There's a whole lot we don't discuss on the website, which is focused towards current target customers of the tool we've built vs. our broader goals to bring transparency to the financial world.
First we've built a (we've been told) very powerful tool to quickly group, filter, sort, and compute standard financial metrics on a portfolio. Importantly, we don't care where you own your securities. It can be holdings from financial accounts, operating companies, homes, art, private options, manually brokered CDSs, whatever. Shockingly, our customers like to pay us a fair amount of money for this tool alone!
On the back end this wasn't easy. We have to normalize the incredibly varied (and often inaccurate) information from banks, third party data providers, excel spreadsheets and other systems. Reconciliation, all day.
Second, if facebook has a friend graph, we're creating the financial graph by aggregating ownership across all sources for our customers to analyze and report on.
At a high level, the financial world (shockingly) lacks a standardized way of communicating information about ownership and transactions. There are complex and specific protocols like SWIFT and FIX, but no standard way of saying "this is what I own, this is what I used to own, this is how it's changed, etc." Banks each make them up with hundreds of unique data formats, often sent with COBOL-style headers. It's 30 year old technology.
Long term, we'd like to open this open both as a data format for representing financial data and as a set of APIs for building tools to interact with financial data.
To use another analogy, if you wanted to make a phone game in 2004, you had to build a phone. Then the iPhone came out. If you want to make a program to analyze portfolio risk in 2013, you need to build out relationships with an entire network of banks, data providers, and customers. We want to be the "app store" for those tools.
There are a million other ways to make a platform like this valuable, but I'll save some of the juicier (and more strategic) ones for personal conversations if you're interested :)
