Andy Efstathiou
Andy has global responsibility for banking industry research and client support, covering the areas of core banking, wealth & asset management, mortgage & loan, and banking automation.
Andy has been part of NelsonHall's analyst team since 2005, providing in-depth coverage of worldwide banking industry markets. He is well-known as the world's leading financial services operations analyst and is frequently quoted in industry media. He assists buy-side organizations in understanding vendor capabilities and making critical sourcing decisions, and supports technology and services vendors in assessing opportunities and refining their go-to-market strategies. Andy is a leading voice on how AI, process automation, and platform modernization are revolutionizing the financial services industry.
Before joining NelsonHall, Andy worked at global banks for 20 years and in consulting for 10 years. His operational experience includes key roles in managing customer and counterparty operations with other financial institutions. He also advised regulatory agencies and investment banks on operational issues and business performance.
Andy has a B.A. in economics from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Nancy, and their two children. When not working, Andy enjoys sailing, hiking, and traveling.
Recent Reports by Andy Efstathiou
Market Analysis
Jun 16, 2026
Transforming Wealth and Asset Management Services
NelsonHall's Wealth and Asset Management market analysis consists of 96 pages.
Vendor Assessments
Jun 5, 2026
Quantiphi - Transforming Wealth and Asset Management Services
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Quantiphi's offerings and capabilities in wealth and asset management services.
Market forecast
Jun 4, 2026
Global Banking BPS Market Forecast: 2026 - 2030
NelsonHall’s “Banking BPS Market Forecast: 2025-2029” consists of 52 pages.
This report covers four of the main banking business process services (BPS) service lines covered by NelsonHall, providing market forecasts and vendor revenue shares for each combination of service line and geography.
Vendor Assessments
Jun 4, 2026
Cognizant - Transforming Wealth and Asset Management Services
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Cognizant's offerings and capabilities in wealth and asset management services.
Recent Blog Posts by Andy Efstathiou
Blog
Jul 21, 2026
Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2026: Industry Growing as Traditional Business Model Disintegrates
Capgemini recently published the 30th-anniversary edition of its World Wealth Report. The report focuses on changes in high-net-worth customer demographics, service preferences, and wealth managers' business intentions, based on year-end 2025 conditions. It surveys customers, wealth executives, and relationship managers to identify how customer experience and wealth manager delivery are shaping industry demand and business model change. This year’s report describes an industry where old business and delivery models are disintegrating.
The report confirms recent NelsonHall research findings that industry change is driving digital and AI adoption to retain customers in mature markets (who are changing their expectations of what good service is) and to add customers in emerging markets by helping set service expectations for those prospective customers. Meeting the emerging customer service expectation of deeper insight into customer needs and delivering those services digitally is the primary industry challenge of the next decade.
Industry change
The wealth industry is accelerating its growth, but demand for wealth services is fragmenting. For example, the growth rate of HNWI wealth accelerated from 4.2% in 2024 to 8.7% in 2025. However, growth rates varied across markets, with APAC growing fastest at 10.5% and North America growing at 9.9%. Meanwhile, the Middle East market shrank by 1.5%, and the LATAM market grew by only 5.1%. HNWIs have increased their allocation to global equities in response to strong stock market performance.
NelsonHall research identifies that changing patterns of global sourcing will create a long-term opportunity in global equities beyond the few strong developed markets of the recent past. Investors will continue to broaden their investible equity markets universe to more emerging markets for the next decade.
HNWIs are reporting dissatisfaction with their wealth managers regarding personalization, service, and the orchestration of offerings. From 2019 to 2025, the share of HNWIs working with a single wealth manager declined to 19%, a drop of 50%. Meanwhile, the number of HMWIs working with 4 to 6 wealth managers has increased by 100 percentage points, to 25% of HNWIs. The report estimates that incumbent wealth managers have lost $1.5 trillion in wallet share over that period. Smaller, focused wealth managers are gaining wallet share because HNWIs feel they have a better understanding of their needs and offer better access to alternative assets. NelsonHall research finds that dissatisfaction with incumbent vendors is highest among next-generation HNWIs, and specifically women and grown children (adult heirs) who feel their concerns have not been considered over the years, and now the primary family contact and advocate for the wealth manager has passed away. These are the most at risk for switching wealth managers and the least satisfied with traditional delivery methods. This demographic prefers someone to listen to their concerns, omnichannel delivery, and access to alternative assets.
