Why we built this
The number at the bottom
had stopped being true.
Verdemar began with a spreadsheet that had quietly stopped being honest.
It had a tab for each platform, a tab for the flat, a tab that tried to follow a private fund's capital calls, and a cell at the bottom that added everything up. That cell was wrong in three separate ways, and none of them was arithmetic. It was wrong because it counted a pound inside a pension and a pound inside an ISA as the same pound. It was wrong because it never subtracted the mortgage. And it was wrong because a third of it was priced in dollars, on a rate from whenever the file had last been opened.
Every tool we tried fixed one of those three and ignored the other two.
The category was built for a narrower investor
Portfolio trackers grew up around a single object: the listed brokerage account. Shares and funds, one login, and more often than not, American. It is a reasonable thing to have built. It is just not what a British balance sheet looks like once someone has been earning and saving for twenty-five years.
By then the shape is usually an ISA at one platform, a SIPP at another, an old workplace pension nobody has looked at, a general account holding whatever would not fit in a wrapper, and possibly something for the children. Around that sits everything the trackers treat as somebody else's problem: the house, the let flat and its mortgage, a term deposit, a loan made or taken, shares in the company someone used to work for.
That is not an exotic case. For most people over forty with any accumulated wealth, it is simply the situation. A tool that can hold only the listed slice of it is not tracking a portfolio. It is tracking a fragment, and presenting the fragment's total as though it meant something.
And the balance sheet keeps getting wider
The awkward part is that the gap is growing, not closing, because what an ordinary investor can now buy has changed.
Private markets used to be closed by default. They are not any more. In September 2025 Hargreaves Lansdown began offering Schroders Capital Long-Term Asset Funds inside a SIPP, with a £10,000 minimum: private equity and infrastructure, in a retail pension, on a mainstream platform. Feeder structures into ELTIFs are doing something similar across Europe. Alongside that sit unlisted shares from employment, EIS and SEIS subscriptions, equity crowdfunding, and crypto.
Whether widening retail access to illiquid assets is a good idea is a real argument, and this is not the page to settle it. What is not in dispute is that it is happening. A holding that arrives with a commitment, a drawdown schedule, a lock-up and a J-curve cannot be recorded in software built for a share and a fund, and the person who owns one still has to answer, at some point, what all of it is worth.
The plumbing multiplied too
The other thing that changed is the number of places to hold it. A decade ago the choice was between a handful of providers charging broadly similar percentages. Now there are flat-fee platforms, percentage platforms, platforms that cap the percentage for shares but not for funds, platforms that charge nothing to hold and something to trade, and platforms that make their money on the currency conversion you did not notice.
The consequence is that the same portfolio can cost very different amounts depending on where it sits, and the cheapest home for an ISA is frequently not the cheapest home for a SIPP. This is one of the few genuinely controllable variables in investing, and almost nobody has the information to act on it. Verdemar runs that calculation on your own holdings, against every major UK platform.
Your balance sheet became institutional. Your tools did not.
It is often said that private investors now need to behave like institutions. We think that puts it the wrong way round, and flatters everybody slightly.
Very few people should run a private portfolio the way a pension fund runs a mandate, and a good deal of what institutions do is a response to problems (committees, external managers, quarterly reporting to a board) that a private investor is fortunate not to have. Behaving more like an institution is not obviously an improvement.
What has genuinely changed is structural rather than behavioural. The shape of a private balance sheet (several vehicles with different tax treatments, illiquid holdings with lock-ups and capital calls, leverage secured against a physical asset, exposure across three currencies) is now recognisably the shape of a small institutional one. The tools available to describe it are not.
What institutions do about it
Institutions that have taken this seriously have converged on something called the Total Portfolio Approach. Stripped of the jargon, it is a change of unit: stop managing a set of asset-class silos, each defending its own target weight, and manage one balance sheet instead.
Total Portfolio Approach, briefly
Treat everything you own as a single portfolio rather than a collection of buckets. Judge each holding by what it contributes to that whole: its return, but also the risk it adds, the liquidity it consumes and the flexibility it costs you.
Instead of defending allocation targets set years ago, every pound competes against the alternative use of that pound. Practitioners describe it as running the portfolio as one unified balance sheet, and note that it needs four things to work: the belief, the governance, the culture, and the tools.
We would rather be precise about where Verdemar sits in that, because the term is fashionable and easy to overclaim. TPA proper is a decision-making discipline, and most of it is governance: who decides what, against which alternative, with what authority. Software cannot give you governance.
What software can give you is the precondition, and the precondition is the part nobody has. Before any total-portfolio decision is possible you need one accurate, after-tax view of everything you own, cut by asset class, geography, sector, currency, wrapper and liquidity, with what you owe subtracted rather than ignored. Without it you are not weighing one option against another; you are weighing an estimate against a guess.
Verdemar is built to be TPA-native in that narrow, useful sense. It starts from the total and lets you cut it, rather than starting from accounts and hoping they add up. The closest thing to genuine opportunity-cost thinking already in the product is the ability to track something you did not buy, on exactly the same basis as the things you did, and that is the direction we intend to keep pushing.
What is not here yet
Verdemar does not connect to your broker or your bank today. You bring your history in once, by uploading documents or by CSV, and after that prices, dividends, splits and coupons look after themselves. Emailing documents in, and direct connections to the brokers that permit them, are the things we most want to add, and we would rather say plainly that they are not here yet than imply an integration that does not exist.
The analysis side has further to run too: deeper research tools, more ways to interrogate what drove a result, and better handling of the awkward corners of the fund universe. We will not pretend to a roadmap with dates on it. What we will do is tell you honestly, on this site, what the software does today.
Nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation, and nothing here is an endorsement of any asset class, fund structure or platform. Third parties are named as matters of public fact.