Advances in technology are empowering financial advisors with new tools they can utilize to generate leads and help their businesses thrive, according to a report in last week’s Wealth Management.
One firm at the forefront of this trend is the startup Finny, which Davis Janowski describes in detail in the column titled, “Finny and the Great AdvisorTech Acceleration.” It is cited as an example of how the advent of artificial intelligence, the growing availability of large datasets, and a wave of young engineers are combining to produce solutions for some of the challenges in the financial industry today.
Finny’s mission is to help financial advisors grow organically. According to the firm, “With a proprietary database of millions of records, we help advisors identify prospects who match their search criteria.” It then prioritizes prospects based on the predicted likelihood of conversion, unique to each prospect and advisor pair.
Finny launched in February, had a viable product ready by May, and within a month had a waiting list of 30 firms that has since grown to over 70. Recently Finny won top prize at Morningstar’s annual fintech competition, with Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor saying that the startup’s founders “are working on an innovative solution for advisors, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for this impressive team.”
Victoria Toli, a Stanford engineering graduate who is one of the three co-founders of Finny, likened the firm to a dating app. In this case, it matches financial advisors with likely prospects in an accelerated and automated fashion with what is called ” hyper-targeted prospect outreach.” Finny identifies prospects in a target group by using thousands of data points per lead, prioritized on the likelihood of converting to an individual advisor.
Toli said Finny is able to use open-source code to customize large language models. Advisors can run unlimited searches to identify prospects from millions of records, based on criteria that matter to them. Advisors can also browse through hundreds of recommended prospects, who match the profile of their existing clients. “Ours is an agent that does the work for the advisor and is always running in the background,” said Toli.
The startup’s CTO and co-founder, Theodore Janson, developed Finny’s F-Score, a prioritization score that helps determine which prospects are best-suited for a particular advisor. The third co-founder, Eden Ovadia, helped launch the concept following a research project with the Boston Consulting Group that found a lead conversion rate amounting to less than 1% following cold outreach to prospects from other forms of data collection.
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