In this edition of the ‘Start-up of the Week,’ International Finance will talk about Addepar, a wealth management platform specialising in data aggregation and analytics, while reporting for even the most complex investment portfolios.
The venture’s platform aggregates portfolio, market, and client data in one place. It provides asset owners and advisors a clearer financial picture even at micro levels, thereby allowing these individuals to make informed and timely investment decisions.
Addepar, as of March 2024, has been working with hundreds of leading financial advisors, family offices, and large financial institutions, apart from managing over USD 5 trillion of assets on its platform.
Addepar hit the headlines in 2018, as it got named in “Forbes Fintech 50,” apart from receiving Morgan Stanley’s “Fintech Award.” Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the start-up has offices in the American cities of New York, Chicago, and Salt Lake.
Knowing The Venture In Detail
As a transformative technology and data platform, Addepar has so far served over 1000 global businesses (ranging from wealth managers, family offices, and private offices to broker dealers) in more than 40 markets, helping its clients to make smarter investment decisions and drive greater outcomes for their portfolios.
Addepar’s multi-product software and data platform helps clients having the most complex investment portfolios to make flexible decisions, as its data mining method aggregates not only customers’ ownable assets, but also analyses and visualises portfolio data instantly, apart from creating customised and branded reports instantly.
Addepar consolidates and unifies all clients’ financial data so that the latter can easily analyse any portfolio, apart from getting a complete and meaningful financial picture and last but not least, the best possible market advice.
Addepar believes that everyone should be able to understand the assets they own, where they have invested and how they are performing. These values are reflected in their solutions as well, as they provide wealth managers with real-time portfolio reporting and insights required to make and implement better investment decisions. The start-up aims to get more assets flowing into impactful investments and ideas.
How The Company Functions
Addepar seamlessly aggregates financial accounts and investments and The platform consolidates its customers’ clients’ wealth across financial institutions and enhances it with relevant market and third-party data. It is flexible enough to track any ownable asset and has direct feeds to various data sources.
As data comes into the Addepar platform, it gets normalised and grouped for analysis, followed by the venture’s automated verification mechanism performing a thorough check of the incoming data across the asset classes for flagging inconsistencies. If there is a discrepancy, Addepar will automatically flag the account for its “Data Operations Team” to investigate, diagnose and resolve.
Addepar’s data model represents all financial transactions and holdings in a unified data structure, while instantly analysing and visualising portfolios, taking into account their complex ownership structures, multiple asset classes and multi-currency scenarios.
“On-demand calculations let you analyse down to the smallest transaction or across the most complex portfolio, within seconds. Drill down on what matters most at any moment,” the start-up stated further.
Addepar’s flexible APIs also help its customers to efficiently automate workflows and drive their business-critical applications.
“Pre-built integrations are simple to deploy, with no coding required. If there’s another integration you need, you can quickly create it to your specifications with our custom integrations,” the venture noted.
Knowing The Products
Addepar sees complex client portfolios holistically to make smarter investment decisions and generate superior outcomes. The media for implementing this approach is an open architecture, multi-product tech and data platform that delivers wealth managers rich data aggregation with maximum flexibility and scalability.
Addepar aggregates all of the financial accounts to create a consolidated view of its customers’ (wealth managers) client portfolios. Data continually gets updated and available for the clients, with the wealth managers being able to view investments across custodial accounts and uncover opportunities to provide data-driven financial plans and holistic advice.
Addepar’s industry-leading analytics and performance reporting software allow wealth managers to tailor insights and conversations for their clients. These professionals, apart from being able to analyse and visualise portfolio data, can communicate relevant insights to their clients on a proactive basis, while creating customised and branded reports in minutes.
The start-up’s digital tools provide wealth managers’ clients with encrypted access to their financial information anytime and anywhere, even through gadgets like smartphones and iPad apps. Addepar’s wealth management tool bridges back-office solutions with the venture’s custom reporting functionality, apart from seamlessly integrating workflows with out-of-the-box integrations like automated data aggregation and verification method, which allows the wealth managers to win back hours spent on manual efforts ranging from reporting to compliance.
Addepar has been named “Best in Class” in 2023’s “Aite-Novarica Report,” as its innovative products for wealth managers and investment professionals have been helping them to deliver exceptional results for their portfolios.
Addepar also helps private banks provide a comprehensive wealth management solution and position themselves as strategic partners to their clients. The start-up partners with financial institutions to design and implement scalable technology platforms that deliver competitive advantage and improved operational efficiency. Banks can easily build seamless integrations with their proprietary legacy systems and other tech partners, through Addepar’s API toolkit. Other abilities of the integrated solution are digital audit trail and permission tools, which help these lenders meet compliance goals and streamline administrative workflows.
Addepar’s family office software creates greater transparency by centralising the family office’s financial information in a single place, delivered with the highest standard of data security. The tool instantly analyses and visualises portfolio data, apart from proactively assessing the clients’ exposure, understanding their financial risks and turning insights into actions.
The tool, which takes into account a family office’s complex ownership structures, multi-asset classes and multi-currency scenarios, analyses down to the smallest transaction or across the most complex portfolio, within seconds. And yes, through the tool, these family offices can quickly create customised reports and update them in real-time.
A Promising Road Ahead
Adderpar’s client base includes investment biggies like AllianceBernstein, Morgan Stanley and London&Capital. In December 2023, the start-up crossed the mark of over USD 5 trillion in assets being managed, overseen and analysed on its platform.
Aeric Poirier, Addepar CEO, in an announcement around the same time, stated that the RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) assets now represent over USD 2 trillion on the venture’s platform.
“Independent RIAs were our first love because they share Addepar’s commitment to client centricity and delivering truly the best outcomes to each client in a sustainable way,” he said, noting that the company had worked closely with a wide range of RIAs.
The venture, in March 2024, announced that Bob Pisani will be its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He will be entrusted with the task of leading Addepar’s global engineering teams to continue delivering ambitious, client-centric innovations.
Pisani joined the business in 2020 to head its “Platform Engineering,” where he built and managed the teams driving Addepar’s data, computing, and AI developments. Right now, this is serving as the foundation for Addepar’s global multi-product strategy.