2Slides Team
16 min read
Client Review Presentation for Financial Advisors + API (2026)
A good client review presentation for financial advisors runs six sections: agenda, goals progress, allocation versus target, performance versus benchmark, cash flow and plan update, and action items. You can build one in 2Slides from figures in your portfolio system's CSV export and get an editable PowerPoint file at 10 credits per page, so a 10-page deck costs about $0.25. Ops teams can automate the same deck for every household through POST /api/v1/slides/generate, with all numbers computed by your own system and an advisor approving each deck before it reaches a client.
Key takeaways
- A 10-page Fast PPT review deck is 100 credits. 300 households reviewed quarterly is 30,000 credits a quarter, about $65 using one 20,000-credit pack and one 10,000-credit pack.
- Your portfolio system calculates every number. The AI only lays out text you have already written, and a script checks that no number in the finished deck is missing from your source text.
- Prompts carry a household ID only. No Social Security numbers, account numbers, or client names go to the API.
- A one-to-one client report usually falls outside the SEC Marketing Rule's definition of "advertisement," but projections and templates sent to many clients need your CCO's review. FINRA Rule 2210 applies to broker-dealer communications.
- Keep every generated deck, its jobId, and the approving advisor for at least five years under the books-and-records rule (Rule 204-2).
- 2Slides makes no SOC 2 claim. Treat it as a third-party vendor in your due diligence.
Who this is for
Part 1 is for the advisor or paraplanner who builds review decks by hand and wants the next one done in 15 minutes, not 90. Part 2 is for ops, technology, and product teams at RIAs, wealth management firms, and advisor-tech platforms who want a deck for every household on the review calendar, waiting in the advisor's queue before the meeting.
Part 1: The client review meeting deck, section by section
Most RIA client meeting decks are either 40 pages of performance exhibits or one returns page with nothing about the plan. Clients care whether they are on track, so start with goals, not returns.
| # | Section | What goes on the slide | Source in your stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agenda | 4 to 6 items, including anything the client asked to discuss | CRM meeting notes |
| 2 | Goals progress | Funded ratio or probability-of-success figure for each goal, compared with last review | Planning software |
| 3 | Allocation versus target | Current vs. target percentages by asset class, plus drift | Portfolio reporting export |
| 4 | Performance versus benchmark | Quarter, YTD, and since-inception returns, net of fees, alongside the blended benchmark | Performance report |
| 5 | Cash flow and plan update | Contributions, withdrawals, RMDs, upcoming large expenses, life changes | Custodian data, CRM |
| 6 | Action items | Who does what by when: rebalance, beneficiary update, Roth conversion review | Advisor notes |
Add a title slide and a disclosure slide, and a quarterly portfolio review presentation lands at 8 to 10 pages. An annual review adds tax planning, insurance, estate documents, and an updated IPS. Whatever tool builds it: state the time period on every return, label net or gross of fees, name the benchmark's components, and keep projections (Monte Carlo results, illustrated income) on their own labeled slide with assumptions.
Make the deck in 2Slides from your CSV export
Fast PPT produces an actual PowerPoint file with editable text boxes, which matters because you will change wording, add the client's name, and paste in your firm's standard disclosure page. It works from text you paste in, so the workflow is: export, summarize, paste, generate.
- Export the household data from your portfolio reporting system or custodian as CSV: allocation by asset class, period returns, benchmark returns, and cash flows.
- Write a short fact sheet from the export. Copy the figures as calculated. Don't ask an AI to calculate returns or drift from raw positions. Your reporting system already computed time-weighted returns correctly, and a language model is no substitute for it.
- Open Fast PPT, pick a clean, conservative template from /templates, paste the fact sheet, and generate. The page count follows the template you choose, so pick one with about 10 layouts.
- Open the PPTX in PowerPoint, add the client's name, check every number against the source report, and add your disclosure slide.
Figure 1: The Fast PPT page. Paste your fact sheet, choose a template, and download an editable PPTX.
Here is a fact sheet prompt that works. Every number in it comes from the export:
Quarterly client review, Q3 2026.
Agenda: goals progress, allocation versus target, performance versus
benchmark, cash flow and plan update, action items.
Goals: retirement goal 84% funded, up from 81% at the Q2 review.
College goal for younger child 62% funded, on schedule.
Allocation: US equity 41% (target 40%), international equity 19%
(target 20%), fixed income 33% (target 35%), cash 7% (target 5%).