Wealth management executives confirm their clients’ perceptions by saying they do not have a unified view of their clients (60%), that they are spending 40% of relationship managers' time on administrative tasks, and that the industry shift from segmenting customers by AUM to segmenting by behaviors remains unfulfilled (currently only 9% are segmented by digital engagement profile). Finally, the lower level of regulation applied to wealth managers enables greater operational flexibility for small RIAs. This is likely to increase in the U.S. if the SEC follows through on its intention to expand the definition of small RIA from the current $25m to <$1 Bn in 2026.
NelsonHall conversations with tier two and three wealth managers show that many of these firms are preparing to implement STP platforms and AI to personalize customer lifecycle management to take advantage of the lower compliance requirements and provide a more satisfying customer experience than a tier one wealth manager can provide.
To address these challenges and meet demonstrated customer preferences, wealth managers will need to:
Develop a unified view of each customer, personalize offerings to those customers, and utilize institutional knowledge of the customer in each interaction with them
Orchestrate offerings by identifying relevant financial products across the manager’s ecosystem, presenting these products in a digestible fashion, and delivering them seamlessly. HNWIs are most interested in tokenized assets and fractional ownership. Larger wealth managers are currently less effective at doing this compared to specialized wealth managers
Deliver personalized service, informed by customer behavioral signals, with access to alternative asset types and value-add services (such as longevity planning, health services, tax, estate planning, and retirement planning).
Key takeaway 1
HNWIs increasingly feel their wealth management relationship is falling short of their evolving expectations. Wealth management firms will need to change their business models away from segregating customers by AUM to responding to customer preferences. The manager’s data and systems will need to be integrated and AI-enabled to search for and deliver relevant products and services for customers. Currently, the largest impediment to wealth manager success is the low level of transformation initiatives (61% of wealth management executives state their AI-based automation initiatives are still in planning). Early transformation will build a moat of customer support that will be difficult to displace. Wealth managers need to accelerate their pace of transformation to retain and grow their customer base.
Key takeaway 2
HNWIs are increasingly diversifying their wealth portfolios across providers. HNWIs are increasing their allocations to specialist wealth managers at the expense of full-service incumbents. All wealth management service providers will need to orchestrate and work with an ecosystem of partners to deliver services to HNWIs. Large wealth managers will need to orchestrate both internal and external environments. The orchestration capabilities will need to deliver real-time insights and maintain awareness of customer preferences across many interactions. Failure to maintain customer insight and deliver in real time will drive customers away from incumbent wealth managers.
Key takeaway 3
Legacy platforms are constraining relationship managers to operational tasks (e.g., data input) and preventing them from focusing on customer preferences. Transforming data into a consolidated, structured, real-time format, accessible through a library of tested use cases, will enable AI to interpret customer intent consistently. This will enable wealth managers to transition from external cues that drive interaction, such as calendar-driven interactions, to internal cues that drive interaction, such as life events and customer preferences. By transforming these systems, relationship managers will be able to focus on differentiating services that increase CSAT and retain and grow the customer base.
Industry-specific BPSSecurities ProcessingFunds Administration
Blog
Jun 9, 2026
Cognizant Addresses the Gap between AI Hype and Reality by Improving Control of AI tools
In its AI Forum last week, Cognizant presented its AI roadmap and activities to operationalize AI for its clients. Cognizant sees the enterprise AI adoption challenge as stemming from the growing gap between model capabilities (the promised benefits of AI adoption) and the production value for enterprises (the realized value after costs). Cognizant’s approach to eliminating the gap is to provide clients with orchestration tools (which it refers to as an agent harness) that source relevant data, manage workflows, optimize processes for specific industries, provide governance guardrails, and reduce token consumption.
