Customer Success Spotlight: Ziggma Portfolio Manager

Our mission at Intrinio is to power a generation of applications that will fundamentally change the way our broken financial system works. Intrinio data feeds form the basis of everything from large enterprise business reporting applications to startup fintech apps. It’s rewarding to see our product come to life at the hands of today’s most innovative developers building powerful things.

We’re lucky to be in a business where we grow together with our customers, and we’re proud to show off their hard work. Each blog in this series will highlight a customer that has leveraged our financial data feeds to build something incredible.

Meet Ziggma Portfolio Manager – a web-based investment portfolio management solution that strives to make investing easy for both experts and beginners. We talked to Ulrich Ebensperger, CEO and co-founder of Ziggma, about the company's innovative approach to personal investing.

Give us the elevator pitch for your company.

Ziggma is a portfolio management application that has been specifically designed to make investing easy. Many investors struggle to keep up with their investment portfolios while failing to find effective means to optimize risk-adjusted returns.

Using professional-grade tools and data, the Ziggma Portfolio Manager helps investors stay on top of their portfolios and find the best opportunities based on their long term goals. By securely linking their investment accounts to Ziggma using our partner Plaid’s leading technology, our users benefit from intuitive portfolio analytics, innovative tools, and the information that is relevant for their portfolios.

Designed by experienced finance professionals, the Ziggma Portfolio Manager incorporates many of the features and data that so far were only available in the world of institutional finance. The Ziggma Portfolio Manager helps you monitor your portfolio effortlessly thanks to smart alerts covering risk, portfolio diversification, and company fundamentals. It lets you screen for the best investment opportunities across different asset classes with our multi-asset screener. Users can find the best stocks in each industry using the Ziggma Performance Score, which is the result of continuous data analytics across hundreds of financial data points. You can also find inspiration in our many model portfolios that range from what the world’s best investors currently own to various ideas of our own.

What is your professional background?

I have worked for 14 years as a credit analyst in institutional finance. I am specialized in the financials sector, which means that I analyze banks, insurance companies, and REITs for a living. Four years ago, I switched to being a consultant for the company in order to have more liberties. This included of course being able to start working on Ziggma.

What inspired you to start your company?

We wanted to fill a gap that we believed needed to be closed. As finance professionals, we got to see the big gap between the means available to professional and individual investors. But with ubiquity of data and progress in technology, this was no longer justified. So, we saw an opportunity in making professional grade tools and data available to all investors, whether private or institutional, expert or beginner.

What have been your biggest challenges, and what did you learn from them?

The biggest challenge has been the communication between product ownership and the development side. Developers with comprehensive finance knowledge are hard to come by. This makes the whole development process even more complex than it already is. Not only do you have to communicate what you want to implement but you also have to put yourself in the developers’ shoes who naturally have a much more limited knowledge of the finance and accounting space. Going through this process has clearly improved our communication skills. It taught us a great deal about how to communicate more effectively.

What have been your biggest successes?

I consider it our biggest success to have gotten to where we are. In parallel to our day jobs, we have built the first dedicated portfolio management solution out there. It clearly makes investing and portfolio management easier and allows users to build better portfolios. Having said that, we are far from done. We have lots of ideas left. Our loftiest maybe being that we want to make the whole universe of fixed income investing more accessible to investors. Corporate bonds just make sense for individual investors. Bond ETFs are too expensive and corporate bonds can now be bought for just a few dollars, making them a great addition for portfolios of long-term investors.

How do you set yourself apart from your competitors?

We have built the Ziggma Portfolio Manager from the investor’s view. This was possible because we have the necessary experience and we did not have to build around legacy systems. Our competitors, such as Yahoo Finance, who has only very recently discovered the topic of portfolio management by the way, did not have that luxury. This is why their displays are not as straightforward and easy to use as ours. In addition, our tool and data set is much larger.

Why did you choose to work with Intrinio?

Being able to get different data sets from the same place is very valuable to us. It reduces the need to find suppliers, the time needed to negotiate and review agreements. If you need to source different types of data flows, Intrinio is very well positioned. This was clear to us from the beginning, not the least because the website is well done.

How would you describe your experience working with Intrinio?

It has been great. Intrinio’s team has great values in terms of work ethic and ambition. Customer support is really impressive with a tech department that gets back to us within the day.

Interested in working with Intrinio? Visit intrinio.com to learn more.

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