THE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN ADVANTAGE

Financial advisory firm MoneyOwl advocates a comprehensive approach to wealth planning.

We see an increasing interest in investment products that allow customers to put their spare cash into funds that offer a higher

deposits.” interest rate than fixed

MoneyOwl is an NTUC social enterprise and a feebased, comprehensive, and bionic financial advisory firm. “While we’re a fintech, we are quite different from normal start-ups in that we are owned by two local corporates: NTUC Enterprise Co-operative Ltd, the holding entity for all of NTUC’s businesses, and Providend Holding Pte Ltd, the holding company for Providend Ltd, Singapore’s first fee-only financial adviser and a retirement specialist serving the affluent market,” explains Chuin Ting Weber, CEO/CIO.

MoneyOwl is a comprehensive financial adviser with an endto-end suite of services or practice areas. They range from comprehensive planning advice that incorporates national schemes like Central Provident Fund (CPF), insurance advisory, investment advisory, and digital will-writing service.

“One of our key services is Comprehensive Financial Planning (CFP),” Weber says, “a process where we review our customer’s current financial situation, set their financial goals, and develop a plan to achieve them. “It involves improving their cash flow standing, protecting their assets, growing their wealth for retirement and children’s education funding, and eventual passing of assets efficiently to their heirs.” The Fullerton MoneyOwl WiseIncome is the advisory firm’s latest product, which was launched in March this year. It is a multi-asset unit trust incorporated in Singapore, as a sub-fund under the Fullerton Fund, co-designed by Fullerton Fund Management, a Temasek subsidiary and MoneyOwl. The fund aims to generate regular income and long-term capital appreciation for investors, Weber elaborates.

We sat down with Weber to talk about where people are putting their money, the kind of returns they are expecting, and the MoneyOwl way of financial planning.

What sets MoneyOwl apart from its competitors?

We’re the only mass-market financial adviser that are all of three things: Comprehensive financial planning services, non-tied to any bank, insurer (or venture capitalist) and fully salaried advisers. We also pride ourselves on being the first bionic adviser, by which we mean using a combination of humans and technology to serve our clients. We have a full advisory and solutions team of advisers, specialists, and financial literacy trainers, with more than a dozen of them being Certified Financial Planners or Associate Wealth Planners. By technology, we have four robo platforms, complementing our full human advisory team and going way beyond investment advice.

What changes in people’s attitude towards wealth accumulation and preservation are you seeing as a result of the pandemic?

There is a greater interest in participating in investments that are connected to technology, such as cryptocurrency and in overall trading for fast, exponential gains.

How would you describe these changes?

Technology has made it faster and easier for people to trade different instruments across markets, while social media has made it easy for corporate or social celebrities and online communities to share views and to do so quickly. When combined with the volatility of the markets, this means that there are more stories of sudden riches gained from cryptocurrency, meme stocks, and so on.

There is often also a story of potential structure changes behind such instruments, like cryptocurrency, and the entry of big funds give them a boost. This becomes really tempting for people cooped up at home in front of a screen to take a gamble. While it is totally okay to put a small percentage of say, 5 per cent of assets that you can afford to lose into such experimental assets, the risk is that you do not yet have your core plan based on a solid, time-tested strategy set up and you end up losing a lot.

What is the common thinking behind popular financial strategies?

“How can I ever make enough to live the life I want as soon as possible? Is there an easier or faster way?” At MoneyOwl, we would suggest that getting rich slowly, and focusing on sufficiency of means and reliability of such returns, would be a wiser way and happier way than the stress of trying to maximize or guess right.

What particular wealth management services do you offer MoneyOwl clients?

Other than our Comprehensive Financial Planning service mentioned earlier and our WiseIncome under investment services, we also have other services such as:

Investment –

WiseSaver is a fund that invests in Singapore Dollar bank deposits, customers now have an alternative to earning higher returns, while maintaining the flexibility and liquidity to withdraw your funds whenever they need them.

Dimensional –

we are also offering five portfolios created using Dimensional Fund Advisors’ (DFA) funds which are backed by decades of research and cater to varying levels of risk appetites.

Insurance –

Our customers can gain access to more than 500,000 insurance quotes instantly by using our insurance comparison tool. Additionally, our Client Advisers are fully salaried and do not take commissions, thus their advice is conflict-free.

Will-writing –

We also provide a free simple will-writing service for our customers, where its usual price is at S$160.50 per user.

What types of wealth management services or investment instruments have become popular of late?

In a recent report by YouGov (commercial.yougov.com/), most Singaporeans (53 per cent) are prioritizing saving money for an unexpected hardship as one of their financial priorities for this year. Hence, we saw an increasing interest in investment products that allow customers to put their spare cash into funds that offer a higher interest rate than fixed deposits and at the same time allow them to withdraw their funds whenever they want.

To what factors would you attribute this popularity?

The reason is that interest rates were cut to close to zero by global central banks. At the same time, many advisers, especially roboadvisers, have aggressively marketed various portfolios of higher yielding fixed income instruments as alternatives to bank deposits.

Do you think their popularity is justified?

I think that the nature of these digital portfolios is not well understood, because they are presented as cash management tools when the underlying funds are either money market funds or even outright short-duration bond funds that come with credit risks, including emerging market debt and real-estate debt. In fact, there was a scare in the second quarter when Huarong Asset Management, one of the popular Chinese companies which bonds are held in such funds, faced financial problems.

Our WiseSaver product is different in that its underlying instruments are really fixed deposits, but this means the headline yield is lower than fixed income funds. From a financial planning point of view, your emergency funds should be as safe as possible and should not be invested in instruments with credit risks. Neither should you over-invest in such instruments as they are not going to help you beat inflation or grow your wealth over the long term. You will be doing roboadvisers a big favor for their asset garnering in their VC-funded growth strategy, but doing yourself no favor in either safety of emergency money or long-term accumulation.

If you can give one piece of advice to a client regarding financial security in the face of the uncertainty we are facing, what will it be?

Don’t just collect financial products to either maximize returns or minimize risk. Rather, start with a comprehensive plan so that you can reach your life goals no matter what happens, based on sufficiency of returns and the reliability and buffers in your plan. Because your needs are multifaceted, and you need to make trade-offs among protection, accumulation and lifestyle needs, as well as national schemes and commercial solutions. A comprehensive approach is the best way to plan.