In the world of finance, views, opinions and forecasts are the ultimate drivers of financial investment decisions. For example, if investors believe that interest rates will rise and oil prices will fall but the only securities they can trade are stocks that leads to investment decisions made based on fuzzy logic.
Given all the noise in the market, how do investors make sound investment decisions and position their portfolios to account for their views and opinions? Enter Lattice Limited.
Lattice is an emerging Fintech company that has created a views-driven portfolio optimizer that scientifically translates views, opinions, forecasts and even preferences across different asset classes into a portfolio optimized to precisely reflect such inputs.
While existing robo-advisors are special-purposed, e.g., only helping passively follow the markets, Lattice’s views-driven portfolio optimizer is a general-purpose robo-advisor that takes in investors’ intentions to create investment advice that fully reflect their views.
“The mission of Lattice is to make investment more efficient, transparent and ever easier. Our technology is reforming the entire investment decision-making process. It will distill views and forecasts into automated investible decisions and reduce the collective level of noise in the market,” said Lattice Founder Wing Cheung.
Cheung is no stranger to finance and academia. In 2005, he graduated from Cambridge with a doctorate in Mathematical Economics and Finance. He then spent 10 years in different investment banks leading their quantitative portfolio analytics efforts. His foray into the start-up world was driven by his passion to bring efficient investing methodology to all investors by using technology.
While Lattice has been winning over large institutional clients in Europe, Israel and Asia, going mainstream and bringing the technology to a wide group of investors is its next goal.
“When we created the world’s first views-driven portfolio optimizer, we thought only big fund managers would be interested. But after speaking to many banks, we were told that our technology would serve retail investors and high-net-worth investors equally well,” Cheung said.
Lattice has won numerous FinTech awards including a Grand Prize at the UKTI Fintech Award 2015, a Gold Prize at the Hong Kong ICT Best Fintech Award 2016, and a HotTen Award on FinTech50 (UK) 2016.
However, the road has not been smooth. In 2013, when he first showed his technology to potential clients, he was told that his technology was extremely interesting but too advanced and too new.
“It was very tough at first, very few institutions were ready to adopt a new technology.” said Cheung.
While in the near term, Lattice is working to meet the huge demand from the retail and the high-net-worth investors segments, Cheung’s long-term vision is to bring his technology to all sectors to make general big data-based decision making scientific.
Lattice currently has a team of eight working out of offices in Hong Kong, London and China.
