Cardiff in south Wales is the scene for a new innovation centre that has been officially opened by UK and international fintech house Equiniti.

Equiniti, the financial technology firm, has officially opened a new innovation centre in Cardiff, Wales, as part of a drive to build expertise in the expanding sector and keep pace with trends such as the phenomenon of the “robo-advisor”.

The Cardiff centre will be a hub from which the firm develops fintech solutions; these include multi-lingual platforms and device agnostic portals for employee share plans, online applications for investment platforms and web/mobile applications for pension products.

"With Cardiff University also announcing a £300 million investment in four research centres, Cardiff is now a city of choice for companies looking to expand or relocate,” the firm said in a statement yesterday.

The development comes at a time when Equiniti is working with clients in areas such as that of the robo-advisor – automated, internet-based wealth management platforms that are seen as challengers to traditional, more costly business models.

“We think it is an area where we must be involved,” Huw Thompson, business development director, told this publication in a call earlier this week. His firm already works with the robo-advisor firm Money On Toast.

“We support their online risk and suitability process, and the allocation of a risk profile and the subsequent asset allocation,” Thompson, who was appointed in August last year, said.

Thompson said that the industry as a whole needs to collaborate more closely with universities such as Cardiff. He also talked of two broad themes he sees driving the fintech sector at present: the move towards interoperability between systems and the focus on improving the user experience so that people can consume data more effectively.

In the past, systems tended to be standalone and that has caused problems. He was asked about whether this creates issues after M&A deals and agreed that was the case.

Interoperability means that one can track document processing much more effectively and rapidly. “Five years ago, there would be phone calls and a person would have been told about a document, `there is a something in the process’. The world has moved on markedly since then,” Thompson said.

He said there is a move to a more “device-agnostic” world where systems are able to be used across different devices with different models.

The Cardiff centre will be home to EQ Xanite, Equiniti’s platform offering front- to back-office solutions.  The software provides custody services for £18.7 billion ($29.3 billion) of assets. Overall, Equiniti’s technology is used by more than 30 million people in the UK. It is a share registrar firm and processes £90 billion of payments per year.

Hazell Carr - from the resourcing arm of Equiniti – will also be located in the new centre. The firm provides specialist interim resource to help firms operating within regulatory markets manage complex remediation and rectification projects, it said in the statement.