How Carrot Is Helping Investors Keep Track Of Their Dividend Investments

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga sat down with The Carrot App software developer Ricardo Pierre-Louis and business development director Armand Bogdan.

About The Carrot App

In light of the commission-free trading revolution, inexperienced participants flooded the market, actively speculating with the use of short-term, risky strategies.

The problem with risky strategies: investors are quickly worn out when things turn bad.

Founded in 2020, The Carrot App is a fintech specializing in portfolio management. The company is one of few that provide dividend-focused tracking tools for investors looking to take an active, informed approach to long-term investing.

In the simplest way possible: Carrot is a place where people come to manage their dividend investing strategies.

“One of the biggest problems that a lot of people have is that whenever they’re investing and they have to manage their dividends, they usually manually log in a spreadsheet and calculate yields for their portfolio, and all that fun stuff,” said Louis. “Carrot puts all your information together in one place, keeping track and managing all of your dividend investments.”

Core Product Portfolio

Carrot comes as a holistic market analytics platform, allowing users to research and track their dividend investments. The company’s core product portfolio consists of stock news and metrics, a scenario builder, alerts, and forecasting features.

“The app offers tracking and a lot of research tools,” said Louis. “Whenever you visit a portfolio, you can see relevant metrics and news. Also, on our blog, we do in-depth analyses on various Dividend Aristocrats and Kings.”

The app’s most sought after features include Scenario Builder which allows users to develop what-if statements and predict future outcomes, as well as Dividend Payout, which helps users keep track of up-to-date earnings.

“With the Payout feature, every time you get a dividend payment, it’ll alert and help you figure out, automatically, how much in dividends you’re about to receive,” Louis added.

Use Case, Recent Developments

In light of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, participation in financial markets grew tremendously as participants sheltered at home searched for ways to engage with the outside world.

As a result, Carrot accelerated its education initiatives, helping inexperienced investors get a better understanding of how to invest for the long term.

“One of the major things we wanted to do was provide our users with actionable information,” Bogdan said. “We provide SWOT analyses -- strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats -- for every single dividend aristocrat that is out there. In addition to that, we do quick newsletters.”

Innovation Outlook

“The next set of features are going to be focused around goal planning,” Louis noted.

Louis and Bogdan plan to further expand the depth and breadth of the app’s performance tracking functionalities, adding tools that automatically import a user’s brokerage holdings onto the app.

“We’re working on international support and automated imports,” Louis added.

“We want to build a platform that gives you long-term insight into your portfolio -- how you’re doing and where you are on your journey. This also includes gamifying the platform and creating automatically generated analyses for the users.”

To learn more about The Carrot App, click here.