When every software company rushes to roll out the next AI feature, those that chart out a different course tend to stand out. So Simple took the time to sit down with the man heading such a company’s product division. Santiago Schuppisser, the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Etops, oversees a portfolio of nearly ten products. Each product covers a specific segment within the wealth management value chain. However, his career actually began in traditional finance.
Santiago started as an intern at UBS Switzerland nearly two decades ago, before joining a private wealth advisory firm as the youngest member of the portfolio management team. Focused on operational improvement, he drove the team’s adoption of key technology platforms, including Avaloq. His expertise attracted Avaloq’s attention, leading to a product manager appointment that drew directly on his experience as an end user.
Over five years at Avaloq, he focused on translating end-user needs into product development, running structured workshops and embedding client feedback into the feature roadmap before any rollout. He subsequently joined a US-based fintech start-up, Halo, broadening his exposure to a different pace and model of product innovation. He ultimately returned to Europe, drawn back by a preference for its more relationship-driven approach to wealth management.
Moving with the shifts
When talking about wealth management in Europe, “the big elephant in the room is always regulation,” says Santiago. Since the 2008 financial crisis, and including the not-so-recent mandates regarding ESG and sustainable investing, compliance and red tape have steadily increased. To add to the evolving regulatory landscape, client reporting has shifted from a monthly or quarterly task to an “available-on-demand” feature that customers expect. As Santiago puts it, “Nobody wants to wait for the end of the quarter or the end of the month to find out how their wealth is performing.”
“The big elephant in the room is always regulation… the biggest problem for our clients is the burden from regulatory scrutiny, and it really did not get easier.”– Santiago Schuppisser, the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Etops.
Santiago also points to two further shifts. One, contrary to next-gen driven headlines, the demand for instant access isn’t limited to the younger generation. Today, even mature clients expect real-time updates on their wealth and risk exposure right from their phones. Two, private market platforms have become so democratised that, over the years, minimum investments have gone from millions to as little as $1,000, creating a pressing need for better ways to track these illiquid assets. So, how to cope with and accommodate all these changes in a wealth tech platform for family offices?
One tool at a time
The core philosophy driving etops Wealth Discovery for family offices is anchored in two primary objectives, explains Santiago. First, the team’s top priority is to maximise user efficiency, in other words, save their clients some time. Second, they focus on ensuring that the product actively strengthens the relationship between advisors and their clients.
In an era where software development has shifted from annual releases to continuous iteration, Santiago and his team are deliberate about what they ship. They collect daily feedback directly from clients and are equally willing to remove what isn’t working. As he puts it: “We’ve previously taken features away where we realised nobody’s using them. We decided to kill them.”
Originally launched as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), etops Wealth Discovery, suited to family offices, initially focused on financial and wealth analytics. The platform aimed to provide family offices with a “360-degree” interactive overview by consolidating data across multiple banks and liquid/illiquid investments in real time. Since then, Santiago and team have further developed it into a comprehensive tool covering KYC, AML, and documentation across the entire client life cycle.
So, where did they add AI?
The entire Etops team viewed AI as great tech that could enable their philosophy. Looking at their objectives of saving time and enhancing client relationships, they included three AI features in the platform:
First, the platform integrated Olymp. Understanding the enormous amount of paperwork involved in wealth management workflows, allowing advisors to upload documents, extract and standardise data, and automate onboarding and documentation directly within etops Wealth Discovery, with all AI services hosted locally in Switzerland.
Second, on the relationship side, they added Advisory Intelligence. Etops enhanced its etops MiFID Recorder with an AI capability called Advisory Intelligence, adding AI‑based transcription and analysis that can flag potential compliance risks in real time and support structured follow‑up after client conversations.
Finally, the team built etops Co-Pilot to handle the summarisation of documents and client situations. They developed Co-Pilot to ensure that data privacy would remain “100% watertight” and compliant with local Swiss regulations, as the team found no external tools met these strict standards at the time.
“I’m not sure if AI is ever going to be able to replicate such a relationship that humans have… a situation which is stressful needs trust, and trust and AI is a much harder thing to fully automate.” – Santiago Schuppisser, the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Etops.
Final thoughts
Wrapping things up with Santiago, we asked him what advice he’d give a family office diving into AI for the first time. The first thing he suggested was starting with automation for regulatory tasks. They are rule-based, no one enjoys doing them, and they generally follow a predictable pattern.
He cautioned, however, that the human-to-human touchpoint with the client should never be fully automated. While AI can prepare and augment the advisor, the final relationship relies on trust and the unique human ability to accept and navigate mistakes, a bond AI cannot yet replicate.
