Site: covisum.com
Founded: 2016
Clients: RIAs serving affluent and mass-affluent clients
Value proposition: Social Security Benefits, Income Planning Tools, Retirement Planning, Financial Advisors, and Continuing Education
The executive team: Joe Elsasser, President and Founder
Dan Gaydos, Chief Operating Officer
Katie Godbout, Director of Sales and Marketing
Chris Whitehill, Director of Software Development
Covisum is a financial tech company that builds software that allows RIAs to see the impact of different decisions within a client’s financial plan. The solution generates client reports based on strong analytics and provides advisors with support by phone, email and chat. Unlike other all-in-one solutions, Covisum tends to make their system’s components function as standalone services that are on par with niche solutions in terms of analytical depth. They follow “the sum is greater than the parts” principle. This year, Covisum launched a comprehensive retirement income planning portal, Income InSight, to join other solutions such as Tax Clarity, Social Security Timing, and SmartRisk.
Joe Elsasser, CFP, started out as an advisor over 15 years ago. He was looking for a social security optimizer to empower his own financial planning practice, but he couldn’t find any adequate solutions on the market. Thus, he joined forces with a college friend to build Social Security Timing software that later grew to become Covisum’s first product.
In this article, we’ll discover the company’s primary focus, clients, integrations, development processes, and the priorities that shape its future.
Eliminating The Rule Of Thumb
After releasing Social Security Timing, Covisum launched Tax Clarity software in 2016. Users often struggle to properly calculate the tax impact on retirement income, which leads to unexpected losses. Tax Clarity is about making smart income withdrawal decisions and navigating interactions between incomes that create marginal, unexpected tax rates.