“That’s a huge opportunity for us to stay engaged with people and make sure they know that they’re heard. We’re not just some technology company that gives them something that says use it because we think it’s right.” The company integrates with CRMs to decrease the effort involved in storing text messages. There CRM Integrations include popular names like Redtail, SmartOffice, Wealthbox, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. For the client’s convenience they integrate tools like

Riskalyze and

MarketingPro

, which makes advisor–client engagement quicker and more meaningful. Also, they have partnered with archivers such as Smarsh, Patrina, Global Relay, Proofpoint, and Microfocus to name a few. For groups of multiple advisors, they have the so-called “Admin Portal”—a fully dedicated administrative platform that a home office gets so they can control and customize rules, parameters, and disclosures.

“There’s nothing that another tool can do and ours can’t, but there’s a ton that our tool can do that others can’t.”

The tool was built utilizing

AWS

and

Twilio for security reasons

. At Ionlake, users own their data and nobody else can access it. To ensure that the storage is reliable and highly secure, every ounce of data that passes through MyRepChat is not only encrypted in transit, but it is encrypted at rest within

AWS

. Derrick says advisors hate it when their company wants to build something themselves because they know it’s never going to be as good as integrated solutions and they know the bumps in the road that they’ll stumble over have already been addressed by us.

“We couldn’t just build it utilizing something we build ourselves in a garage. We needed to utilize reputable companies and names.”

For that reason, they’ve built their product so that firms don’t have to build the tool themselves. Also, ionlake doesn’t charge organizations to adopt the tool.

Simple, flexible, phenomenal—that’s ionlake’s team

The team structure of ionlake is pretty simple and consists of three departments—development, customer service, and sales. As the CEO, Derrick oversees these and continues to be a visionary of the company.

“My job is to think three steps ahead and ensure we’re doing the best we possibly can in every facet of the business. [integrations, enhancements, and features that make the communication between an advisor and their client is critical to our ability to ensure MyRepChat always stands apart and delivers an experience unlike anything else] Every time I do a demo for advisors, they [can] tell within two seconds [that MyRepChat] was built by somebody who understands what they do for a living.”

Derrick is proud of their outstanding customer service, which has received the highest praise from organizations and subscribers. He also feels that way about their development team and practice. Ionlake is Agile and has weekly development meetings at which they decide what other features or integrations they want to implement. They say that integrating with a partner can sometime be done in less than24 hours, which sounds pretty good—though some bigger initiatives, like

Marketing Pro

or

Riskalyze,

can take more time as they require a bit more back and forth within the company. The lengthiest part of integration is reaching an agreement with companies, rather than the development itself, Derrick says.

Future plans and challenges

Despite the company’s successes, there might be a blot on the landscape. The toughest part for Ionlake is marketing their product, lack of awareness, and misconception. The company is young and the team is small, so they struggle to compete with companies that spend millions on marketing.

“It’s not always the most accurate voice that people hear, it’s the loudest […] I can’t tell you how many times people [have] called me and said they were told that our technologies don’t do this or that. But it does.”

Derrick says there are a couple other solutions out there that allow for compliant texting in the market. They are bigger organizations, and their marketing is better causing firms to sign up without truly understanding that the benefactor of the product should be the client and the advisor. The company has been able to win some of those clients because these companies have realized ionlake’s commitment to the tool. Ionlake is aiming to make MyRepChat a big name and capture more markets.

“We’ve had so many firms tell me, ‘Derrick, we went with this other solution as we didn’t know you existed. Call us back, we are eager to switch over because it’s not what we thought and we are paying way more than we should be. Many times when I do a demo for a company that either has another solution or that is in the market for one, I hear things like; I saw things I expected to see, things I was hoping to see, and many things I couldn’t imagine I would see.’”