Family Wealth Management

Expert Systems with Applications 29 (2005) 219–228 www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Web-service-agents-based family wealth management system*

Shijia Gao, Huaiqing Wang*, Yingfeng Wang, Wenqi Shen, Siubun Yeung

Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

Abstract The increasing number of wealthy families, large amount of intergeneration transferable wealth, roiling financial markets, constantly changing tax law and increasing complexity of planning transaction increase the demand of aggregated family wealth management (FWM) services. However, current trend of developing such advisory systems is mainly focusing on financial or investment side. In addition, the existing systems are lack of flexible and autonomous problem-solving capability, rich interactions, and pro-active and reactive features. In this paper, a novel architecture of Web-service-agents-based FWM systems has been proposed. Agent technology is applied to deal with the complex, dynamic, and distributed FWM processes; Web-services techniques are proposed for more interoperability and scalability in network-based business environment. By integrating agent technology with Web-services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach provides a more intelligent, flexible, autonomous, and comprehensive solution to FWM. A prototype system for supporting FWM advice is also presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Web-service-agents-based FWM system architecture and business value. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Intelligent agents; Web-services; Family wealth management; Financial advisor

1. Introduction In September, 2003, a joint development project between Bank of Communications (Hong Kong Branch) (BCOM) and City University of Hong Kong started. The goal of this project is the development of a financial planner system that is able to help high-net-worth-individuals (HNWIs) to manage their portfolios....