Pareto Services

We work with Asset managers Wealth managers Single & Multi-Family Offices Financial organisations

Focus

The few AI projects that move the business.

Every institution has dozens of possible AI projects. A handful sit on the frontier: the most growth for the effort they take. We find those first, build them, and leave the rest for later.

On the frontier (Pareto-efficient): build first
Dominated by a better option: park or drop

Your Pareto frontierILLUSTRATIVE

Services

Intelligence to decide, planning to grow, automation to scale.

Our work sits at the intersection of financial expertise, data, technology and operating-model design. We stay with the project from the first idea to a system your teams use every day.

Business intelligence tools

AI that reads your clients, markets and competitors and turns the signals into clear priorities: which clients to grow, which products to push, which risks to watch.

Growth & development planning

Planning tools that model scenarios, size opportunities and turn strategy into a roadmap with targets your teams can track.

Agentic workflows

AI agents that take on research, reporting, onboarding and other multi-step work, so you can serve more clients without growing headcount at the same pace.

Integration & operating model

AI built into your core systems, data and controls, with the governance and ways of working that let it scale across teams after the pilot.

Approach

From experimentation to measurable outcomes.

Most institutions have run AI pilots. Few have turned them into results. We follow three steps, and each one ends with something you can measure.

STEP 1 · IDENTIFY

Find where AI creates real value

We map processes and decisions, size the opportunity and find the few use cases that deliver most of the value.

Output: prioritised use-case map

STEP 2 · INTEGRATE

Build it into how you work

We design and implement the system inside your existing processes, data and controls, together with your teams.

Output: a working system in production

STEP 3 · MEASURE

Prove the outcome

We track time saved, quality and growth against a baseline agreed upfront, then scale what works.

Output: measured impact, next roadmap

Hourglass with blue sand on a black background

Why Pareto

The goal is not AI for its own sake.

It is to help financial institutions scale: grow revenues and clients faster than costs, and be ready for the next market cycle. Our name comes from Vilfredo Pareto, the economist who began teaching at the University of Lausanne in 1893, and we work by two of his ideas.

The Pareto principle

20%of the effort

80%of the result

We start with the few initiatives that create most of the value, and leave the rest for later.

Pareto efficiency

Win-wina higher optimum, reached together

Two parties starting from a sub-optimal position can, by working together, achieve a Pareto improvement: creating more value so that both are better off and neither is worse off.

That is how we work with our clients – using AI to help their business move closer to its efficient frontier.

About

Built by an investor, for investors.

Karim Varini at an M. C. Escher exhibition

Karim Varini, CFA

CEO & Founderkarimvarini.com →

Karim has worked in Swiss and international asset management since 1997, almost 30 years. In 2006 he co-founded Hedge Invest Suisse, part of the Hedge Invest SGR group, and led it as CEO until 2016, also serving as director of the two Hedge Invest offshore funds. Earlier he worked on the Antares European Fund, one of the leading European long/short equity hedge funds of its time, and as a risk manager at BSI, Banca della Svizzera Italiana.

Since 2019 he has provided wealth consolidation and guardianship services at Bel-Fa SA, a leading family office in Italian-speaking Switzerland. He took part in the Canton Ticino working group on the development of the local financial sector, has written and spoken on alternative investments since 2001, and has backed venture projects such as TimeRepublik.

Since 1997in asset & wealth management
CFAcharterholder since 2003

1997

Where it started

“…the main trends of IT applied to the financial sector, including the remarkable contribution to computerised decision-making offered by applications developed in the field of artificial intelligence, a source of enormous strategic opportunities.”Karim Varini, thesis summary, June 1997

Karim's Bocconi thesis, supervised by Prof. Giorgio Stefano Bertinetti, argued that information technology, including the artificial intelligence of the time, should be a competitive weapon and not just a way to handle data. It also showed that technology pays off only together with strategy, skilled people and redesigned processes. Almost thirty years later, Pareto still works that way.

Strategic partners

A selected network of specialists we bring into a project when it needs them.