It has been a monumental year for German WealthTech company fincite, as it enters the next stage of its mission to improve digital advice across Europe.
The genesis of fincite, which was founded in 2015 by Ralf Heim, Stefan Post and Friedhelm A. Schmitt, came after the realisation that the wealth management experience lacked effective data usage and was laden with poor customer experiences. Heim, who was recently named Entrepreneur of the Year 2025, noted, “It was all red carpets and little innovation.” Working together, the trio set out to create fincite with a mission to revolutionise investment advice. “We started the company together to make investment advice a great experience,” Heim added.
The biggest issue with wealth management was that advisors were no longer providing personalized advice to their clients. Instead of taking people’s specific situation and goals into account, many clients were routed into 1 out of 7 Model Portfolios, caused by stricter regulations and a lack of budget.
Heim explained, “Access to truly personalized portfolios was lacking because banks cut costs and created something that we called the advice gap.” In a decade, in which the whole world experienced more personalization e.g. in shopping (Amazon), or in entertainment (Spotify or Netflix), wealth management went into the opposite direction: standardization.
But this left banks in a difficult position: “If you just funnel a customer into one of seven Model Portfolios, you will find it difficult to compete with ETFs.”
Nowadays, personalisation is a major demand within financial services and people are happy to switch to firms that can provide it. A recent report from Publicis Sapient found that 58% of investors it surveyed want to leverage personalised financial planning.
Without strong software-based automation, providing personalised advice at scale is too expensive, as they would need to hire a new army of advisors. The real solution to solving the gap is through technology. fincite understood how the market was shifting and set out to build affordable technology to solve the gap.
“A modern personalized experience requires an integrated combination of five disciplines. That’s why we call CIOS a 5-in-1-Software. It covers the customer journey from onboarding, financial planning, a personal wealth overview, the advice process from strategic asset allocation, comparisons and rebalancing as well as the investment reporting. That’s what we built.”
Leading the way in Europe
Due to this forward thinking, fincite was one of the first solutions of its kind to launch in Europe. Heim noted there were several strong digital financial planning tools in the US, but they were largely absent from Germany and continental Europe. The solutions that were in the market were specialised parties, either focusing on reporting systems or on portfolio management, but no one had combined them into a single SaaS environment.
fincite, on the other hand, was entering the market as a comprehensive five-in-one solution, covering onboarding, advice & financial planning, investment, ordering and investment reporting. On top of this, the company was one of the first to offer its services via the cloud and was often the first cloud solution for many of its banking clients.
Taking Europe by storm
With its founding mission being to improve investment advice, it is now looking to continue that mission beyond its home of Germany and support the whole of Europe. To achieve this, it has teamed up with a fellow European WealthTech giant, Harvest Group.
Earlier in the year, fincite completed a strategic merger with France-based Harvest Group. The new Group represents by its own statement by Revenue and Customer Numbers the biggest WealthTech Software Provider.
Heim explained, “We noticed that the German market and most European markets in this niche are too small to build really large players. Our ambition was always to build a champion, a relevant software company that can grow beyond €100m revenue and we found that to be quite different, if each of the single European markets would fight alone”
This sparked a plan to create a pan-European giant that could support multiple countries. The best way to achieve this would be to merge multiple local champions. This is the strategy the now grown Harvest Group will focus on.
Key areas of focus will be France and the DACH region, Italy, Benelux and Northern Europe. Its growth plans will also include targeted acquisitions that will either grow its product capabilities or support its growth into new markets.
Heim also noted the team is looking to improve its ‘time-to-value’. “Innovating on Enterprise Software is a venture, we want to simplify for our customers. Our efforts are directed to create a higher value in a shorter time. To do this we focus on efforts that make our software easy to buy, easy to implement and easy to roll out while providing high value to our customers.”
Harvest and fincite are in a unique position. They can use their size to take the European market by storm. Other companies might want to build a pan-European WealthTech solution but doing this alone will take them years. “I think we now have a time advantage, and we need to play this time advantage.”
Each country has their own regulatory frameworks that must be adhered to, and residents of the country also have different expectations. Regulations like DORA have added to the complexity, while MiFID has helped standardise various aspects. A lone company trying to scale across Europe is going to be slow, but fincite and Harvest are now in a strong position to accelerate growth, whether organically or by acquiring established regional players.
The evolution of advice
fincite is still focused on making investment advice great. WealthTech has transformed wealth management over the past decade, helping to democratise the space. No longer is investing exclusively for the wealthy. Despite this, digital advice is lagging over areas of the space, particularly brokerage.
Heim said, “What you see is that brokerage had a huge leap forward with user experience in terms of ease, convenience and so on. As advisors, you provide a premium service. That’s why the advice experience needs to outshine the brokerage experiences – especially in the digital experience.” Unfortunately, this is not the case.“If it’s more convenient for you to trade at a Revolut or Trade Republic and they have a better overall experience, then your advisor has a general challenge.”
Advisors need to appear smart and knowledgeable to their clients, but they also need to show that their services are easy to use and not time consuming, whether that is with onboarding or receiving portfolio updates. “If you have seven meetings in an old-fashioned building each year, it’s not the same as looking daily at your mobile to check the performance and developments, and to see what your advisor is actually doing.” Having these capabilities instantly help reassure clients with their financial plans and seeing the full picture of their assets, and are what clients demand nowadays.
Not only is fincite helping banks to meet these standards, but it is also providing them tools to excel beyond what brokerages can offer so that they are no longer a form of competition. “One of the recent developments in this mission is to extend our financial planning to a full estate planning,” Heim said. In the future, wealth managers can model holding structures, prenup agreements or inheritance models on the software, then the advisor can guide through the very impactful decisions of the financial life of a customer.
“Our clients were very interested in having these features because it’s another value you give to the customer. And suddenly you do not compete against the Trade Republics and Revoluts anymore, but you compete around really valuable advice.” Heim explains.
As technology helps to improve digital advice, large language models (LLMs) are helping to ensure everyone has access to personalised advice. As consumers get used to seeing tailored experiences, they will start to expect it, and this is something Heim sees happening to the world of investment advice. “Every single touch point and everything you open will have to be very contextualised to you, easy to use and very well structured. I truly believe you will have LLMs running in your investment advice.”
This will provide people with the real-time ability to understand their financial situation that has been highly tailored to their specific situations, he noted. They will be able to ask questions to get insights on how decisions would impact them, such as how moving to another country would impact them and what the financial risks would be. LLMs could even help to be more proactive.
“They will come and tell you we saw you moved, and this is what is relevant for you to do from a financial perspective.” These LLMs will help advisors access quick support and the advisor can follow-up with more detailed insights and support. Heim doesn’t just predict LLMs to be for the customer, with advisors also set to use them. They will help them to generate insights and support the advice they can provide to the customer.
fincite is helping to build the software to help firms reach this future. As it prepares for its next growth phase, the team is committed to building the best services and helping clients meet customer demands. He concluded, “If you simply want to work with the best software then you will hopefully naturally come across us.”
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