in investments
If you already have the permissions mentioned above for your regular business activities, you can start integrating with our API.
You can apply to the FCA for a Variation of Permission (VoP) if you need to change or add to your existing regulated activities. This can take up to 12 months.
You may also currently be unregulated and are looking to add an investment proposition for your users - in which case you can follow the same path as earlier stage fintechs by:
- Applying to the FCA to become Directly Authorised
- Becoming an Appointed Representative of a Regulatory Principal*
*We can introduce you to a number of AR Principals
WealthKernel has been providing investment infrastructure since 2015 and and holds FCA permissions for its activities. You can view our full permissions on the FCA Register.
You can view our regulatory overview page here for more information on the regulatory environment.
Business Model
WealthKernel supports all types of regulated businesses, and the most common built on our API are Execution-Only (XO), Discretionary and Advisory.
With an Execution-Only proposition, your users will be making their own investment decisions on where to invest their money - you will be responsible for choosing the investment universe to offer them as well as a place to execute their trades.
Execution-Only business models are often viewed as less complex than Discretionary and Advisory models as they need less compliance oversight and regulatory permissions.
In a Discretionary Fund Manager (DFM) proposition, you will be investing your customers money on their behalf, choosing suitable investments based on the risk tolerance of your customers.
With a higher level of responsibility and access to users’ investments, discretionary fund managers' permissions come with greater regulations and require more oversight.
KYC
As an established business, you will already have a process for onboarding customers and collecting their information.
You may want to continue working with your existing KYC supplier.
We can support this setup with a Letter of Comfort between our two companies, that allows you to continue to KYC your users. We will also conduct random sampling to ensure that we are able to place reliance on you.
You can also choose WealthKernel’s KYC service to reduce the number of integrations you have to maintain.
WealthKernel is currently integrated with third-party KYC providers. Our API lets you stay updated on the status of your onboarding users via our webhooks service and the WealthKernel Dashboard.
Account Types
With WealthKernel, your business can offer multiple account types to customers and enable them to invest in their choice of products.
WealthKernel can support all of the following account types in the UK.
ISAs are tax-efficient accounts in the UK, that enable retail investors to save or invest without being taxed on the interest or income they earn.View API
A General Investment Account is a non-tax-advantaged account where investments are held and has no limit for the amount that can be invested.
View API
A JISA is a tax-efficient investment account for children that can be contributed to by family and friends, but only the child can access the money.
View API
Trading
WealthKernel supports a broad range of investment instruments, and all of our investments are liquid, listed and suitable for the retail market. This helps our Tenants customise their investment offering with their choice of instruments.
WealthKernel is open architecture, and currently supports US stocks, UK stocks, ETFs, and Mutual Funds and also offer all of our supported instruments in fractions.
WealthKernel operates a sub-broker model and consolidates all client orders in a certain window, and sends it to a sub-broker once a day. We also settle all orders in GBP.
Custody
We act as a custodian for our Tenants, and all of our client money is held at Tier 1 banks in the UK under WealthKernel Nominees.
WealthKernel also strictly complies with the CASS rules and is responsible for safeguarding and securing clients’ money as well as records, accounts and reconciliations.
We receive regular audits from an external party to ensure that our systems and controls around Client Money are working appropriately.
Payments & Transfers
We support a diverse range of payment methods that give you the flexibility to choose an approach that best suits your users’ needs. This allows your users to make one-off and recurring deposits to their portfolios.
After WealthKernel receives a deposit from your users, we match it with the deposit expectation that contains the details of the source account.
We enable users to transfer their assets held at another provider into our accounts at WealthKernel. The transfers can be made in cash or in-specie, depending on the asset type and you and your customer's choice.
You can view the payment types we support here.
Front Ends
As an established business, you will already have a front-end journey that your customer uses. You might want to offer a new investment product to your customers or are looking to re-platform your current investment service.
We offer all the resources your tech team needs to connect to our API, focusing on creating the optimal back-end experience.
WealthKernel has publicly available API docs and a sandbox environment so developers and product owners can evaluate what can be built with our API endpoints.
Tenants - The term we use to describe our clients at WealthKernel.
