Sales FAQ - sgajbi/portfolio-analytics-system GitHub Wiki

6. Sales & Business Development FAQ

This section provides answers to common questions that arise during business development and sales conversations.

Q: Is this an off-the-shelf portfolio management system with a user interface?

A: No. The Portfolio Analytics System is a "headless" back-end engine. It is designed to be the "brains" behind a firm's own applications. It does not include a user interface. Its core value is providing highly accurate, real-time analytics via an API that can power a firm's custom-built or existing client portals, advisor workstations, and internal reporting tools.

Q: Who is our ideal customer?

A: Our ideal customer is a mid-to-large-sized wealth management firm, private bank, or fintech company that has in-house software development capabilities. They are typically looking to modernize their technology stack to deliver a better digital experience for their clients and advisors, but are constrained by the performance, accuracy, or cost of their existing back-end systems.

Q: How do we position this against large, established competitors that offer all-in-one solutions?

A: We compete on flexibility, speed, and total cost of ownership (TCO). While competitors offer monolithic solutions, our platform is an API-first, microservices-based engine. Our key differentiators are:

  • Unmatched Flexibility: We don't lock clients into a proprietary user interface. They use our powerful back-end to build and control their own unique client experience.
  • Lower TCO: Our cloud-native design is more efficient and cost-effective to scale than legacy on-premise systems.
  • Superior Agility: Our clean APIs and event-driven architecture enable client development teams to innovate faster and integrate new features in weeks, not months.

Q: What is the deployment model? Is it SaaS or on-premise?

A: The platform is designed to be deployed directly into the client's own environment. This can be their private cloud account (AWS, Azure, GCP) or an on-premise data center. We deliver the platform as a set of containerized applications and use modern infrastructure-as-code tools (like Terraform and Helm) to automate the installation. This single-tenant model gives clients full control over their data, which is critical for security and regulatory compliance.

Q: What does a typical integration process involve for a new client?

A: The client's primary effort is focused on API integration at the edges of the platform. Their development team will typically need to:

  1. Build a Data Adaptor: Write code that reads from their internal systems (e.g., an Order Management System) and pushes data into our Ingestion API.
  2. Integrate with Applications: Modify their downstream applications (like a client portal) to call our Query API to fetch and display the calculated data.

Our platform handles all the complex data processing, calculation, and storage in between, significantly simplifying the overall effort compared to a full system replacement.