Two years after defecting from UBS, Dirk Klee has rolled out a digital tool for the affluent at British bank Barclays. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a roboadviser UBS mothballed in 2018.

The German banker joined Barclays to oversee its savings, wealth and investments, after losing out in a 2018 mega-merger at UBS. At the British bank, Dirk Klee launched a new digital wealth adviser in record time.

Barclays launched the tool,«Plan & Invest», within its main banking app two weeks ago, after quietly offering it online since July. A partnership with Germany’s Scalable Capital, the investment tool for U.K. clients twins digital advice with human interaction – starting at £5,000 ($6,500).

«For me it's absolutely crystal-clear that this hybrid digital way is the future of wealth management,» Klee told finews.com. «It’s only been a couple of weeks, but so far we’re pleased with it, and also in terms of feedback from clients,» he said.

Rare Success Story

The launch comes as traditional banks scramble to respond to the threat of challenger banks and wealth advisers. Those have focused largely on retail banking clients, while Klee, an early adopter of platforms and ecosystems in finance, is more experienced in building tools the wealthy would take to. He views robo without human support as not having widespread potential.

Scalable, backed by U.S. asset manager Blackrock, is a rare success story in digital advice – but it is heavily reliant on big partners with clients, like ING Diba in Germany (Scalable pulled the plug on its activities in Switzerland last year).

No Exclusivity

Klee didn’t negotiate any exclusivity with Scalable’s technology – «pretty much everything is open source these days» anyway. Could the robo adviser replicate it in another market? «Sure, but I'm not worried about that. This is a constant catch-up and improvement journey. I'd rather spend my time and energy and be the fastest and highest quality.»

Klee was most recently operating chief at UBS’ flagship private bank. He left the Swiss bank shortly after the $2.6 trillion merger of private banking and U.S. brokerage, shortly after his boss, Juerg Zeltner. One year later, UBS abandoned Smartwealth, a key Klee project.

A Combination of Technology and Expertise

What of the experience has carried over to Barclays? «Instead of recreating what others have already built, we were looking for more mature partners that already had partnerships with banks, and where we can benefit from their experience building digital journeys,» said Klee, who is normally based in London but currently working from Zurich under Barclays’ work-from-home arrangements

Under Klee, who was also responsible for a $1 billion technology project to unify UBS’ disparate wealth platforms, Barclays is working with Amazon on cloud services, with Salesforce, and has a technology partnership with FNZ, a little-known British fintech.

«Plan & Invest» draws on technology to combine Barclays’ in-house investment expertise with clients’ goals, timeline, and risk appetite. The tool generates an automated, personalized investment plan of active and passive investments, managed by third-parties but monitored by Barclays.

Potential in the Upper Market

Klee notes there are more than 10,000 potential paths and the offering is sophisticated and not limited to, for example, three standard in-house funds «where you get version A, B, or C and you just ask yourself why did you answer all these questions if you end up at A, B, or C?»

At Barclays, where Klee reports to U.K. CEO Ashok Vaswani, Klee’s newest project is clearly considered as high-potential for the wealthier. «Plan and Invest» is designed to deploy Barclays’ wealth tools to more people, he notes. «That being said, I think Plan & Invest has a lot of potential for the upper market, but we will see how it goes.»

Survival in a Digital World

That sounds a lot like cannibalization – a topic new UBS CEO Ralph Hamers said he wouldn’t shy away from at ING. At Barclays, Klee concedes the bank might be cannibalizing itself in the short term, but not further out.

«I believe we have no other choice,» Klee said. «I think we need to work really hard to have a sustainable proposition for our customers that can survive in the new world of easy access to the digital ecosystem.»