Performance, net of fees: quarter +2.4% vs. blended benchmark +2.6%;
year to date +8.1% vs. +8.4%. Benchmark: 60% MSCI ACWI, 40% Bloomberg
US Aggregate. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Cash flow: $18,000 contributed to 401(k) YTD; $40,000 withdrawal
planned in January for a home renovation.
Action items: rebalance cash into fixed income; update beneficiary on
IRA; review Roth conversion amount in November.
Tone: neutral and factual. Do not add numbers, forecasts, or advice
that are not in this text.The last line matters: Fast PPT fits your wording to template placeholders, and an explicit "no new numbers" instruction keeps it factual.
What you still do by hand: add the client's name and the meeting date, insert your firm's disclosure page, swap in charts from your reporting system if you want visuals of allocation drift, and check each figure. Expect 10 to 15 minutes on a deck that used to take over an hour.
If you'd rather upload the CSV directly, Create Slides from File accepts CSV and XLSX and runs an analysis pass over the rows. The spreadsheet to presentation guide walks through that flow, and how to turn Excel data into slides covers chart-heavy decks. Two caveats for client work: those slides are designed images, not editable text boxes, and the figures come from the AI's analysis, not your performance engine. That's fine for internal prep or a market recap. For client-facing performance numbers, use Fast PPT with figures you supply.
Part 2: Automate client review decks for every household
The pipeline is the same one used for personalized sales proposals from Google Sheets and other batch jobs, with tighter controls:
| Step | Owner | What happens | 2Slides endpoint / credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ops | Nightly export from the portfolio system, keyed by household ID | none |
| 2 | Your code | Compute and format every figure; build neutral summary text | none |
| 3 | Your code | Submit one async Fast PPT job per household | POST /api/v1/slides/generate, 10 credits/page |
| 4 | Your code | Poll, download PPTX, run the number check, write a review row | GET /api/v1/jobs/{id}, free |
| 5 | Advisor | Open, edit, approve or reject in the review queue | none |
| 6 | Ops / compliance | Archive approved deck + jobId + approver for retention | none |
The rule that makes this safe: your system computes, the LLM formats
Every figure that reaches a client (returns, drift, funded ratios, dollar flows) is calculated by your portfolio or planning system and formatted by your code before the API call. The model only lays out finished facts. That removes the most common AI-deck failure, invented statistics (see the hallucinations guide), and enables a deterministic check: every number in the output must also be in the input.
Data minimization
- Household ID, not identity. Use your internal household key (for example
HH-10427). No names, SSNs, account numbers, addresses, or dates of birth. The advisor adds the client's name during review. - Aggregates, not positions. Asset-class percentages and period returns are enough for a review deck. Don't send holdings-level data, cost basis, or custodian account identifiers.
- Pattern check before submission. The script below blocks anything that looks like an SSN or a long account number.
Read are AI presentations safe for confidential data before your vendor review. 2Slides makes no SOC 2 or other certification claim, so your due diligence should rest on what you send (the minimized text above), not on a certificate.
Generate one deck per household
Pick a template once with GET /api/v1/themes/search?query=finance (free) and save the themeId as configuration. Then submit async jobs:
curl -s -X POST https://2slides.com/api/v1/slides/generate \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SLIDES_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"userInput": "Quarterly client review, Q3 2026. Household HH-10427. Goals: retirement goal 84% funded, up from 81% ... Tone: neutral and factual. Do not add numbers, forecasts, or advice that are not in this text.",
"themeId": "<themeId from themes/search>",
"responseLanguage": "English",
"mode": "async"
}'The response is { "jobId": "..." }. Poll GET /api/v1/jobs/{jobId} every 5 to 10 seconds until status is success, then download the PPTX from downloadUrl. Generation allows 6 requests per minute per key, so space submissions 10 seconds apart. For households that prefer another language, set responseLanguage to a language name such as "Spanish".
Figure 2: The generate endpoint documentation, including responseLanguage and the supported output languages.
A short Python job: summary, generate, verify, queue
This script reads the nightly CSV export, builds the summary text from precomputed fields, generates each deck, flags any number in the PPTX that wasn't in the input, and writes a pending_review row. Nothing here sends anything to a client.
import csv, hashlib, os, re, sqlite3, time
import requests
from pptx import Presentation # pip install python-pptx
API = "https://2slides.com/api/v1"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SLIDES_API_KEY']}",
"Content-Type": "application/json"}
THEME_ID = os.environ["REVIEW_THEME_ID"]
NUM = re.compile(r"\d[\d,]*(?:\.\d+)?%?")
