Tech review: The right side of quirky… just

This week Mark Polson takes a look at InvestorBee, a new online investment service that mixes fun with serious data.

Last time we looked at a venerable institution with well in excess of 100 years under its belt (Alliance Trust). This time our subject is closer to 100 weeks old, than 100 years.

InvestorBee.com is a new investor engagement service from DCisions, a company specialising in unlocking insights from huge banks of data. These insights form the basis of the proposition.

I spoke to Maya Kuzalti, information director, and Nigel Aston, business development director, about the site, the design principles behind it, the tech and the intellectual capital that’s gone into it.

People like your clients

The key principle of InvestorBee is “people like me…” This has been something folk have tried to do inside workplace savings for some time, but here it’s really brought to life. DCisions has built up a ‘hive’ of around 1.2m individuals. It has profiled these individuals and segmented them. When you register with the site you get to choose what kind of bee you are – a CoolBee, a FocusedBee, a WorryBee or a NewBee.

At this point you have probably worked out that the chaps are not shy of working the bee motif for all it’s worth. I think they get away with it and it is the right side of quirky, but others may disagree.

Once you have picked a segment you get data. Lots of it. The FocusedBee segment, for example, has 40,000 folk in the hive. They save on average £1,955 per year. One in 14 would like advice but find it too expensive, two in five are self-directed and one in three hold a university degree. You get to see a range of what others are saving and how you fit into that range. And so on.

Beyond that we get into investment land. The team has looked at the total portfolio volatility over three years experienced by the hive and cut it into five equal risk groups, from lowest to highest. You get to see the returns that each risk group has achieved, again as a range.

From there you can start to play with investments. The site lets you choose a risk level and runs an analysis of how you would have done in the last ten years. There is the usual graph, but below that is a great bit called a ‘yo-yo factor’ – best month, worst month and ‘longest period underwater’ (the longest period the value dipped below its previous high-point).