In order to offer an investment proposition to your customers, you will need the relevant permissions that match your business model.
The most common permissions in the wealth and investment space are:
If you already have the permissions mentioned above for your regular business activities, you can start integrating with our API.
You can apply to the FCA for a Variation of Permission (VoP) if you need to change or add to your existing regulated activities. This can take up to 12 months.
You may also currently be unregulated and are looking to add an investment proposition for your users - in which case you can follow the same path as earlier stage fintechs by:
WealthKernel has been providing investment infrastructure since 2015, and holds FCA permissions for its activities. You can view our full permissions on the FCA Register.
For more information on the regulatory environment, you can view our regulatory overview page here.
WealthKernel supports all types of regulated businesses, and the most common built on our API are Execution-Only (XO), Discretionary and Advisory.
With an Execution-Only proposition, your users will be making their own investment decisions on where to invest their money - you will be responsible for choosing the investment universe to offer them as well as a place to execute their trades.
Execution-Only business models are often viewed as less complex than Discretionary and Advisory models as they need less compliance oversight and regulatory permissions.
In a Discretionary Fund Manager (DFM) proposition, you will be investing your customers money on their behalf, choosing suitable investments based on the risk tolerance of your customers.
With a higher level of responsibility and access to users’ investments, discretionary fund managers' permissions come with greater regulations and require more oversight.
As an established business, you will already have a process for onboarding customers and collecting their information.
You may want to continue working with your existing KYC supplier.
We can support this setup with a Letter of Comfort between our two companies, that allows you to continue to KYC your users. We will also conduct random sampling to ensure that we are able to place reliance on you.
You can also choose WealthKernel’s KYC service to reduce the number of integrations you have to maintain.
WealthKernel is currently integrated with third-party KYC providers. Our API lets you stay updated on the status of your onboarding users via our webhooks service and the WealthKernel Dashboard.
With WealthKernel, your business can offer multiple account types to customers and enable them to invest in their choice of products.
WealthKernel can support all of the following account types in the UK. Learn more about our account types on our page.
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WealthKernel supports a broad range of investment instruments, and all of our investments are liquid, listed and suitable for the retail market. This helps our Tenants customise their investment offering with their choice of instruments.
We currently support US stocks, UK stocks, ETFs, and Mutual Funds and also offer all of our supported instruments in fractions.
WealthKernel operates a sub-broker model and consolidates all client orders in a certain window, and sends it to a sub-broker once a day. We also settle all orders in GBP.
We act as a custodian for our Tenants, and all of our client money is held at Tier 1 banks in the UK under WealthKernel Nominees.
WealthKernel also strictly complies with the CASS rules and is responsible for safeguarding and securing clients’ money as well as records, accounts and reconciliations.
We receive regular audits from an external party to ensure that our systems and controls around Client Money are working appropriately.
We support a diverse range of payment methods that give you the flexibility to choose an approach that best suits your users’ needs. This allows your users to make one-off and recurring deposits to their portfolios.
After WealthKernel receives a deposit from your users, we match it with the deposit expectation that contains the details of the source account.
We enable users to transfer their assets held at another provider into our accounts at WealthKernel. The transfers can be made in cash or in-specie, depending on the asset type and you and your customer's choice.
You can view the payment types we support here.
At WealthKernel, we believe that your front end is what differentiates you from your competition. That’s why we focus on providing all the building blocks needed to create an investment proposition without designing the website or application ourselves.
WealthKernel has publicly available API docs and a sandbox environment so developers and product owners can evaluate what can be built with our API endpoints.