Key components of Cognizant’s AI strategy are adapting its industry-specific platforms with embedded AI, enabling client systems to communicate across silos so that AI agents can develop insights, deriving ontology from platform processing to create context, and building orchestration into the client platform to control process execution and costs. Cognizant’s strategy is the next generation of AI deployment, enabling clients to drive a more domain-based approach to AI, with AI embedded in their core platforms and orchestrated from them. The agents will derive ontology and context in real time from process flows.
The stated ambition is to close the value gap between model capability and production value by becoming an AI builder company with a full stack of custom capabilities, an integrated human/digital labor force, and partnerships that deliver reimagined business and operating models to clients, using open platforms into which 3rd-party modules can be integrated.
Let’s look at how Cognizant is building its AI services.
Platforms
Cognizant sees platforms as the fulcrum for pulling together resources and delivering business outcomes. It has developed engineering platforms, including Ignition (agentic-enabled data lifecycle), Flowsource (AI-enabled software engineering), and Skygrade (AI-enabled Cloud transformation). It has business platforms, including Meritsoft (a post-trade processing platform) and Trizetto (a healthcare administration platform), and is building AI-based platforms for lending and life insurance servicing. Its goal is to make all its business
platforms “headless,” with open APIs that allow any third-party module to operate as part of the platform, enabling clients to customize functionality and switch vendors at will.
Cognizant believes the largest value pool in applying AI to operations lies in physical AI, which involves engineering AI into physical systems across multiple business domains. Cognizant’s orchestration platform, Intelligence Spine, unifies an enterprise’s agentic and physical AI to manage process allocation and token consumption. On the same day as the conference, Cognizant launched its Physical AI Platform-as-a-Service. This physical AI offering orchestrates and integrates autonomous systems into the core enterprise infrastructure.
Context and Sensing
Sensing requires an ability to see into silos and source relevant external data. Cognizant is deploying platforms, as identified above, that enable enterprises to look across silos and identify relevant external data. Its tools can determine whether a process is best executed by an AI tool or a traditional algorithmic tool. Once an enterprise can sense the environment, it can begin to build context.
Assembling context is an emerging skill necessary to reduce hallucinations and drive the effective use of AI. Generic AI produces generic outcomes. By sensing institutional context, enterprises will be able to reduce the gap between model capability and operational value. Cognizant is seeing that models are commoditizing, but the enterprise context remains differentiated.
Cognizant’s primary investment in sensing context is its partnership with Workfabric AI. They have jointly built a platform to sense institutional context for enterprises. The platform analyzes processing on the core platform in real time, identifies weaknesses, and proactively recommends changes to improve operational delivery.
Blog
Apr 22, 2026
How Wealth & Asset Managers are Transforming Operations
I recently completed a global market assessment of how wealth and asset managers are transforming their operations. Here are some high-level findings.
Technology services trends
W&A managers have been niche businesses that take in data, manually analyze it, and make investment decisions. Third parties, such as custodians and brokers, have provided complex technology processing services to the industry. Today, W&A managers are trying to transform and industrialize their processes to:
Maintain margins, using automation and AI, in an increasingly competitive industry with growing revenues but declining pricing
Expand the range of financial products they invest in to include alternative and digital assets
Improve their own data management capabilities to enable them to deliver differentiating insights and investment performance. Improved data management capabilities will also enable them to deliver compliance insights and reporting
Increase omnichannel access to attract new customers and independent RIAs/business service providers.
To accomplish these goals, W&A managers are rolling out transformation programs in phases to build capability over time. To mitigate risk, projects target single business processes (e.g., customer onboarding). The typical phases are:
Automate processes: processes need to be automated to reengineer them, enable AI to analyze transactional data, and expose operational data to third parties
Clean data: W&A managers typically have many silos of data with conflicting taxonomies and dubious validity. Increasing M&A activity in the industry will increase the data cleansing challenge
Orchestrate data across silos: orchestrating data across silos will facilitate self-service, open banking partners, compliance, and risk management
Embed AI: once the previous three phases have been accomplished, AI is embedded into processes to improve accuracy and efficiency. Typically, embedding AI into processes is a joint effort among the platform/solution provider, the IT services vendor, and the W&A manager, because successful AI deployment in this industry requires both domain and technology expertise
Orchestrate human/AI delivery: to date, clients are training their employees to work with AI. However, to effectively deliver ethical AI and customer engagement, firms will need to develop guidelines that define what people and AI bots should do. Advanced services vendors are developing these standards, but to date, the maturity of these guidelines is minimal.
