How YourStake founders' ESG passion transformed into an advisor platform

Before YourStake became a personalized portfolio analytics tool for registered investment advisors (RIAs) it began with two Yale students, passionate about data science and climate risk, who successfully advocated for Yale's endowment fund managers to reduce their fossil fuel investments. 

"They ended up instructing all of their private equity managers to consider climate risk and make that a part of the investment process," said Gabe Rissman, cofounder and president of YourStake. "So the initial launch of YourStake was taking that from the endowment side — and also talking to a ton of financial advisors — and realizing there was a major lack of not just environmental data but values alignment data across the board."

Since Rissman and Patrick Reed founded YourStake in 2019, it has grown substantially to a more comprehensive platform that extracts data from PDFs, such as tax documents, as well as client meetings and surveys, then provides portfolio analysis and investment model comparisons with a focus on a client's personal investment behaviors and values, like environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. 

YourStake has grown to work with more than 400 advisors and most recently signed partnerships with Broadridge Financial Solutions, Mercer Advisors and Apex Fintech Solutions.

This mini profile is part of a series spotlighting vendors to help advisors and their firms make informed technology decisions. 

Name: YourStake

Website: www.yourstake.org

Size of YourStake: The platform has more than 400 advisor clients and roughly a dozen employees, Rissman said. 

Products and services offered: YourStake's core products include its Advisor Hub for portfolio customization and its AI-powered Advisor Core, launched last year, which helps RIAs onboard clients and manage portfolios faster, such as extracting complex brokerage statements and translating that into actionable insights. The company claims Advisor Core saves advisors at least five hours of portfolio analysis work per week.

YourStake also has a values-aligned direct indexing solution to help advisors offer more personalized direct indexing, and a portfolio research tool that helps manage and customize portfolios faster. 

In October, YourStake launched an AI-based notetaker tool to help offer a more "all-in-one" solution for advisors, Rissman said. 

Who YourStake aims to serve: YourStake mostly serves RIAs as well as broker-dealers, asset managers and advisor technology platforms.

What problems YourStake is trying to solve: While YourStake started with a values-driven investment analysis tool, Rissman said they want to broaden the platform to simply help advisors do their everyday work faster. 

How that works in reality is that advisors can upload documents — whether it be insurance, brokerage, tax and mortgage information — through a secured link onto YourStake's platform and then it will extract the data and structure it for portfolio analysis, investment proposals and comparisons as well as suggestions on values-driven investments. YourStake is also integratable with most CRM systems. For example, it can extract information from the CRM and share notes from YourStake's AI-notetaking assistant to help draft summaries and meeting preparation for an advisor's next client meeting.   

"The biggest advisor problem that we're trying to solve for that is the coherent one across all of our product solutions, is we want to help advisors spend less time on manual entry and nonvalue-add tasks so they can spend more time with their clients, serving them better and serving more clients," Rissman said. 

How YourStake is different from competitors: While there are many tech companies that offer single solutions, like an AI notetaker or meeting planner, Rissman said YourStake is different in the all-in-one advisor tools that it provides, especially when comparing their starting price of roughly $1,000 per year, per advisor. 

"We're the lowest cost solution for the broker statement extraction, and we have functionality that isn't seen in other proposal generation solutions as well," he said. 

What it costs: YouStake has an online pricing sheet for its AdvisorCore and Values Hub products but generally pricing starts at $1,000 a year per advisor seat. Pricing then goes to a range of $3,000 to $10,000 a year depending on the hub and tools used. 

What's next in development: Rissman said YourStake is working on expanding the types of documents and data that the system can read and analyze into actionable items for advisors.

"Right now, you can launch an investment proposal, but it would be really great to get estate planning analysis … or take a look at your insurance documents and see if anything needs to be refreshed," he said. "The overall vision, which we're still building towards, is being able to help advisors load all of their data into one place and then launch actions from there."