Tessellare gives SEC-registered advisors an in-house direct indexing capability for international equity portfolios, connected to your existing systems, defensible to the last trade.
We are building the enterprise system with our pilot advisors. Applications are now open.
Direct indexing’s advantage is tax-loss harvesting at the security level, not the fund level, and applied against capital gains elsewhere in the portfolio. For clients with cross-border capital gains complexity, concentrated legacy positions, or dual-filing obligations, this creates measurable after-tax value that is visible, reportable, and defensible to the client.
Cross-border advisors have been unable to offer direct indexing for international equity portfolios because no suitable platform existed. The alternatives — expensive generic US-focused tools — leave clients underserved and the advisor’s position exposed. Tessellare closes that gap. Advisors who offer it early establish a capability that is difficult for competitors to replicate.
Tessellare is not a replacement for your existing infrastructure; it is an addition to it. The platform connects to your portfolio management or CRM system via API. Recommended trades are delivered to your trading desk in the format you already use. You execute through the workflow you already have. Client assets remain custodied where they are. Tessellare does not touch them.
Every trade recommendation Tessellare generates is derived from explicit, inspectable rules: the index or model portfolio composition, drift thresholds configured by the advisor, and tax-lot selection logic. There is no black box. The output of every rebalancing pass can be reproduced, explained, and documented: for the client, for compliance, and for the regulator. This is what “defensible” means in practice.
Tessellare sits between your portfolio management system and your trading desk. It monitors, recommends, and reports. You execute.
Tessellare connects to your existing portfolio management or CRM system via API. Setup is configured once; no ongoing manual data entry is required.
You build a model portfolio: select an index or define a custom equity universe, set sector constraints, apply exclusions, and configure drift thresholds. Parameters are set by the advisor. Tessellare does not make those decisions.
The platform monitors each account against the model. It flags drift beyond configured thresholds, identifies tax-loss harvesting opportunities, and generates recommended trades daily, or at intervals the advisor sets.
Recommended trades are delivered to your trading desk. You review, approve, and execute through your existing workflow. Tessellare does not hold client assets, execute trades on your behalf, or interact with the client directly.
The most durable advantage in private wealth advisory is not investment performance. It is the demonstrable, reportable delivery of value that clients cannot easily replicate elsewhere. For cross-border advisors managing US-linked clients in Europe, direct indexing is that advantage. It reduces the tax drag on client portfolios by a measurable, citable amount. It increases the degree to which each portfolio reflects the client's individual circumstances. And it creates a level of specificity that makes switching advisors structurally costly for the client — not because of lock-in, but because the portfolio was built around them.
Direct indexing delivers index-like equity exposure through individual security ownership rather than a pooled fund vehicle. That distinction has one primary consequence: every position at a loss relative to its cost basis is available to harvest. Losses are realised, applied against gains elsewhere in the portfolio, and the position is replaced with a correlated security to maintain market exposure. The client ends up in roughly the same investment position with a smaller tax bill.
The benefit has been empirically quantified. Using US equity data from 1926 to 2018, Chaudhuri, Burnham and Lo (Financial Analysts Journal, 2020) found a before-transaction-cost tax alpha of 1.08% per year. Constrained by the wash-sale rule — as any real direct indexing strategy must be — that figure is 0.82% per year. At the account sizes relevant to this segment, 0.82% is concrete: $16,400 in client wealth preserved annually on a $2 million account, and $24,600 on a $3 million account. Per account. Before compounding.
The benefit is not uniform across investors. Those who generate systematic short-term capital gains — from hedge fund allocations, derivatives, or actively traded structures — derive the greatest advantage, because harvested losses can offset income taxed at the higher short-term rate rather than the lower long-term rate (Sosner, Krasner and Gromis, AQR, 2021).
For US persons resident in Europe, the case is stronger still. US citizens and green card holders pay US capital gains tax on worldwide portfolio gains regardless of residence. Loss harvesting reduces a liability the client cannot legally avoid. Additionally, many European fund vehicles are classified as Passive Foreign Investment Companies under US tax rules, creating punitive treatment for US persons holding them. Individual securities are not PFICs. A direct index eliminates that compliance burden entirely.
The commercial logic flows directly from the client benefit.
Lower outflows. Tax liabilities on investment portfolios are typically funded by liquidating positions. Every sale to fund a tax bill removes capital that would otherwise compound and reduces the base on which the advisor earns fees. A direct indexing strategy that systematically reduces the annual tax bill reduces that structural pressure. More of the portfolio stays invested. The client's wealth compounds more effectively and the advisor's fee base is more stable.
Higher retention. A generic model portfolio can be replicated by any competitor in an afternoon. A direct index built around a specific client's tax lots, cost basis history, concentrated legacy positions, sector exclusions, and jurisdictional circumstances cannot. The portfolio is technically specific to that client in a way that makes reconstruction elsewhere genuinely costly. Research across 15 wealth markets found that more than 78% of investors want more personalised investment products, and 52% specifically identified direct indexing as their preferred approach (Fender and Munson, CFA Institute, 2022). Clients who receive this capability are materially less likely to leave.
Reportable value at every review. An annual statement showing the tax alpha generated — in dollars, per account, against the benchmark — is a concrete deliverable that most portfolio management relationships cannot produce. For advisors who need to demonstrate value at every client review, that number is an asset in itself.
Cerulli Associates (2022) projected direct indexing assets to grow at a 12.3% compound annual rate, reaching $825 billion by end of 2026. That growth is concentrated in US domestic markets where platforms exist to serve it. The optimisation required to run individualised accounts at scale is computationally tractable (Moehle, Kochenderfer, Boyd and Ang, 2021), but the infrastructure built around it for cross-border advisors has not existed. The advisors who build this capability now establish client relationships, cost-basis histories, and portfolio-level data that competitors cannot quickly replicate. Tessellare is built for exactly that segment.
Connected to your existing systems. Auditable to the individual trade.
Tessellare was founded by Daan Voskuil, CFA, formerly a cross-border wealth advisor at a Swiss-domiciled RIA and equity research analyst at a hedge fund. He built Tessellare after advising cross-border clients and watching a systematic gap: no platform existed to deliver direct indexing for international equity portfolios at the account level.
Jeroen Henrix, co-founder and CTO, brings a background in security and data infrastructure from FireEye, Mandiant, and Google Threat Intelligence. The platform is built on the security standards of those institutions.
Tessellare is a software company building portfolio optimization tools for cross-border wealth managers, domiciled in Freienbach, Switzerland.
Tessellare does not manage client assets, hold custody, execute trades, or act as an investment advisor.
Tessellare is entering a pilot program in Q4 2026.
We are not looking for beta testers. We are looking for practitioners who will work with us to build the enterprise system from the ground up.
Pilot advisors help define the workflows, constraints, and reporting structure the platform needs to serve cross-border client books at a professional standard. In return, they get direct access to the founding team, influence over the product roadmap, and enterprise pricing established at the pilot stage.
Pilot places are limited. Q4 2026 start.