“The general public believes they can operate on a rule of thumb. In pretty much all of our tools, our focus is on identifying the biggest issues where people might think they know what they’re doing, but then get an unexpected result.”
Similarly, they are on the way to modernizing advisors’ risk metrics via their SmartRisk product. They acquired a company specializing in building heavy-tailed risk algorithms.
This year, they launched Income InSight, a retirement income planning portal that deeply integrates with their other tools and forms a cohesive whole.
Integrations And Conflicts
Covisum is building a coordinated stack with Income InSight as the center to eliminate conflicts in assumptions between multiple software products:
“Everybody talks about open architecture and integrations as the Holy Grail. But when advisors try to link together multiple programs, they see conflicts in assumptions. There’s nothing worse for an advisor than sitting in front of a client and explaining, ‘Yeah, these are the best tools that exist, but no, they can’t agree with each other.’”
Covisum services are integrated with Redtail and Orion. The company provides APIs in a variety of different capacities such as consumer calculators, which power several Fortune 50 organizations. This way, they empower other wealth management tools to become holistic.
“We have actively worked to reconcile the conflicts in assumptions and results so that the advisor can have that same level of confidence as they have with our own.”
Design Versus Analytics
Elsasser sees a challenge: a lot of industry focus has gone to visualization at the expense of underlying analytics in WealthTech solutions: