Riskalyze came onto the financial technology scene in 2011 with its Risk Number, a quantitative measure of an investor’s true risk tolerance and the risk in the portfolio. But the company has since evolved to provide a number of different tools to help wealth management firms grow their businesses, beyond the simple risk questionnaire. So early next year, the company will have a new name, announced CEO Aaron Klein, speaking at Riskalyze’s Fearless Investing Summit in Salt Lake City this week.
“Given that we’ve built so far beyond that risk questionnaire we started with, we realized that while we’ll always be the company on the mission to empower the world to invest fearlessly, the name Riskalyze really just embodies part of our product portfolio,” Klein said. “We’ve come to realize that it’s a fantastic product name for that part of the product portfolio, and we kind of need something to tell a broader story for the future.”
Riskalyze will live on as a product name within the company. Klein said he and his team had not yet decided on the new name, but they’ve enlisted Lexicon Branding, the company behind Sonos, Swiffer, Febreze, Subaru’s Outback and Forester, and Intel’s Pentium, among others, to create it.
The new name will reflect the company’s focus on driving growth for wealth management firms, something Klein said is a new pillar of wealthtech that Riskalyze has invented. The other pillars include financial planning tools, CRM and asset platforms.
“It’s a pillar that feeds data to and from your financial planning tool, deeply integrates into your CRM on one side and your asset platform on the other," Klein said. "We call it the ‘growth platform.’ It defines what we’ve built over the last decade, the new things that we’re excited to announce today, and what we plan to deliver to the marketplace over the next decade.”
Contrary to questions raised over the years, Riskalyze won’t get into that asset platform pillar nor become a turnkey asset management platform, Klein said.
“Almost every big company in our space has achieved its revenue scale by becoming an asset platform, asking you to let them manage your assets and taking a piece of your basis points,” he said. “We feel like that’s a crowded market with a lot of great players, the vast majority of them are our partners.”
Riskalyze will remain a “pure-play technology company,” Klein said.
Klein announced several tech enhancements at the conference, including a new experience for its “check-ins” feature, which gauges client market sentiment with email check-ins.
The company also added more filters to its Discovery tool, launched at last year’s summit, including ones for fixed income, separately managed accounts, bond funds and a turnover ratio filter.
The firm introduced a new Portfolios experience, which provides for more ways to organize and categorize accounts, including by time horizon, goals or other “buckets of money” approaches.
Riskalyze has also introduced a new metric to help advisors differentiate themselves in the proposal process, alongside its Risk Number and Riskalyze GPA metrics. It’s called Tax Drag, and will display the tax liability triggered by capital gain distributions.
Klein also announced improvements to its Command Center, its compliance tool launched earlier this year, including new tools that help advisors find the accounts that are out of whack with their risk targets, have concentrated positions or inappropriate investments. The tool also now allows for householding.