db = sqlite3.connect("client_reviews.db")
db.execute("""CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS deck_reviews (
job_id TEXT PRIMARY KEY, household_id TEXT, quarter TEXT,
input_sha256 TEXT, file_path TEXT, flags TEXT, status TEXT,
approver TEXT, approved_at TEXT, created_at TEXT)""")
def build_summary(h):
# Every figure was computed by the portfolio system; we only format it.
f = {k: float(v) for k, v in h.items() if k not in ("household_id", "quarter", "actions")}
return (
f"Quarterly client review, {h['quarter']}. Household {h['household_id']}. "
"Agenda: goals progress, allocation versus target, performance versus "
"benchmark, cash flow and plan update, action items. "
f"Retirement goal {f['funded']:.0f}% funded, compared with {f['funded_prev']:.0f}% last review. "
f"Equity {f['eq']:.0f}% (target {f['eq_t']:.0f}%), fixed income {f['fi']:.0f}% "
f"(target {f['fi_t']:.0f}%), cash {f['cash']:.0f}% (target {f['cash_t']:.0f}%). "
f"Net of fees, quarter {f['ret_q']:+.1f}% vs. benchmark {f['bm_q']:+.1f}%; "
f"year to date {f['ret_ytd']:+.1f}% vs. {f['bm_ytd']:+.1f}%. "
"Past performance does not guarantee future results. "
f"Contributions ${f['contrib']:,.0f}; withdrawals ${f['withdraw']:,.0f}. "
f"Action items: {h['actions']}. "
"Tone: neutral and factual. Do not add numbers, forecasts, or advice "
"that are not in this text."
)
def assert_minimized(text):
if re.search(r"\b\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}\b|\b\d{8,}\b", text):
raise ValueError("Possible SSN or account number in prompt")
def generate(text):
r = requests.post(f"{API}/slides/generate", headers=HEADERS, timeout=60,
json={"userInput": text, "themeId": THEME_ID,
"responseLanguage": "English", "mode": "async"})
r.raise_for_status()
job_id = r.json()["jobId"]
while True:
job = requests.get(f"{API}/jobs/{job_id}", headers=HEADERS, timeout=30).json()
if job["status"] == "success":
return job_id, job["downloadUrl"]
if job["status"] == "failed":
raise RuntimeError(f"job {job_id} failed")
time.sleep(8)
def unexpected_numbers(summary, path):
deck = " ".join(sh.text_frame.text for s in Presentation(path).slides
for sh in s.shapes if sh.has_text_frame)
return sorted(set(NUM.findall(deck)) - set(NUM.findall(summary)))
def run(export_csv):
with open(export_csv, newline="") as fh:
for h in csv.DictReader(fh):
text = build_summary(h)
assert_minimized(text)
job_id, url = generate(text)
path = f"decks/{h['quarter']}/{h['household_id']}_{job_id}.pptx"
os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(path), exist_ok=True)
with open(path, "wb") as out:
out.write(requests.get(url, timeout=120).content)
flags = ",".join(unexpected_numbers(text, path))
db.execute("INSERT INTO deck_reviews VALUES (?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)",
(job_id, h["household_id"], h["quarter"],
hashlib.sha256(text.encode()).hexdigest(), path, flags,
"pending_review", None, None, time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")))
db.commit()
time.sleep(10) # stay under 6 generate requests/min per key
if __name__ == "__main__":
run("exports/q3-2026-households.csv")The number check is deliberately strict. A slide number may occasionally show up in flags; a flag means the reviewer looks harder, not that the deck is blocked. What it reliably catches is a figure in the deck that was never in your input.
The review queue: the advisor approves, not the script
Your CRM or a simple internal page lists pending_review decks by meeting date. The advisor opens the PPTX, adds the client's name, checks the flags, edits, and approves; your code records approver and approved_at. Only approved decks can be presented. Rejections get a reason code (wrong data, tone, formatting) so ops fixes the export instead of regenerating blindly.
At 300 households, submissions take about 50 minutes of rate-limited calls, an easy overnight job. Since most firms stagger reviews, you will more often generate a weekly batch for meetings two weeks out. For queueing, retries, and parallel keys, see how to batch generate presentations with an AI API.
Compliance notes (not legal advice; confirm with your CCO)
SEC Marketing Rule. Rule 206(4)-1 defines an advertisement as a communication to more than one person (or to anyone, if it includes hypothetical performance) that offers advisory services to prospective clients, or new advisory services to current clients. A review of an existing client's own account usually doesn't meet that definition. Three things can change that, so have your CCO rule on each: projected or targeted returns on a plan slide may be hypothetical performance, which can make even a one-to-one deck an advertisement (certain interactive analysis tools are carved out); a slide pitching a new service; and firm-wide commentary decks sent to all clients. The SEC's Marketing Compliance FAQ is the staff's running guidance.
