Personal Finance Mgt (PFM)

Performance Corner: Portfolio Performance Made Easy And Understandable to the Masses

by Fintechnews Switzerland September 8, 2015

Evaluating the result of your investment portfolio can be a hassle; especially if you are not familiar with the typical financial jargon. Well, Performance Corner wants to change that and make what is traditionally accessible to a handful of professionals, comprehensive to the masses.

This free portfolios management comparison site allows you to keep track and understand better how your investments are doing while taking into account the risks encountered. Everyday, the platform analyzes and gives you summaries of how things are going with your investments. You can even compare your performances with other registered users.

Its guideline: “Popularize and demystify a traditionally opaque field,” as the company claims on its website.

Performance Corner is a product of Investment by Objectives (IBO), a Swiss company founded in 2005 that helps private investors define their financial objectives while facilitating communication between individuals and bankers.

“Our initial core business is to offer advice to wealthy private clients,” the company’s website reads. “Over the years, we have extended our advice to fiduciaries, trustees and even directly to asset managers.”

“We now wish to offer our tool and the benefit of its comparison information to everyone. Our revenues allow us to fund this initiative without a need for profitability.”

Speaking with ICTJournal, Nicholas Hochstadter, founder of IBO, explained how Performance Corner emerged:

“At the beginning, I created a database that I used to compare financial results to the risks taken. With these data, I created an index on private portfolio performance that was accessible to professional wealth managers so they can have a concrete point of comparison.”

Launched in November 2013, Performance Corner aims to do just that. With the help of Virtua, a Swiss digital communication agency, IBO took that database to the Internet and made it available to the public as a comparator for wealth management and portfolio performance.

Users simply need to register and authorize an anonymous connection between his or her bank and the platform, so the custodian bank can send the relevant data to Performance Corner.

Everyday, data is transfer to Performance Corner, which processes and analyzes them. Instantly, the performance algorithm determines and evaluates how lucrative your investments are. Everything is done in an anonymous and encrypted manner, Hochstadter said, meaning that none of the information retained can be linked to your identity whatsoever.

However, not all the banks are willing to give away their data. Some have simply not yet heard of Performance Corner, and others just aren’t convinced the service will be of any value to their clients.

On the other hand, some have accepted to play the game. So far, Performance Corner has enrolled 13 banks and independent wealth managers, including E-Merging, BGE Finance AG, Manavest, Banque Paris Bertrand Sturdza, Saphir Invest, QLAB Invest, Conser, Antarctica, Gonet & Cie, and Medicis.

“We would need at least one of the two biggest banks in Switzerland to accept to play the game in order to accelerate the movement,” Hochstadter said.

The platform is entirely free to use “and will be kept that way forever, for ethic and objectivity,” Hochstadter insisted. Additionally, the company does not accept commissions from banks so they can have better marks, he said.

Following Performance Corner, IBO also launched Performance Network, an anonymous social network for professionals and owners of financial assets, and Performance Watcher, a professional evaluation, supervision, reporting and networking website for portfolios performance.