Ask an investment advisor what her top challenges are and besides expected responses such as “getting the best ROI”,  “making money for my clients when market is not going up and up”, you’ll commonly hear things like “managing client expectations”, “managing information flow” and “staying in touch with clients to just the right degree “.

Looking closely, these are not small issues to deal with. Setting and managing expectations is something every investment advisor has to deal with all the time. For every other transaction, every new stock they pick, every new idea they present, and at the time of every major market movement. Evidently, it’s not a one-time thing. Also, “managing information flow” and “staying in touch just the right amount” sort of fall within the ambit of managing expectations as well.

We, at Stockal, have often been asked if there was a product that could build on top of our existing foundation, but for investment advisors. We looked around and found that while there are some great RIA products out there, most of them work in the background – designed to make certain parts of the advisor’s life easy. They help manage new business prospects, file reports, ensure compliance and place trades. But not many of them come close to being able to address client expectations. Is my advisor on top of relevant market information? Will my advisor be able to revisit my portfolio now and then to make sure my investments continue to perform as planned? If something major happens with one of my investments, will my advisor get to know immediately? Will she inform me in time?

These are critical questions that few products solve, efficiently. And those that try, don’t provide the ‘fluid’ user experience that modern investment managers expect. So we’re building Folio.

Folio uses the data and analytics foundation that Stockal has built – processing over 7.5 million data points every day, covering over 7,000 US stocks and about 2,000 ETFs. It also uses Stockal’s, proprietary, personalization algorithm that discovers investing opportunities based on investor profiles. Along with these machine learning and AI driven features, Folio uses Stockal Chat to power client-advisor communication and Stockal’s ability to import client portfolios from multiple brokers to create a full-suite of “Client Expectation Management” systems. We’re building a powerhouse.

So, if you are an investment advisor, Folio will automatically alert you when any of clients’ stocks see an insider transaction or if Wall Street analyst firms change their opinion on any of your stocks or if there is a spike in social media buzz about any of the stocks you’re interested in. It will keep you apprised of important regulatory events across all the companies you track. Of course, major price movements are tracked as well. And with Chat, you can seamlessly share important information with your clients with ease. Emails are cumbersome, we know! All chat conversations are archived for compliance, by the way, in case you were thinking.

So, there you have it. Right from creating and maintaining client profiles and consolidating their portfolios across brokerages, to presenting them with personalized investing ideas and running simulated investment scenarios for them, to pushing multiple trades to the broker of choice in one go, to having all the relevant news, analysis, social media chatter and regulatory information at your fingertips – Folio helps you truly stay on top the investment information your clients want you to have.

And we are just getting started. We look forward to hearing about your evolving requirements, and build Folio into a product that really helps you create long-lasting client relationships.