Prioritization of services required varies by demographic. The services with highest spending by size of W&A manager are:
Large managers:
- Data integration and governance
- Hybrid cloud implementation and expansion
- Analytics: performance analytics for asset managers and advisor productivity for wealth managers
- New product introduction and management (tokenization, blockchain assets, private and alternative investments)
Mid-tier managers:
- Process automation
- Advisor productivity tools
- Alternative asset tools to integrate with third-party providers
- Performance and attribution tools
Small or boutique managers:
- Managed services and BPS services with ongoing enhancements
- Compliance and risk management analytics and reporting
- Omnichannel enablement.
The challenge of transforming a legacy business
W&A managers need to retain accounts as a new generation inherits wealth and attract new customers, both retail and institutional, who are accumulating wealth. These new customers have different preferences for investments and methods of interaction. Legacy financial businesses cannot meet these challenges without changing their operating models and institutional culture.
Change management is becoming increasingly important in all W&A industry transformation projects. Tech services vendors are rapidly adding employee training programs to their service offerings, for both internal and external employees, and are delivered via hyper-personalized courses to meet each person’s unique requirements. As new technology offerings evolve, change management and stakeholder training will become increasingly important. As of today, only a few of the most sophisticated, large W&A managers are integrating business model change into their transformation initiatives. Most W&A managers are demanding change management and training services from vendors.
Summary
The wealth and asset management industry is transforming its operations to:
Expand the range of investments it offers customers. The new asset types are non-exchange-traded, digital assets that require new methods of processing
Expand the range of customer demographics serviced to expand the addressable market when the total population and the number of enterprises are not growing
Orchestrate larger, more complex businesses using intelligent automated systems, which are delivered and consumed by a growing ecosystem of partners.
Successful transformation projects require rigorous control of business and data scope. In contrast, implementing new functionality is done using a trial-and-error approach that sources advanced technology from Fintech vendor ecosystems and marketplaces. Service vendors are implementing orchestration and management systems to enable solutions to be swapped out if better technology options become available.
I will publish a market assessment of Transforming Wealth and Asset Management Services in June that will delve deeper into the market. It will identify how the market is evolving, what services W&A managers are buying to support their transformation efforts, and the benefits being realized.
Industry-specific BPSBanking-Specific
Blog
Mar 26, 2026
The Impact of Stablecoin: Cross-Border Payments & Beyond
Cryptocurrencies are seeing increased interest and activity following the passage of the U.S. GENIUS Act (July 2025) and, because multiple countries have launched stablecoin initiatives, financial institutions are experimenting with using stablecoins for cross-border payments. However, the overall stablecoin market remains a wild-west environment, with regulations, stablecoin products, and infrastructure varying widely in operational maturity, local market structure, and investor interest.
Market regulations
Most countries lack regulations specific to cryptocurrencies, though a few are developing regulatory regimes to manage risks within their markets, set global standards to benefit homegrown vendors, and facilitate domestic monetary policy transmission. The leading regulatory locations are:
The U.S.: governed by the GENIUS Act (July 2025), which requires issuers to be regulated financial institutions approved by federal regulators (FDIC, OCC, Fed). Payouts to consumers in fiat currency are regulated by the state and require 50 licenses to cover the entire nation
Europe: Governed by the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation (December 30, 2024). Tokenized deposits, issued by authorized credit institutions, are treated differently from e-money tokens, which fall under existing bank regulations
Singapore: Payment Services Act 2019 (PSA) and the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA). Key requirements include mandatory licensing for Digital Payment Token (DPT) service providers, Anti-Money Laundering (AML/CFT) compliance, and adherence to the Travel Rule for transactions over SGD 1,500
Japan: Payment Services Act (PSA) and Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA), treating crypto as legal property. Exchanges must register, adhere to custody rules (cold storage), and comply with AML/KYC requirements.
