Quai Digital marks fifteen years this month. Chief Executive and co-founder Tony Webb has spent much of his career in wealth infrastructure. Here he reflects on what has changed, what has stayed the same, and where the industry is going next.
Fifteen years ago, my co-founder and I set out to build a business in this industry. Fifteen years is long enough to see which patterns hold and which turned out to be noise — a fitting moment to reflect not just on that journey, but on how the infrastructure landscape itself has changed, what has stayed the same, and where I think it is heading next.
What has changed
The most obvious shift is technological. Fifteen years ago, outsourcing your technology build overseas was standard practice, and owning your own platform was seen as an unnecessary cost rather than a strategic asset. Today, ownership of your own platform is expected, not admired. Clients, regulators and investors all now expect API driven, straight through processing as a baseline, not a differentiator. Many firms our age carry a scar or two from a partner or platform provider that did not survive, and those experiences have shaped how seriously the industry now takes infrastructure ownership rather than treating it as someone else’s problem to manage.
Regulation has changed just as significantly, though more gradually. CASS requirements have tightened considerably, Consumer Duty has moved outcomes from a compliance afterthought to the organising principle of how firms are expected to design products and communicate with clients, and the SMCR framework has made individual accountability explicit in a way it never used to be. None of this has made the job easier, but it has made the industry more honest about where responsibility actually sits.
Market structure has shifted too. Consolidation, which felt speculative fifteen years ago, is now a constant undercurrent. Scale increasingly determines who can absorb regulatory cost, invest in technology, and survive a bad year without it becoming an existential one. Businesses that started at this scale have often found themselves on both sides of consolidation over time — watching the industry contract around them in the early years, and later becoming acquirers, bringing another firm’s assets, clients and people into their own. There is real perspective in having stood in both positions.
What has not changed
For all of that, the fundamentals have not moved nearly as much as the industry likes to pretend. Trust remains the actual currency of this business, not assets under administration, not technology stack, not headline growth figures. Clients, whether they are individual savers or corporate partners, are still trusting infrastructure providers with something that matters enormously to them and that they cannot easily verify for themselves. That has not changed since I started, and I do not expect it to.
Operational resilience has also remained non negotiable, even as the definition of what resilience means has expanded to include cyber risk, third party dependency and data integrity alongside the more traditional concerns of solvency and process control. And leadership, in my experience, is still fundamentally about the same thing it always was: absorbing uncertainty on behalf of people who are relying on you, whether that is staff, clients or investors, and making decisions with incomplete information while being honest about the trade offs involved.
Where things are going
Looking ahead, I think three things will define the next chapter for firms like these.
- Technology ownership will keep deepening rather than plateauing. Artificial intelligence is already changing how administration providers handle exception processing, reporting and pattern recognition across large client books, and the firms that treat it as a tool that sharpens judgement rather than substitutes for it will be the ones clients trust with it. Accountability will remain stubbornly human even as the tooling becomes more capable.
- Consolidation will continue, and probably accelerate. Scale will keep mattering, not because bigger is inherently better, but because the cost of doing this properly, regulation, technology, governance, keeps rising, and only businesses of sufficient scale can absorb it without passing unacceptable risk on to clients.
- The standards clients expect are increasingly global, whether firms operate across borders or not. The rigour that UK regulation demands — Consumer Duty, CASS, SMCR — is what maturing markets are increasingly asking for as their own frameworks develop. Firms that can carry that discipline abroad, rather than lift UK templates carelessly into markets with different consumer protection norms, will find real opportunity as this industry widens.
A personal note
Fifteen years ago, having spent fifteen years building this kind of infrastructure was not something I could have described with confidence, because in the early years the only real objective was surviving long enough to find out what came next.
What I can say now is that none of it happens in a straight line, and none of it happens alone. It happens because investors back businesses when belief is the only asset on the table, because suppliers and partners stay through years that give them every reason not to, because clients trust infrastructure providers with things that matter to them long before that trust has been fully earned, and because every person working in this industry, in any capacity, at any point, builds something none of them could have built individually.
The infrastructure will keep changing. I suspect the reasons clients choose to trust it will not.
Tony
