4ESTA -The virtual assistant

Meet your personal financial advisor: 4ESTA

4ESTA© is our chatbot to cater both the brokers as well as the sell-side. In a nut shell:

It listens to the markets 7/24 on behalf of the user
It utilizes its ML-based analytics engine and pinpoints the profitable trading points (anomalies, peaks, corrections, reversals and alike),
It communicates such findings to the user, via alerts, or, via any messaging media the user might prefer (e.g. it sends Whatsapp text to its user when it pinpoints a trading idea)
It also takes and answers the questions from the user, such as "Where is this stock trading at?", or, "What is your target price for this stock?", or, "What is your best Long idea?". 4ESTA returns with a clever answer at all times, with a short back-testing report backing its recommendations.

Keeping the core philosophy of our company in mind, we started to work on this module (among our product canvas) back in 2017. The MVP of the 4ESTA was completed in April 2018. It met with its first client in November 2018 (Deutsche Bank / Romania).

With 4ESTA, we as Verizekalı aim at catering for both the sell-side and the buy-side spectrum of the finance industry.

How do we do it

In a nutshell, 4ESTA:

Relies on 4SIGN as the back-end and uses the same technology with this module
The engine that sits between the back-end and the front-end of 4ESTA is basically an unsupervised NLP in which the typical text classification algorithms are embedded and provides 4ESTA the ability to understand and speak better with every interaction
It takes the textual (or spoken) input from the user through the front-end (integration to any messaging media is possible)
It gives a meaning to this input
It translates/classifies this input into a “question"
It maps this question into an analytical routine at the back
It connects to the back-end service (4SIGN, in our case)
It produces one (surely quantitative, rational, and repeatable) answer
It requests/responses within the architecture via our proprietary APIs
And finally, it presents this response through the front-end as the “answer"
Front-end is customized according to our clients priorities: As a start, we integrated 4ESTA with Telegram messaging application.

What challenges do we address

Affordable advisory service possible with 4ESTA

4ESTA can be that perfect alternative for the costly and ineffective “human-only advisory teams" that cater for the "C" Segment.
This market (let's call it the "Mass market") is high in number of clients (hard to retain personal touch), yet it is low in revenue yield (per client).
That said, it is really hard to convert the efforts into revenues for this segment - with human-only advisory teams.
Mass market also comes with quite high(er) coverage costs as well (as human interaction is costly for the brokers)
Mass market requires substantial investment in human capital, HR, training, and CRM tools (‘retail is detail’)
And mass market is never happy as it is simply impossible for the broker to customize its services for this segment and one size never fits all for the masses. Advisory should take the custom and special needs into account, and with limited number of head counts in the team, such level of service is never possible for this segment
And, bank-affiliated brokers find it hard to satisfy the bank’s massive customer base with their "never-enough" head counts and advisor teams (so the holding bank keeps complaining about the brokerage services while the subsidiary broker keeps asking for more resources to improve the metrics, and this never-ending loop goes on forever)
Under such tough conditions to monetize the advisory efforts to the mass market with a human-only team, 4ESTA, relatively cheaper and non-human alternative to an advisor, should look very attractive for the retail brokers
In fact, we expect 4ESTA to transform the Turkish brokerage industry - once the regulation surrounding the robo-advisory services is published in the coming months, and quantitative and ML-based interactive software are accepted from the regulatory stand point as legitimate and valid research and advisory tools

4ESTA to reduce costs of the retail brokers

Reduce the cost of the HR (via utilizing the AI-based robots to generate ideas instead of human teams, to present ideas, or to customize ideas for different risk profiles)
Reduce the human errors (that cost to the broker in one way or another)
Reduce the cost and the overall time required to handle the ‘usual’ requests from this segment (i.e. Our robot can easily answer the questions that might come from this segment such as “What to trade today?”, “Dollars or equities today?”, “How much of my portfolio to invest into that stock?”)

4ESTA to maximize the efficiencies

It should help the broker increase the quality of service (e.g. the service quality of the IVR, the web-site, the app etc.)
it should help the broker achieve the integrity among the channels) (e.g. the ability of the broker to push the very same ideas from the very different channels with minimal effort and organizational layers)
The speed to respond to the market developments should also improve with 4ESTA (machines are fast accurate to respond)
The opportunities to convert the “service” to the “revenues” will increase (i.e. one button at the end of the chat such as “press OK to invest in this recommendation” will help broker to convert its service into revenues)
Profitability KPIs for the mass market will improve with 4ESTA (through reduced costs, or increased revenues. Not much brokers can achieve an impressive ROI in this segment. We might help.)
Presumably 4ESTA will help the broker to provide services at lower fees for this segment (machines and software always ask for lower fees vs. human teams)
Differentiation will be much cheaper if the broker can position our 4ESTA chatbot into its recommendation processes (Human advisors find it hard to differentiate their recommendations for different risk profiles they are talking to)
Customization will be much possible for the broker with the help of 4ESTA (this is the key)
Eventually, 4ESTA will evolve into a ‘dedicated personal advisor’ through its ML back-end - that learns gradually the client's response to its recommendations (‘Know-Your-Client’)
4ESTA will be much easier to integrate to ever-changing UIs (mobile apps, SaaS options, web branches, VRs)

Use cases for 4ESTA

4ESTA can be positioned in numerous ways among our clients. Buy-side, Sell-side, the banks, the exchanges all may find good use cases to deploy our product within their processes.

To give some examples, 4ESTA might be considered:

As the personal dealer in the sell-side brokers and it can handle the order and execution of "large-in-number-yet-small-in-size" tickets of the mass market
As the stock recommender for the mass market
As the day-trading assistant for the individuals,
As the product promoter in the new-gen brokers which facilitate and encourage higher volumes via pushing notifications to the messes.
As the communication channel for the robo-advisory services.

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