By Vasyl Soloshchuk/ Insart

Site: ionlake.com/myrepchat
Key dates: 2008—Company is founded (as TikiWade) 2016—MyRepChat is launched
Value proposition: Provider of customer-management software for RIAs that incorporates outstanding text messaging capabilities.
The executive team: Wade Girard, Founder and CTO Derrick Girard, CEO Brian Keohi, Director of Sales

In today’s article, we’ll tell the story about a solution provided by ionlake that is a multifaceted tool for professional advisors created by a former compliance officer. ionlake was born out of a synergy between technology and business domain knowledge, which is, we think, crucial for building genuinely great products.

We discussed ionlake’s routines and plans, MyRepChat differentiators, trends observed, and ways to exploit them with the company’s CEO, Derrick Girard.

Derrick has been in the financial services industry for about 14 years now. He started out as an advisor, moved into leadership and consulting, and then went back into practice as an advisor. At that time, several clients began texting him and when he told them it was against the rules to exchange a text, not only did that seem odd, they didn’t seem to care about the rules and kept texting. He did some research and realized there was no client communication solution in the industry built for advisors directly. This prompted him to create a tool that would allow advisors to compliantly text and apply all the knowledge he had acquired during his own practice.

Advisors cannot be commoditized

Countering the trend of devaluing human advisors, Derrick and his team built their tool to empower them and create conditions for providing personal insight.

“The challenge is that everything is becoming so commoditized that it is devaluing the advisor–client relationships. Chatbots further the commoditization down the road that is allowing the computer to have a conversation and dictate certain things.”

However, financial planners should manage emotions. Following on from this standpoint, they designed MyRepChat—a specific text messaging tool that makes client communication personal. MyRepChat incorporates advanced data-loss-prevention practices. It provides users with auto responses, which are integrated with CRM and can be customized. Also, MyRepChat is the only solution dedicated to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach to business communication. This approach brings a number of benefits to firms, including dramatically reduced costs and increased employee satisfaction rates.

“Advisors can’t work 24 hours a day, but what they can do is make it easier for clients to ask questions and have a conversation. Sometimes picking up a phone or typing out a lengthy email just isn’t what they want to do.”

Derrick says there are certain people that see themselves as true wealth managers; however, most financial advisors spend most of their time managing emotions and behavior. Nowadays, people are turning to fee-free online money-management software, disregarding the fact that human advisors do much more than just automating investment process.

“Today, let’s look at the world. Everyone is glued to their phones, you sit on a train and nobody looks up and talks to each other. We want to try to get people to still want to engage in dialogue and conversations by making it easier.”

Ionlake’s unique feature set and strategy

Ionlake is all about trying to make MyRepChat more useful. They seek advice and guidance from their users to find out what else they can do to make the workflow easier.

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