The purchase of Embark will also enhance Lloyd’s joint venture with Schroders, Schroders Personal Wealth, to make a further push into the mass-affluent and high-net-worth market. Embark’s platform will help Lloyds meet the more complex financial planning and investment requirements of these two wealth brackets with simple digital tools that let them manage their own portfolios.

Moonfare’s expanded access to private markets has been rewarded by rapid AUM growth and a mega-round.

Insider Intelligence spoke with Kate MacCabe, Brooklinen's vice president of Product, a DTC brand selling luxury bedding products.

It led a $50M round in Aumni to scale its investment analytics capabilities in private markets, and we expect the incumbent will seek more targets in H2 to power its digital transformation.

iCapital has grown fast over the past year by easing access to private markets. Ninety percent of private market AUM is held by institutional and ultra-high-net-worth investors, per a Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman report.

The first is a short survey offered via mobile; it contains a key set of 70 questions and reaches mobile (as well as mobile-only) respondents (who tend to be younger, less affluent, and concentrated in emerging markets).

This suggests that CIBC could market the feature to more affluent customers first as a way to build user interest. It’s planning to offer a virtual assistant later this year, but it’s unlikely Canadian customers will gravitate toward it. The feature was the lowest in demand for the Customer Service section of our survey, with just 5.1% deeming it “extremely valuable.”

For instance, a number of digital brokers, including SoFi, launched IPO investing offerings this year, opening up a market traditionally populated by institutional and ultra-high-net-worth investors to individuals. Furthermore, more players may add long-term investing options on their platforms to maintain users and attract new ones.

In lower-income homes, penetration was closer to 22%, but in more affluent households, ownership was 44.9%. As these figures suggest, many advanced digital devices still have little market presence in Russia, and adoption is slow. For example, smartwatch penetration climbed from 7.5% to 9.3% this year, and 14.3% of respondents had a smart wristband. Barely 1 in 10 owned a game console.

The Global Media Intelligence Report is a concise yet detailed compilation of data and insights about internet users’ traditional and digital media usage in 42 key markets worldwide. This 2020 edition covers the same range of metrics we featured in 2019, and the consistency of GlobalWebIndex’s methodology enables us to offer precise year-over-year comparisons; these provide vital indicators of exactly where and how quickly changes are happening, and where behaviors haven’t altered much.

For years, luxury brands around the world have been slow to adopt digital. But the pandemic has sped up the process, forcing many to pivot and innovate during a time when a large number of transactions are happening digitally.

Issuers pivoted rewards to follow consumer spending trends and meet both affluent and mass market cardholders’ enhanced need for essential goods. Rewards have historically been a key spending driver, but that importance magnified during the pandemic, even as key categories, like travel and entertainment (T&E), ground to a halt.

Insider Intelligence associate analyst Christina Obolenskaya spoke with Ricky Joshi, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Saatva, on providing "accessible luxury" products to customers. Saatva sells high-end mattresses on its ecommerce platform, as well as bedding products, bed frames, and more.

Like Hong Kong, Singapore is a small, densely populated and relatively affluent market where the dominance of digital media has been consolidated. Smartphones are the leading digital device in Singapore and continue to increase their lead over PCs. According to GlobalWebIndex, 98.3% of internet users ages 16 to 64 owned an advanced handset in H1 2019, compared with 78.1% who owned a desktop or laptop.

There has been so much news about this over the past 18 months, including specific instances of how much app data is shared with Facebook. iOS users are more likely to care about this than Android users because privacy is a selling point for Apple, which is also more geared toward an affluent market,” she said.

Asia-Pacific is rapidly gaining, driven by China’s outsized population and outsized ecommerce participation, as well as by mature wealthy markets like South Korea (79.5% penetration), Australia (82.8%) and Japan (84.8%). Latin America, however, unexpectedly leapfrogged Central and Eastern Europe a couple of years ago and is now widening the gap.

Even among internet users in affluent homes, just 15.0% owned a smart wristband. Ownership of smart home products rose modestly, as well. But unlike smart wristbands, smart home items are gradually acquiring significant market presence. This year, 20.5% of all internet users polled owned such a product—perhaps a smart appliance, an energy consumption monitor, or a remotely-controlled security system.

This partnership is a huge opportunity for Klarna—which first entered Australia’s robust BNPL market in January 2020—and should help expand its retail network. Yoox Net-a-Porter. The tie-up lets customers purchase the company’s luxury clothing and accessories in three or four installments.

That said, respondents in affluent households more than doubled that average, with 23.1% owning smartwatches. But uptake of smart wristbands, TV streaming sticks, and smart home products remained very low overall, at 5.1%, 5.7%, and 6.5%, respectively.

The uptick in events will translate to huge demand for bespoke fashionable attire, generating momentum for luxury rental platforms like Rent the Runway. Nuuly’s entry into the resale market will convince more established brands to chase recurring revenues.

Every national market in the world will finish this year with more ad spending than in 2020. In most categories, worldwide growth records will be shattered. But 2021 was a very unusual year, following a very unusual 2020.

In contrast to a pattern seen in many other markets, ownership of both PCs and tablets rose by a couple of percentage points this year, to 49.4% and 33.6%, respectively. Time spent with desktops, laptops, and tablets also climbed, from 3:38 in H1 2020 to 3:55 in H1 2021. Males, respondents ages 45 to 64, and those in affluent homes continued to overindex for PC ownership.

When Amazon starts a new business, competitors scrap business plans and markets shudder. We examined 19 of Amazon’s divisions to help parse how the company fuels its flywheel to keep driving the virtuous cycle.