CUSTOMER: Ziggma

In recent years, the barriers to personal investing have crumbled. This is partly due to next-gen brokers that make buying stocks easier than ever. The pandemic has also spurred the interest of young investors, with Robinhood adding 3 million new accounts in just one quarter.

But while buying stocks may be easy, managing a portfolio is a different story.

“Once you own a portfolio, keeping it up quickly becomes complex,” explains Ziggma CEO Ulrich Ebensperger. “It’s difficult to maintain a good understanding of its many aspects.”

Ziggma reduces the complexity of portfolio management and investment research. As Ebensperger explains it, cutting-edge investment tools used to be restricted to institutional investors and asset managers. He launched Ziggma in 2020 to help investors better understand, optimize, and monitor their portfolios.

To enable those functionalities, Ziggma needed a way for users to connect their investment accounts. For that, they chose Plaid.


Building a stickier user experience

When users sign up for Ziggma, they’re given the option to connect their investment accounts with Plaid. To do so, they simply select their financial institution from a list and enter the username and password associated with their accounts. Plaid now connects to more than 11,000 financial institutions in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe—often in a matter of seconds.

Once a user connects their accounts, Ziggma quickly analyzes their portfolio and displays metrics for risk, diversification, and fundamentals. Users who are happy with their portfolios at this stage can use Ziggma as a monitoring tool to keep tabs on their investments.

More active investors can use the platform to optimize their portfolios according to their individual goals and risk tolerance. Ziggma’s multi-asset screener, for example, helps users quickly find new investment ideas based on their search parameters and Ziggma’s proprietary stock-scoring system. Likewise, Ziggma’s investment portfolio simulator allows investors to simulate a transaction’s impact on their risk and diversification levels, enabling more personalized investment decisions.

The first-of-its-kind investment solution is turning heads. Just six months after launching, Ziggma crossed the $100 million threshold in connected account balances.

While users are not required to connect their investment accounts to use Ziggma, those who do are considerably more engaged. In fact, 81% of investors who connect their accounts with Plaid return to the app within a week. That’s 3.2x higher than those who don’t. Additionally, users who connect with Plaid spend 4.3x more time on the Ziggma app.

“When users connect their accounts with Plaid, they have more skin in the game,” explains Ebensperger.

Delivering deeper value to customers

Ziggma recently introduced premium memberships. In exchange for a nominal monthly fee, premium members get access to even more sophisticated tools for managing their portfolios.

Smart alerts, for example, allow premium members to receive tips on how to reduce portfolio risk by receiving a notification whenever a given stock makes up too much of their portfolio. Once that threshold is reached, investors can choose to take action with their broker and use Ziggma to research other stocks that may provide the desired level of diversification and portfolio risk.

Comprehensive portfolio analysis requires access to a user’s investment accounts, and Ziggma’s customers have generally been happy to oblige. In fact, those who link accounts with Plaid connect 3.2 accounts, on average.

“We looked at several data networks, but Plaid was the clear choice,” says Ebensperger. “Not only did they provide the widest coverage of investment accounts, but overall our experience with Plaid was cleaner, more professional, and just better.”

Ebensperger also praises Plaid support. He says tickets are usually answered within two hours and contain multiple paragraphs of useful information. This helps Ziggma resolve technical issues quickly and provide solid support to their customers.


Fueling a global expansion

For Ziggma, early success has only fueled a desire to grow and scale. Right now, the company supports US investment accounts only, but they aspire to expand globally.

As part of these plans, Ziggma is busy developing new tools to help investors pay less in fees and gain even greater control of their investment portfolios. They consider Plaid an important partner in that journey.

“We have big plans to excel in this nascent market,” concludes Ebensperger. “We’re confident Plaid will be there for us, and enable us to achieve our goals.”