Lastly, we are constantly updating templates in all of our tools so that when an advisor needs to quickly pull the ‘Major Index Performance’, ‘Intraday Yield Data’, or ‘Covid Vaccination Rate’, they can easily do so with the click of a button and immediately send a visual off to their clients.
Hortz: How do you work with your advisor clients on the ongoing development of the platform?
Brown: We regularly engage our advisor clients via formal surveys as well as informal, day-to-day feedback. For instance, we are in the process of determining some new enhancements for our charting tool and will be sending a survey to our power users of the tool. We also conduct win/loss analyses and customer interviews with the product team to help us better understand the needs of our clients.
Hortz: Can you share with us what plans you have for new enhancements or tools you will be adding to your investment research platform?
Brown: We are in the process of redesigning our dashboard, to make it more configurable and informative for our customers. Additionally, we plan to expand our Fundamental Charting tool to allow for more versatility (for example, scatter plots) and personalization. Regarding personalization, our goal is to make the tool more flexible and allow advisors to annotate charts in more unique ways, really adding their voice to each touch point with clients. Plus, we are adding integrations with Redtail, and other key technology solutions used amongst advisors to ensure our platform is easily accessible and streamlined with other tools advisors use.
Hortz: What have been the benefits coming from being acquired last year by the middle market private equity firm LLR Partners?
Brown: We are excited to have partnered with LLR Partners, as they are providing great strategic support and capital backing for faster innovation and development, whether that innovation comes from building, partnering, or buying. With their significant focus on WealthTech, LLR has been great at collaborating with my leadership team to understand the evolution of the markets we serve and define our high impact growth initiatives.
In terms of funding, our business performance and financial backing has allowed tremendous growth to our toolset due to increased hiring. Prior to being acquired we had 62 employees; we just hired our 87th. This growth during the pandemic has been otherworldly and we feel very blessed.
Hortz: Any other thoughts you would like to share?
Brown: Throughout our 12 years in business, YCharts has grown at a remarkable pace of 35-45% per year and a 5-year total growth over 400%. We are confident that if we did not provide a great solution that enables wealth and asset managers to succeed and do right by their own clients, we would not have been able to achieve everything we have to date.
We built multiple powerful investment tools into a single, cohesive platform to drive idea generation, portfolio construction, analysis, visualization, and communication. We would like to invite investment professionals to follow our blog and watch our webinars as we continue to provide research, data, and new perspectives on making smarter investment decisions and engaging tools for client communications and engagement.
Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and financial services firms determined to lead their businesses in an operating environment of accelerating business and cultural change. We position our members with the necessary ongoing innovation resources and best practices to drive and facilitate their next-generation growth, differentiation, and unique client/community engagement strategies. The institute was launched with the support and foresight of our founding sponsors — Ultimus Fund Solutions, NASDAQ, Pershing, Fidelity, Voya Financial and Charter Financial Publishing (publisher of Financial Advisor magazine).