When we talk about the Assette today, you see our proven Unified Data Engine and an incredible bench of top industry clients that have in excess of one trillion in assets under management. We take great pride in each of these, but these elements didn’t come together overnight.  

 

In fact, Assette was founded around a simple idea, a portal for institutional asset management. It was our first idea twenty years ago and quickly became our first offering. 

 

From the 10,000 foot level, the idea behind the portal was to make things easier for clients, just as Amazon was doing for book lovers at the time. But rather than selling bestsellers, our goal was to plug into the digital realm to provide investors with fast and easy access to live quantitative and qualitative data including all of their information. 

 

Now it’s 2021 and I know what you’re thinking—a portal doesn’t seem like a transformational innovation. But keep in mind that this was the late 1990s before the internet took the world as we knew it and turned it upside down. At the time, asset managers were spending an inordinate amount of time sifting through data that was siloed in different locations to create, print, and mail out information.  

  

With our portal we offered asset managers a new alternative that would replace time consuming endeavors with fast and easy access to all the data they need, all in one place.  Initially we introduced the portal to private and some institutional clients and response was quick, especially with our high-net-worth managers who were looking to use it to support their financial advisors.  

 

In meeting after meeting, and demo after demo, clients were naturally drawn to the convenience of the portal. But they also loved the transparency that came with it.  It was then we saw the importance of being transparent. Transparency drives trust and that became a cornerstone of all our future offerings. 

 

Twenty years later we are still delivering portal technology to asset management firms and innovating with this technology. Who would have guessed that something as simple as a portal could start something so big? 

 

Interested in where we are taking portal technology next? Contact Brian for a demo!