5 tools that make my work easier – Laurent Bertrand, CEO and Co-Founder of BetterTradeOff
Today we shine the spotlight on entrepreneur, Laurent Bertrand, who is the founder and CEO of FinTech start-up BetterTradeOff. He oversees the company’s global business operations and sets the strategic direction for its next phase of growth into a global innovative company that makes a lasting difference in the lives of others.
Laurent has built up a considerable level of international experience in delivering large-scale transformations in the financial services and technology industries. Before BetterTradeOff, he was the Head of Data and Analytics at UBS Wealth Management (APAC), where he led transformation programs for the front office, and was responsible for product management of client information and KYC. At Dresdner Bank Switzerland (Singapore), Laurent served as Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for the launch of their first private banking branch in Asia.
We asked him to share the tech tools that he uses with his team to manage the growing company and his team.
His company BetterTradeOff (BTO) is a Singapore-headquartered FinTech that makes simple financial advice available at scale. The platform aims to make financial planning more engaging and effective for both advisers and consumers. The platform can be deployed, and configured with local rules, tax laws, and advanced statistical models for every country within three months.
The online platform has been deployed in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the UAE, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. It counts leading financial institutions as investors, including the Achmea Innovation Fund, HSBC Asset Management, SC Ventures, and Swiss Bank PostFinance.
Automate your work with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 (Paid)
Our solution allows people to develop a highly personalised financial plan covering all aspects of their finances – from investments to Insurance, real estate, education, and travel, right down to their detailed monthly living expenses. OpenAI GPT-4 allows us to dramatically accelerate access to the broad range of information we need to deliver these comprehensive plans in a fully localised and compliant manner. Things like – country tax laws, social security policies, real estate laws, and market data like inflation rates. ChatGPT integrations into our solution are also helping us use generative AI to deliver personalised advice and a tool to assist with financial literacy, in a way that’s cost-effective and scalable. And that’s just the beginning. The possibilities with AI are incredible.
Tableau helps with data visualization (Paid)
The comprehensive nature of the plans users create on our platform makes them an exceptional source of zero-party data. Data that provides our clients with tremendous insight into the users’ financial needs and gaps, allowing them to deliver more personalised advice and product solutions. To manage and visualise this data we use Tableau. It’s excellent for building highly visual, easy-to-read and work with dashboards for our clients and team. Data from multiple sources can be seamlessly integrated into Tableau and dashboards update in real-time. They’re also extremely easy to work with – so people of all technical levels can explore the data in different ways and run custom reports. And Tableau is designed to scale easily and handle large volumes of data, both of which are critical for us.
Manage your security and compliance with Drata (Paid)
Given the data we collect. And who we collect it for – leading global banks and insurance companies – maintaining ironclad data security and compliance is absolutely critical. For this we use Drata. A comprehensive platform with tools that cover all aspects of security and compliance. Things like automated data collection, security monitoring, risk assessments, policy management and compliance reporting. Drata works in the background, continuously monitoring our security controls and compliance requirements, by actively collecting data and performing assessments on an ongoing basis. With the help of Drata we’ve been able to implement the necessary policies and controls to achieve SOC 2 compliance – an important designation for a company that works with Tier 1 financial institutions.
Figma for designing financial plans (Paid)
Enabling people of all financial knowledge levels – even absolute beginners – to build their own comprehensive financial plan, is a unique UX/UI challenge. It’s an aspect of the solution that we continue to optimise and will never stop optimising. For the design of these experiences, we use Figma. Figma allows us to design elaborate end-to-end financial journeys that can be output as fully functioning prototypes for testing. And it’s great for real-time collaboration, so multiple users can work on the same project simultaneously, making it easy for our designers, developers, and product owners to collaborate, provide feedback, and iterate on designs together. Figma provides extensive features for creating design systems and offers a wide range of helpful plugins and integrations. It’s an absolute must for any company developing digital experiences.
Carta to automate your Cap Table management (Paid)
As our business has developed and taken on investment from institutional investors, investor relations have grown more demanding and complex. Carta is a great tool for managing this. It gives us a centralised platform for all investor-related matters. It simplifies and automates Cap Table management. It gives our employees an easy-to-use platform for viewing and managing their ESOP holdings and tracking the value of their equity over time. Most importantly, it helps ensure that we’re compliant with regulatory requirements by making it easy to generate accurate and up-to-date reports on equity ownership, valuations, transactions, etc – things that are crucial for audits and investor reporting. It’s professionalised our investor relations at a critical time, as we expand into the US and begin our Series A raise.