Building trust in the digital era: Inside JM Financial’s wealth-tech transformation

Wealth management is undergoing a fundamental transformation as technology reshapes how firms engage with clients, deliver advice, and scale operations. In this evolving landscape, JM Financial Services is focusing on building technology platforms that combine personalisation, data-driven insights, and scalable infrastructure to serve a diverse investor base ranging from mass affluent customers to high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. In an exclusive interview, Anshuman Das, Managing Director & CTO of the company shares how the firm is leveraging data lakes, analytics platforms, cloud-native architectures, and in-house product development to enhance client experience, empower advisors, and prepare for the next wave of innovation in wealth management.

Wealth management is undergoing a structural shift, from relationship-led to platform-led models. How do you see technology redefining the way wealth firms engage, advise, and scale in a highly competitive market like India?

While technology provides apps and features to the customers, there have been attempts at Robo Advisory also previously which was not so successful. With advent of AI and human like voice AI, this area may see success.

However, key factor on engagement especially to the wealthy is still the relationship led human aspect which drives trust. Driving trust via technology is likely to be the area of focus of the upcoming platforms.

JM Financial serves a diverse investor base, from mass affluent to HNIs and ultra-HNIs. How do you architect technology platforms that balance personalisation at the frontend with scalability and efficiency at the backend?

We have different business teams that cater to different segments and the technology offering are also different. The tech team is however, utilising the synergies across these systems and driving efficiency using similar technology components.

Data and analytics are becoming central to investment advisory and portfolio construction. How is JM Financial leveraging data, AI, and advanced analytics to enhance decision-making for both advisors and clients, while maintaining trust and transparency?

We underwent a massive data lake project and use systems such as PowerBI and MixPanel for BI and analytics.

Regulatory expectations around compliance, risk, and data security continue to rise. How does the technology function work closely with business and compliance teams to enable innovation without compromising on governance?

Tech enables business, compliance, risk and data security aspects with tools and systems. The projects go through rigorous process where we take sign offs from each of the stakeholders.

The role of the CTO in financial services has evolved beyond systems and infrastructure. How do you view your role today – as a business enabler, a growth catalyst, or a strategic co-creator and how has that shaped JM Financial’s wealth-tech roadmap?

The key role of CTO now is to understand the leadership vision for the business growth and provide the tech vision to enable this growth. We have aligned the business strategy and tech strategy in order to ensure that we achieve the 2030 goals.

With increasing adoption of digital channels, client experience has become a key differentiator. What are the key technology investments that have had the most visible impact on advisor productivity and client engagement in your wealth business?

Our Wealth appEdge and Broking appJMPro, have the client as the central focus. We have built a strong development team and also recently opened a large Dev Center at Andheri, Mumbai to create the technology in-house to quickly cater to the customised needs of our customers instead of depending on generic off the shelf products.

What technology trends like AI-led advisory, open ecosystems, cloud-native platforms, or embedded finance, do you believe will fundamentally reshape wealth management over the next 3 to 5 years, and how is JM Financial preparing for that future?

We and most other players are already cloud native but the technology landscape is currently changing very fast due to AI innovations. In the next few years, we will witness heavy disruption in how people engage even with digital media. We are training our developers and product managers on AI and looking come up with several innovations in the near future.