Regulations are evolving rapidly. Generally, regulators in the U.S. are trying to synchronize regulations across assets, regions, and institutions. In Europe, the EBA will monitor the use of commercial bank-issued tokens for settlement and provide reports on the trends in tokenized settlement assets by Q4 2026. New regulations, if there are any, will likely be formulated in 2027. So, 2026 will be spent assessing what types of regulations work in practice and implementing changes in 2027 to reflect best practices.
Stablecoin products
Stablecoin products remain highly concentrated in USD offerings. Many countries are introducing stablecoin products, some from the government and others by enabling private-sector companies to issue stablecoins in their own currency, backed by government bonds.
Leading stablecoins pegged to currencies are USD, Euro, Singapore dollar, GBP, Aussie dollar, Brazilian real, Mexican Peso, and Japanese yen. The USD stablecoin market is the largest, with over 90% market share. Because the primary use case for stablecoins today is cross-border payments, the USD backs most of those payments. Stablecoins pegged to non-USD currencies are being used for bilateral trade flows, such as the Japan/Korea or China/Russia trade corridors.
Stablecoin infrastructure has three key components: payment rails, acceptance, and custody. Currently, the most important segment is tokenization services from payment networks. The largest are:
Visa Direct: a real-time, 24/7 payment network that enables direct money movement to eligible debit cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets
Mastercard Send: near real-time, push-to-card, and account-to-account funds transfers.
These investments will enable consumers to deposit local currency, payment networks to move stablecoins, and local wallets/accounts to settle in local currency, at a lower overall cost to the sender.
Market direction
Which financial institutions are establishing businesses around stablecoins and tokenized deposits, and which services are they setting up? As of Q1 2026, most of the activity is in infrastructure setup and provisioning, including:
Global custodians, such as BNY Mellon and State Street, are investing in custodial services for the collateral backing stablecoin value (primarily U.S. treasuries). They are also investing in integrating the ecosystem to enable data flow to sync with the funds flow
Payment providers, both established and Fintech (such as Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Stripe, BVNK, and OwlTing), are investing in enabling the on/off ramps for crypto payments, including acceptance services and direct to account/wallet services
Large banks, investing in:
- Tokenized deposits (a WEF 2025 survey found 9% of U.S. banks intended to invest in tokenized deposits in 2026)
- Proprietary stablecoins: JP Morgan has launched its JPM Coin, and Citi its Citi Token
- Payment and wallet offerings for crypto, but no material activity in lending yet.
Financial institutions may slow their investment in these services if they experience high fraud losses, challenges in establishing effective KYC/AML controls, or increased liquidity pressure due to operational issues. The trend toward tokenization of payments will not be affected, since it is already advanced (Mastercard claims over 30% of its international transactions are tokenized) and has already reduced fraud.
A use case
One example of how service vendors are working with financial institutions to enable customers to invest in tokenized on-chain financial products is an Infosys engagement with a multinational investment bank and financial services firm.
The firm wanted to build a tokenized money market fund on the chain to enable it to innovate digital assets and automate lifecycle operations for tokenized funds. Infosys delivered design/deploy/ IT services, along with ongoing managed services for application maintenance and support. This engagement enabled the firm to manage any fund’s lifecycle on the blockchain using tokenization and to provide faster settlement times for fund subscriptions and redemptions, with greater liquidity than traditional funds.
Outlook
The infrastructure buildout for stablecoins and tokenization is well underway at the largest global institutions. In 2027, governments and institutions will be adapting regulations and orchestration strategies in light of the 2026 experience. The large institutions that win in this market will be the ones that adapt faster to challenges identified in the 2026 “beta test”.
Investment at scale has not begun in niche opportunities such as:
Smaller market size stablecoin offerings (i.e., non-U.S. denominated coins)
Global availability (payments to/from smaller economies and emerging markets)
Automated cybersecurity customized for this product set
Smart contracts as part of a crypto payment
Currency conversion for crypto (expected to be the largest revenue driver for stablecoin payments)
The opportunities for financial institutions and IT service providers will grow faster than the overall financial services market over the next decade, reshaping the payment industry’s business model.
Industry-specific BPSBanking-SpecificPayment Processing