UBS Wealth Management Americas has teamed up with a West Coast fintech firm to develop digital tools and services for advisors and clients, part of ongoing ferment in this field.

UBS Wealth Management Americas and SigFig, a Californian wealth technology firm, have formed a strategic alliance to develop financial technology for the Swiss bank's Americas arm, as well as UBS' financial advisors and clients.

The platform created by SigFig for UBS will enable the some 7,000 advisors at the latter firm to provide advice on assets held in-house and at other institutions.

As part of the arrangement, UBS has made an equity investment in SigFig, the financial size of which was not disclosed. Both organizations have also decided to create a technology "innovation lab," part of a trend of banks setting up such facilities to stay ahead of fintech competition.

"This alliance will strengthen our advisors’ ability to provide outstanding client experiences and outcomes by combining our expertise in relationships and personalised advice with SigFig's skills in technology, data science, design and development," said Tom Naratil, president of UBS Americas.

Such a venture is part of a wider, global trend in fintech innovation activity. Last month Deutsche Bank, for example, opened an innovation lab in the place most widely associated with new techie ideas: California’s Silicon Valley (see more on that here.)

HSBC and Aviva, meanwhile, are among the various other finance companies involved in creating labs to ensure they are ahead of upstart fintech challengers. The labs are designed to spawn ideas in areas such as security, client reporting, apps, use of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other fields. Last week, the University of Oxford and Man AHL, part of UK-listed hedge fund business Man Group, enhanced the focus of the Oxford-Man Institute, which researches quantitative finance, on so-called machine learning.