Problem
Financial advisors operate across fragmented systems — documents, client portfolios, compliance notes, and communication histories are scattered across CRMs, custodians, email, and local drives. Getting a unified view of a client's financial health requires manual aggregation that slows down every client interaction.
"I have all the information about my client — but it's spread across too many systems to act quickly."
Opportunity
Build a centralized financial health record — the advisor's equivalent of a clinical chart — that aggregates client data, documents, and AI-generated insights into a single interface. Advisors query it naturally; the system surfaces what matters.
Design Decisions
GraphRAG for structured financial document querying
Standard vector RAG loses relationship context in financial documents — who owns what, under which account, held at which custodian. GraphRAG preserves these entity relationships, enabling queries like "show me all assets this client holds across custodians with maturity dates under 12 months" rather than simple keyword retrieval.
Dual interface: advisor dashboard + client portal
Advisors need a high-density information view. Clients need a simple, transparent window into what the advisor sees. Building both from a shared data model ensures consistency while allowing each interface to be optimized for its user's mental model and trust level.
Insights and summaries over raw data views
The design prioritizes synthesized insight over data tables. An advisor shouldn't have to read every document to understand a client's position — the system should surface the summary, flag the anomalies, and let the advisor drill down only when needed.
Trade-offs
What we gain
- Unified client view across all systems
- Faster advisor decision-making
- Improved client experience through transparency
- AI-assisted querying across unstructured documents
What we give up
- Data ingestion complexity — each system integrates differently
- Reliance on structured, quality inputs
- Initial setup overhead per advisor/client
Opportunity Cost Evaluation
Building deep integrations with all financial systems before launch would delay time-to-value significantly. Starting with document ingestion and structured uploads provides an immediately useful product for advisors while the integration layer is built out incrementally.
Full portfolio management. Trading execution. Complex financial planning tools. The focus is visibility and insight, not execution. Adding execution would shift the product into a different regulatory and liability category before the core value is proven.
Success Metrics
- Time to retrieve key client insights (baseline vs. with platform)
- Advisor engagement — daily and weekly active use
- Reduction in time spent on document lookup per client meeting
- Client satisfaction with financial transparency
What's Next
- Expand integrations with custodians and CRM systems
- Introduce proactive alerts (e.g., portfolio risk signals, upcoming maturities)
- Add compliance monitoring layer for advisor regulatory obligations