The new year will mark the 10th anniversary of HiddenLevers, originally a purveyor of a single macroeconomic analysis tool. Praveen Ghanta has been the company’s CEO from the start, though in the beginning, the staff was limited to him and his co-founder Raj Udeshi. The two bootstrapped the firm and have never taken any venture capital or private equity funding.
Fast forward to today, and the company, which is headquartered in Decatur, Ga., has 25 employees, more than $503 billion running through its platform and is branching out with new uses for its technology that should drive the firm deeper into the advisory space.
Not bad for a little company, whose original product—a low-cost suite of web-based risk management and macroeconomic research tools—required a lot of explanation for most advisors to wrap their minds around. HiddenLevers performed risk-mitigation “stress tests” on portfolios given various hypothetical economic scenarios (a spike in oil prices, for instance). It became an integrated partner of Envestnet in 2013. A string of other partnerships and integrations with custodian platforms followed.
Its success lent credence to the founders’ belief that economic analysis should be the third component of investment research, alongside fundamental and technical analysis, even for financial advisors looking to mitigate portfolio risks for their clients.
But it turns out the duo has more tricks up their sleeve, and that makes them worth watching. “Up until about three years ago the adviser stress-testing platform was our only product, and then we introduced our Risk Monitor product and that has evolved into a true business intelligence tool,” Ghanta said.
That iteration spawned one of the company’s biggest announcements to date, a partnership with RIA rollup Focus Financial, to build out a true business intelligence platform for advisory firms. The tool will give Focus insight into performance metrics across the enterprise, down to the individual firm and advisor. Focus will benefit, but HiddenLevers will retain the right to license the tool to others in the industry.
The key is API integrations across RIAs each with their own custodial relationships and different portfolio and account management platforms. These kinds of integrations are HiddenLevers’ sweet spot, Ghanta says.
Integrated business intelligence platforms—tools that take a deep dive across a firm’s disparate operations and return with actionable insights—are a big business: Salesforce.com recently announced a $15 billion-dollar acquisition of Tableau Software Inc. to work on developing out analytics capabilities within its offerings.
But Ghanta says his firm’s previous work gives it an edge. “We think our differentiator is that we actually understand the RIA industry and what will work for advisors because we have worked so closely with them for all these years,” Ghanta said.
