VT Wealth Management AG

VT Wealth Management’s independence creates opportunity, and operational complexity. With no single banking partner, the firm accesses the best investment opportunities worldwide across more than 40 custodian banks.

For relationship managers, this meant navigating multiple banking systems daily. Urs Meier, Senior Wealth Manager, worked with 12 different banks regularly. “I have 12 banks I work with, so sometimes I would have to log into 12 different systems to find out what my clients own.”

For the portfolio management and quantitative teams, the challenge multiplied. Supporting multiple relationship managers meant exposure to all custodian banks the firm used. Raphael Steigmeier, Senior Portfolio Manager and Quant and AI Architect, describes the scope: “Most external asset managers work with different custodian banks. In our case, it’s one of the more pronounced ones with more than 30 custodian banks. For us, it was crucial to have one single source of truth.”

The manual workflows consumed substantial time. Every week, the process repeated: download data from multiple banks, upload it into internal systems, run analysis, trigger notifications to relationship managers. “It took a whole Friday morning just to download data, upload it to our system, trigger all the mailings,” Raphael Steigmeier recalls.

Weekly updates were the maximum frequency the team could sustain. More frequent refreshes would have been operationally impossible, the manual effort simply didn’t scale.

Compliance added another dimension. With regulatory requirements intensifying and multiple jurisdictions involved, systematic oversight across all accounts and custodians became essential. Raphael Suter, Head of Business Development and Digital at VT Wealth Management, emphasized the stakes: “You really want to make sure you have a tool that serves your regulatory needs. If the regulator basically tells you, look, this is not sufficient, then you really have an issue. If you lose your license, that’s the biggest nightmare.”

For a firm built on entrepreneurial responsibility and personalized service, the focus shifted to one key objective: how to create a shared operational foundation that supports VT Wealth Management’s independent, multi‑bank strategy, while strengthening client service, oversight and scalability.

In 2018, VT Wealth Management partnered with etops Wealth Discovery to build that foundation.  

etops Wealth Discovery became VT Wealth Management’s operational foundation, bringing together data from more than 40 custodian banks in one place and supporting both relationship-led client service and fully automated overnight workflows.

Client-Facing Operations: One Platform, Complete Visibility

For Urs and his colleagues, the platform became essential to daily operations. “For me, it’s really an essential system. I actively use it. I have it open all day.”

The morning routine centers on the dashboard: total assets under management, account balances, compliance status. This daily verification catches issues before they escalate, incorrect security prices, unexpected debit balances, positions drifting outside strategy parameters.

Key capabilities transformed client management. The wealth list provides performance overview across all portfolios, making outliers immediately visible. Performance contribution analysis shows exactly which positions drove results, essential context for client conversations. Consolidated reporting across multiple banks became seamless, presenting clients with VT Wealth Management-branded reports rather than disparate bank statements.

Most fundamentally, the 12-login problem disappeared. “I save a lot of time by just accessing one system,” Urs explains. Client information, holdings, and transactions across all custodian banks now appear in one place.

Raphael Suter highlighted another critical benefit: “Having a central repository creates even more benefits for the portfolio management team. They deal with lots of relationship managers, so they’re exposed to more than just 12 custodian banks, in theory, all of them. Imagine how much time it saves if you’re not forced to deal with each one separately.”

The Portfolio Management & Quant Perspective: API Access Changes Everything

For Raphael Steigmeier’s team, transformation came through a different channel: the API.

“With previous versions, there were workarounds, downloading Excels, uploading into our internal systems, then performing analysis from there. This is now way more simplified by having direct access to Etops via the API. We can build our custom solutions on top of what Etops provides.”

The API enabled complete workflow automation. Each evening around 11 PM, automated processes fetch daily data from Etops and populate internal databases. Analysis runs overnight, identifying upcoming maturities, flagging large cash balances, detecting tactical asset allocation breaches.

“By the time we come into the office, everything is prepared,” Raphael Steigmeier explains. “This morning, for example, emails were sent out automatically to all relationship managers with upcoming maturities, cash balances, negative balances, things that need their attention. This would probably take a few hours to prepare manually. Now we come into the office and it’s already done.”

The system’s criticality became evident during a brief disruption. “We had a change to the API three or four weeks ago with breaking changes that led our systems to go down. All the information emails stopped going out. We got immediate feedback: ‘Where are the emails?’ The relationship managers relied on them quite heavily.”

The API doesn’t just automate existing workflows, it enables new capabilities. “By now we more or less replicated what we already had, but going forward this will give us the ability to build even more on a more profound database than what we had before.”

The Compliance Perspective: Systematic Oversight

Centralized visibility transformed compliance monitoring from reactive to systematic. With one consolidated database across all custodian banks, compliance checks became comprehensive and auditable.

“You really want to make sure you have a tool that serves your regulatory needs,” Raphael Suter emphasizes. “If the regulator basically tells you, look, this is not sufficient, then you really have an issue. If you lose your license, that’s the biggest nightmare.”

VT Wealth’s transformation shows across multiple operational dimensions, from individual relationship managers to portfolio management teams to firm-wide compliance.

2 days per week saved in manual preparation work for the portfolio management and quant teams. Tasks that previously consumed every Friday morning plus additional weekly effort now run automatically overnight.

7× increase in data refresh frequency. The team moved from weekly manual updates to daily automated processes, more current information with zero manual effort.

40+ custodian bank relationships consolidated into a single central platform. Up to twelve bank systems per relationship manager, and more than forty firm-wide, are now accessed through one shared data foundation.

~70% reduction in client meeting preparation time, enabled by consolidated portfolio views and automated data availability. Relationship managers arrive each morning to pre-generated analysis that previously required hours of manual compilation.

For Raphael Steigmeier, the efficiency gain is measurable and substantial: “I would easily say this spares me one or even two days a week performing manual calculations, triggering tasks manually. That time is now saved. It’s fully automated. Nobody needs to take care of it anymore.”

For relationship managers like Urs, the platform became indispensable. “I couldn’t work without such a tool. I save a lot of time by just accessing one system.”

The transformation runs deeper than time savings. Relationship managers arrive each morning to pre-generated alerts and analysis, ready to engage with clients rather than spending hours preparing data. The compliance function gained systematic oversight that manual processes couldn’t reliably provide. And the portfolio management team can now build increasingly sophisticated analytical capabilities on a robust data foundation.

As VT Wealth Management continues growing its independent model across new markets and client relationships, the platform scales with them, not just solving today’s challenges but enabling tomorrow’s capabilities.