One cold Autumn morning, I sat down over a coffee with our founder, Vanessa Gibson, to ask a few questions that I felt our users might like to know. Below is a snippet of our conversation.

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Rex: So, first off is the name "illio". What's the meaning behind that?

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Vanessa: At first, we tried so many variations of traditional type names. As with any startup, we would spend weeks thinking of the perfect name, think we found one, then a few days later, decide it didn't sit well. Once, we thought we had the perfect name until we did a google search and found a similar sounding company who'd gone bankrupt.

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However, one suggestion we had was from a design agency who said the brand name doesn't have to be a derivative of the words "wealth" or "finance". It just needs to link to your purpose, which in our case is to bring professional grade tools to individual investors and help them think like wealth managers.

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In the wealth world, one of the best long term investors are family offices who manage billions. However, the tools they have and the investment opportunities they can access, such as Alternatives, puts their methodology out of the reach of individual investors, who each hope to manage their own millions.

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With the rise of fractionalized alternatives, it's now possible for individual investors to mimic what a family office invests in. In other words, it's possible for the person managing a million to now manage wealth just like a family office who manages a billion. illio is simply the common thread that links a million to a billion.

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We liked the concept of giving individual investors the option of managing their wealth like a billionaire, so stuck with the name.

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Rex: Talking of which, is illio meant for just millionaires then?

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Vanessa: Not really. illio can be either used by investors who are starting to care more about the wealth they create or by someone who wants to simply track all the investment accounts they have.

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We can't tell you which direction your money will move, but we can tell you why it can move. We help you conceive how a given change in the stock market or yields affect the profit or loss of your portfolio so that you can stay on track. That is useful to anyone who is starting the journey to save with a goal to build a sizeable retirement pot.

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Likewise, if you have a smaller amount of wealth but you hold crypto, a retirement account, a stock trading account and perhaps some investments in a crowdfunding site, you can use illio to see your total wealth and perhaps learn something about how they all fit and move together. In that way, illio becomes convenient as a portfolio tracking and learning tool in one.

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Rex: You've mentioned this term, fractionalized alternatives and now crowdfunding. Why the focus?

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Vanessa: When I was CIO at a family office, we generated high risk adjusted returns by investing in Alternatives which were uncorrelated to our traditional holdings. Indeed if you look at other family offices as well, they often allocate up to a third of their clients' portfolios into assets such as commodities, real estate, private equity, hedge funds and other types of unlisted assets.

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Thanks to technology, it's now possible to take a large nominal asset such as a commercial property or an unlisted equity, and break it down into legally binding ownership parcels in an efficient manner. We counted over 100 of these types of Alternative asset brokers who offer fractionalized or bitesize exposure to assets such as vintage cars, wine, buy to let properties, private companies, private equity funds or art.

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In effect, individual investors can now access many more investment opportunities to diversify their traditional stocks and bond portfolio.

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This is why I believe a system like illio can help this modern investor get a holistic overview of this type of diverse portfolio and help them analyze it as well.

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Rex: Perfect. Finally, we’re very proud of the power of illio's "Insights", but there’s a lot of confusion around how that term is used generically in the industry, can you shed some light on that for our users?

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Vanessa: When people talk about Portfolio Insights, they either talk about being able to see your portfolio structure, portfolio benchmark or P&L contribution analysis or they produce generic insights about Portfolio construction so that the user can mimic institutional behaviour.

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The challenge with both is that they are neither personalized to the individual's portfolio nor do they explain what the analysis actually means.

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Our "Insights" take the key facts about your portfolio and explain it back in a way that you don't need to be a financial expert to understand it. They give people answers to questions about their investments that  they did not know or have time to ask. For example, if you have a large allocation to equities, we can tell you what kind of profit or loss to expect if the underlying market moved and how that stacks up against your overall portfolio profit or loss.

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This way, you can assess whether the exposure you have to equities, is too much or too little based on what kind of risk tolerance you are willing to take. It's like having your own personal CIO help you understand what is likely to influence the movement in your portfolio so you can take a step back and think about your current portfolio composition and whether its inherent risk represents what you are willing to accept going forward.

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Rex: Thanks Vanessa. I can see this making a big difference to how people invest.

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