How YCharts' Scatter Plot Tool aims to increase client adoption rate
Would you like a tool to help your clients take more of your portfolio suggestions?
YCharts Inc. of Chicago is offering a new Scatter Plot Tool to allow advisors to plot data points on both a X and Y-axis grid to compare and contrast securities and data.
“The visuals that advisors can generate, using our tool, helps them explain their strategies to their prospects and clients,” Caleb Eplett, YCharts’ chief product officer told Wealth Professional. “We’re giving them the tools that can help them find, and identify, different investments, but what we’re really trying to do is help them get more adoption from their clients.
“What we’ve heard from talking to our clients is that if the advisors can help their clients visualize what they’re recommending, so they can look at it, then their adoption rates tend to increase. So that’s our underlying goal,” he said. “We’re trying to package it all up in such a way that the end investor is more likely to act on their advisors’ recommendations because they can see the benefits and clearly understand the research behind those ideas.”
YCharts is U.S.-based, but has a strong Canadian advisor client base. Its new Scatter Plot tool allows them to do more research on their portfolio products, but also illustrate risk versus reward for different securities, then plot their portfolios to show how individual holdings are affecting portfolio-level metrics. Advisors can use what’s in the tool, but also add their own products, so they can do a risk/reward analysis of what they’re offering clients.
“It can help, even when they’re trying to choose a fund manager or individual security. It makes that really easy,” said Eplett. “But it also makes it easy to grab those visuals and brand them and make it something that they can easily share with their clients to explain the decision-making process that they went through to put together their portfolio or compare it with some other options to ensure that they’re acting in their clients’ best interest.”
Eplett agreed it can assist with the client-focused reforms’ know-your product requirements, even though it wasn’t designed to meet those. He said it allows advisors to look at the various funds’ expense ratio and how they compare to their track records, as well as how long a manager has been in place. They can then retain the documentation.
“Most advisors are probably already familiar with, or using, a scatter plot to evaluate risk and reward in a portfolio. What they haven’t necessarily had access to is the configurability that we give them to look at different time periods, different ways to measure risk, and different ways to measure the reward. It’s a much more flexible tool, and they can actually add historical data to our scatter point, too.”
“There are numerous thousands of different metrics they can use, so the actual analysis that they can do is unlimited,” he said. “We just make it a little easier for the advisor because there are lots of shortcuts that help them jump into the analyses with a single click, so they don’t have to build it on out on their own.”
