Fintech brand Arta Finance has an unconventional proposition. While many financial service companies use AI to personalize consumer experiences, Arta leverages the tech to make private banking more accessible through automation. The goal is to bring services once reserved for the ultra-wealthy to a broader population of high-income earners.

The person in charge of spreading that message is Melissa-Ann Chan, who was recently promoted to chief marketing officer and is putting plans in place to expand the company’s marketing across the U.S. and Singapore, where it recently began operating. 

Ad Age recently caught up with Chan to learn more about Arta Finance’s business proposition and its marketing approach. She is one of dozens of former Google employees who left the firm to help fill a gap in the market.

“Over time, we ended up earning more and more, but you don’t realize that you’re investing the same way you did in your 20s,” Chan said. “We found that we all had this problem and our friends had this problem, and not just people in tech. It was our doctor friends and our lawyers friends and our media friends. Fast-forward to launching Arta and when we get client feedback, one surprising thing is how many people working in financial services have this problem.

“These people are working in private banks and they know about this industry—they’ve served the ultra-wealthy for much of their career but they can’t get access to those services themselves.”

Chan helped form the company in October 2021 as its head of marketing after spending nearly 15 years at Google, most recently as head of product marketing for Google Pay. Arta’s founders, including CEO Caesar Sengupta, left Google once they realized they needed to “level up” their own finances, Chan said.

Arta saw enough growth to open a second office in Singapore in October, joining its Bay Area headquarters. As it went global, it saw the need to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy and appointed Chan as its first CMO earlier this month.

In 2025, Chan plans on emphasizing financial literacy and investments commonly available through private banks, such as private equity, venture capital and hedge funds, to market the brand’s more mainstream services.

Inside private banking

Most banks offer tailored asset management and tax advisory services to clients with net worths of seven figures or higher. Those accounts are often handled manually by dedicated advisors and have a high cost-to-serve. By automating parts of the process, Arta reduces costs and brings private banking to high earners who may not meet the traditional super high-income criteria but are on a trajectory to get there. On its website, Arta lists hypothetical clients as millennial millionaires and those with dual incomes and no kids. These individuals have net worths in the low six or seven figures.

“The core of our technology platform tends to be in portfolio creation,” Chan said. “This is stuff that used to run on spreadsheets and in some places still does. We’ve automated a bunch of that infrastructure.”

Arta is still small compared to private banking operations at legacy corporations. Following its opening to all U.S. accredited investors in October 2023 after being invite-only for two years, it onboarded thousands of clients and grew assets under management to hundreds of millions of dollars. For comparison, J.P. Morgan Private Bank has $2.4 trillion in assets under management.

Also read: How J.P. Morgan is positioning itself as the go-to banker for Silicon Valley startups

When Arta launched in Singapore, it released a campaign using social media, events marketing, community activation, product-led growth and digital out-of-home advertising that aimed to differentiate the brand to working professionals rising in their careers. Arta often posts financial advice and thought leadership specific to its clientele’s wealth-building needs on its social media accounts.

Ad Age spoke with Chan about more 2025 goals, how AI can play a role in financial services and her plan to make Arta more mainstream.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

What inspired Arta’s decision to have a chief marketing officer for the first time?

The role of chief marketing officer in any company implies you have multiple types of go-to-market promotions, business streams and geographies. Over the past three years, we’ve expanded out to have that. Now we’re at the stage where we can start thinking about connections between our product and users.

We have always had aspirations of being a global platform. We launched globally two months ago via Singapore and it’s been incredibly validating to note that our platform has global governance. We’re thinking about what the next stage is now.

What are your 2025 goals now that you have a global footprint?

We’re trying to grow out of this niche product to something that is much more mainstream and well-established. Some of this requires establishing a very strong, trustworthy brand. Some of it requires taking some of the lessons that we’ve learned running consumer technology products and applying that to something that is more old-school financial services industry. Cracking problems within that related to customer acquisition, costs and ROI is a big goal.

My personal goal is making wealth management and investments more relevant to people. That’s a huge challenge for us and something I hope we’re going to solve over the next couple years to come.

From a marketing perspective, how is the brand looking to become more mainstream?

There’s this idea that sophisticated finance has always been out of reach of people and if you want to get access, you have to get a bunch of money and you have to know someone. In order to make wealth building more mainstream, you have to break down some of those barriers, and some of it is in education about what asset classes can do and how you might want to think about them as part of your portfolio.

Our second thing is breaking down this gatekeeper model by letting people have transparency. Once you’re one of our clients, you can look at everything available to you in very fine detail with transparent fees and minimums.

What is your next marketing push?

We now have two interesting markets [Bay Area and Singapore] to pursue that we’ve been pursuing in parallel. The next big push is to bring them together under a unified brand positioning.

We have the launch of quite a few product features that help foster learning, whether it’s understanding your asset allocation or what your financial goals are compared to your peers. You can really learn what other people are doing.

We also do a lot of events and activations with people who are the clients we represent on the platform.

You have a relatively well-defined client base. Break down the clientele that you serve.

Our clientele right now skews anywhere from mid-20s to 50s or 60s but at their core are working professionals in a variety of fields. Many are from the creative, tech, and even financial industries who are just looking for new ways of doing things and aren’t willing to go down the traditional finance route or are dissatisfied with a current private banker.

What do you make of how well technology and AI has been embraced within the financial services category, especially when it comes to wealth management?

One of the things we’ve noticed is there is quite a delay in the adoption of new technologies like AI. There are multiple reasons for that: it’s a highly regulated industry and people in the industry take their responsibilities very seriously. You do not always want to adopt new technology wholesale—you have to do it in a very responsible manner.

It takes a culture change in the industry to understand technology and adopt it in a responsible manner. We’re seeing encouraging signs—the discourse is really changing around the potential for AI in wealth management and the technology overall.

When we think about the application of AI to wealth management, we’re looking at use cases it can be applied to, the data that we’re using the train these models, the infrastructure we’re building and then the overall system’s robustness. It’s a very multi-layered problem. You can't just use ChatGPT and expect it to pick stocks for you. You have to really think about building a tech infrastructure and AI stack that’s purpose-built for wealth and finance. That’s the key behind what Arta has built—it’s not off the shelf.

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CORRECTION: A previous version of the story incorrectly described Arta Finance's co-founders.