Having an integrated view of portfolio assets could provide crucial insights. For example, Shum Nolan says incorporating information about all the funds in an investors’ portfolio can help them determine the weighted average of the fees that they are paying. Knowing what assets are in the portfolio can also speak volumes on what risks the client is carrying, where they’re getting the most returns, and whether they’re properly diversified against downside risks, among other information.
Beyond portfolio performance, Shum Nolan says Wealthscope has integrated its portfolio analysis with retirement planning capabilities, taking into account people’s needs for tax optimization in both the accumulation and the decumulation phase. While there are other financial planning tools out there, Shum Nolan says her platform’s visibility into people’s actual portfolios gives it a leg up against many competitors.
“At Wealthscope, we also have a segment of business that focuses on investors,” she says. “We’ve talked to a lot of investors coast to coast in Canada, and many are asking why their advisors aren’t providing that type of information in their conversations. So we believe it’s important to do this research and help advisors answer these questions.”
For many advisors, Shum Nolan says doing a proper portfolio review or portfolio recommendations for clients typically requires them to subscribe to expensive platforms, with many functionalities that are really targeted towards institutional investors. That leaves them with a painful alternative, which is to download market data and fund data themselves and spend hours crunching the numbers on Excel, then putting them in a format that’s appropriate for presentation to clients.
“Our platform automates that whole workflow, and displays the information in our UI,” she says. “But I think what sets us apart is the contextualization of the analysis and the educational component. Advised clients already have pages of tables and charts at their fingertips from all the reports and disclosures they get, but they still need a lot of help to understand what it all means.”