FINRA Rule 2210. If your firm is dually registered or the deck goes out under a broker-dealer, FINRA Rule 2210 applies. It treats material sent to 25 or fewer retail investors within 30 days as correspondence and anything wider as a retail communication with different approval requirements. It also generally prohibits predicting or projecting performance. Ask your compliance team how a single template sent to hundreds of households should be classified.
Books and records. Rule 204-2 requires advisers to keep written communications relating to advice they give, generally for five years from the end of the fiscal year of the last entry, the first two years in an appropriate office of the adviser. In practice, archive every deck you send, plus the input text, its hash, the jobId, and the approver. The deck_reviews table above holds that metadata; send the PPTX files to the same archive that already stores your email.
What it costs
Fast PPT is 10 credits per page. All figures assume 10-page decks.
| Volume | Credits | How to buy | Approx. cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 advisor, 40 households, quarterly | 4,000 per quarter | One $9.50 pack of 4,000 | $9.50 per quarter |
| 300 households, quarterly | 30,000 per quarter | $42.50 (20,000) + $22.50 (10,000) | $65 per quarter |
| 300 households, quarterly, with regeneration headroom | 40,000 per quarter | One $80 pack of 40,000 | $80 per quarter |
| 300 households, reviews staggered monthly | 10,000 per month | Pro plan, billed yearly | $132 per year |
That last row works because 300 quarterly reviews spread evenly is 100 decks, or 10,000 credits, a month, which is exactly the Pro plan's monthly allowance. Pricing has no per-seat component, so adding advisors doesn't change the math. New accounts get 500 free credits, enough for five test decks. See /pricing.
Where 2Slides is not the right tool
- Performance reporting itself. Your reporting platform's performance report stays the source of truth; attach or reference it. 2Slides builds the narrative deck around those numbers, not the report.
- Native charts from data. Fast PPT lays out text in a template. If you need pixel-exact allocation pie charts, generate them with your reporting tool and paste them in during review.
- Certified vendor requirements. If your vendor policy requires SOC 2 reports from every tool that touches client data, 2Slides doesn't have one. The minimized-data pattern above limits what you send, but your policy has the final say.
- Alternatives. Copilot in PowerPoint runs inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, which some compliance teams prefer for one-off decks. Gamma, Canva, and ChatGPT make attractive decks from prompts but are built for interactive use, not an approval-gated batch pipeline. Your planning software's built-in client reports may be all a small practice needs.
For a broader look at how other teams use the same endpoints, see AI presentation API use cases by team. If you also want a narrated market recap video for your client newsletter, automating financial report presentations with AI voice narration covers the Workspace flow.
FAQ
What should a client review presentation for financial advisors include?
Six sections: agenda, goals progress, allocation versus target, performance versus benchmark (net of fees, with time periods and benchmark components labeled), cash flow and plan update, and action items. Add a title slide and your disclosure page. A quarterly deck is 8 to 10 pages; an annual review adds tax, insurance, and estate pages.
Can AI calculate portfolio performance for my review deck?
It shouldn't. Time-weighted and money-weighted returns, fee netting, and benchmark blending belong in your portfolio accounting system. Use AI to lay out figures you supply, and verify every number in the output against the source report.
Is a client review deck an advertisement under the SEC Marketing Rule?
Usually not, if it covers an existing client's own account and doesn't offer new services. Projected returns can count as hypothetical performance, and slides promoting new services can change the analysis. Have your CCO review the template once, then apply it consistently.
How much does it cost to automate client review decks for 300 households?
300 ten-page Fast PPT decks a quarter is 30,000 credits. That's about $65 a quarter with a 20,000-credit pack plus a 10,000-credit pack, or $132 a year on the Pro plan billed yearly if you stagger reviews evenly across months.
What client data should I send to the 2Slides API?
Only a household ID and aggregate figures: asset-class percentages, period returns, benchmark returns, and dollar flows. Never names, SSNs, account numbers, addresses, or holdings-level data. Advisors add the client's name in PowerPoint during review.
Can the decks be in a client's preferred language?
Yes. Set responseLanguage to a language name such as "Spanish" or "Simplified Chinese". 2Slides supports 20+ output languages. Have a fluent advisor or staff member review translated decks before the meeting.
Start with one household: paste a fact sheet into Fast PPT, and when the format works, get an API key at 2slides.com/api to generate the rest of the quarter's decks.
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