In today’s edition of the “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will talk about Illio, which, having its operational presence in Hong Kong and London, has emerged as a comprehensive investment intelligence platform and a fully interactive digital front-end built with powerful data visualisation technology.
The uniqueness of Illio’s technology-heavy operations lies in the fact that its client can upload multiple portfolios online and the start-up will consolidate all positions across asset classes, geographies, currencies, sectors and custodians/brokers.
Knowing Things In Detail
Calling itself a product “Built by investors, For Investors,” Illio was the brainchild of Vanessa Gibson, who, after 35 years running her own award-winning hedge fund and a family office, realised that the wealth management industry was lagging big time, when it came to simplifying complex information in a digestible format.
Whether the clients held their wealth with a wealth firm or an online platform, they used to receive static reports using terminologies they didn’t understand. Key information about their wealth used to come in a backward-looking format. As an experienced fund manager, Vanessa Gibson knew it was also important to understand how portfolios of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) would likely behave in the future.
“Furthermore, given the rise of Alternatives in people’s allocations, she felt there needed to be a system capable of normalising analytics between listed and unlisted assets and then deliver the answers to the most important questions quickly. So, in 2019, with the help of Sarang Karkhanis (ex-Wharton fund manager) and Kenneth Sue (ex-Coutts MD), Illio was founded,” the venture stated further.
Illio has now emerged as a modular platform designed to support online platforms, wealth firms, family offices, asset or fund managers with time-saving analytics, user-friendly visualisation and call-to-action-driven Insights.
The venture’s team comprises finance experts and engineers, who are working together on creating an intuitive and powerful platform that leverages a proven investment process with a UX (User Experience) that benefits both the business managers and the end users.
Illio’s mission is to bring transparency and efficiency to wealth management, by sharing and applying the start-up’s collective know-how, and years of investment experience, with the ultimate goal of helping different stakeholders across the category.
“Illio was born to give investors premier analytics to help them manage wealth to the best of their ability. With that in mind, our customers’ satisfaction is core to what makes us tick. We believe in being open to getting feedback, ideas and suggestions from anyone. We encourage all employees to take part in the full Illio journey and share their perspectives,” the venture explained its operational values in the following words.
Here are the Key Products
Talking about Illio’s wealth management-related products, let’s start with “Illio Platform,” which helps its users improve advisor productivity and increase stakeholder transparency. It is an all-inclusive wealth platform, carrying instrument-level and portfolio-level insights. The tool analyses performance, risk and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) for listed, unlisted and digital assets.
The insights part of the “Illio Platform” helps both clients and advisors quickly learn what matters most about their portfolios and instruments. These individuals can also generate performance reports on demand via PDF on client portfolios. Another feature of the “Illio Platform” is the “What If Scenarios,” under which client portfolios can be tweaked or compared to showcase what could have happened under different market scenarios. The whole platform has been drawn up from the client’s point of view, so that the latter can remain engaged with a simplified view of what he/she owns, visualised with insights.
“Illio Platform” brings its clients’ listed, unlisted and digital assets into one platform, followed by performing an analysis of these assets and using the insights to give clients and advisors quick answers on their assets’ performance. The platform also offers its clients their own view of their assets’ performance to create better engagement through transparency.
“Illio Platform” is suitable for asset managers, as it normalises portfolio analytics across listed and unlisted assets. Wealth firms can use the tool to increase their advisor productivity and client engagement activities. Family offices, on the other hand, can consolidate all investments and improve stakeholder reporting, while the platform also presents an opportunity for fund managers to enhance investor reporting with a dynamic interactive tool.
Next in Illio’s product line-up is “What-If Tool,” which generates new assets under management (AUM) scenarios by showcasing better client outcomes with full transparency.
Through this tool, wealth firms can upsell their new investment ideas to clients, family offices can test how a new private asset affects their portfolios, asset managers can showcase how their investments affect investors’ overall portfolios and last but not least, fund managers can illustrate how the addition of the clients’ funds enhances an existing multi-fund portfolio.
An Ocean Of Opportunities
We have already made a mention about Illio’s “Insight” services. Let’s explain things further. The “Insights Data & Widget” has earned its name in the wealth management circle for making its users confident to research new instruments and ideas to trade.
The tool, tailor-made for wealth management sector players, can be seamlessly integrated into their digital platforms as a widget or can be taken as a data feed. The mechanism also comes with a clear CTA (Call to Action) protocol that helps its users understand opportunities and risks for a more informed trading experience.
It also helps the users discover new instruments to trade. Using 20-plus filters traditionally used by professional traders, the discovery section within “Insight” allows wealth management players and their clients to uncover new financial instruments, without getting entangled in multiple charts and analytics.
In fact, through its “Insight” services, Illio is moving the wealth management industry away from disengaged analytics towards personalised, data-driven Insights.
Insight has a dedicated dashboard, which is basically a landing page for wealth managers to access all of the insights in one place, summarised with concise headlines. The “Insight” covers two aspects of the wealth management game: portfolio and instrument. Portfolio one flags whether the five largest positions in the portfolio are contributing a suitable amount of P&L (Profit and Loss). Whereas the instrument part points out the potential asymmetric relationship of how an instrument reacts when markets move up or down.
The “Insights” solution also helps its users in enterprise reporting activities, by performing crucial functions like performance and risk reporting of clients’ assets, with the help of risk statistics enriched with Illio’s “Proprietary Insights.”
Talking about risk and scenario analysis, Illio provides a multi-dimensional view of an asset’s risk. The “Risk Analytics Dashboard,” using elements like risk statistics, drawdown and scenario analysis, performs its functions.
Image Credits: Illio