Advisors today have plenty of options for generating leads—but how do they find the ones that will be the best prospects and, in turn, their best clients?
Technology that merely delivers contact information for people interested in financial advice or at certain levels of wealth only gets advisors halfway to the clients they really want, said Niharika Shah, Executive Vice President and Chief Growth Officer at TIFIN Wealth, an AI-powered technology platform for wealth managers.
“Growth is everywhere but hard to find,” said Shah. “Advisors spend too much time and their own resources trying to figure out where their next growth opportunity lies and where to find the prospects that will become clients.”
Intelligence for Growth
With this in mind, TIFIN Wealth has created a layer of intelligence that makes enriching client data, prioritizing prospects, and identifying opportunities with existing clients easier for advisors. “This is an opportunity to use technology to help advisors prioritize their focus, time, and attention,” said Shah.
TIFIN Intelligence is a big-data-powered overlay for TIFIN Wealth’s technology, connecting financial advisors to insight into which prospects match their best clients. It also includes the ability to comb through an advisor’s current clientele to see who may be the best fit for upsells or additional value-added services.
Advisors need the help, said Shah, who noted research from Michael Kitces showing that the average cost of client acquisition is $3,100 per client, with $2,600 of that expenditure going towards the advisor’s time and another $500 to discretionary marketing budgets.
“We’re enabling advisors to reduce inefficiencies in how they use their time and their discretionary marketing budget by honing their focus and getting ahead of client and prospect needs,” she explained.
Current lead-generation solutions have advisors paying a lot of money for a certain volume of leads from online financial platforms, but Shah says that even among those very high-quality leads, the conversion rate doesn’t add up. That leaves many advisors pursuing what some may consider the lowest form of lead generation: buying lists.
“We wanted to at least optimize the path forward for advisors, the number of hours they spend, the resources, marketing, budgeting dollars that they were spending against prospects that were just not going to convert, that didn’t even want to be converted or didn’t fit what the advisor had to offer in the first place,” said Shah. “It is in addressing those issues that Intelligence can help: we’re using data to help the advisor better focus their time and attention.”
TIFIN Wealth’s technology can also aid in deepening client relationships by helping advisors proactively respond to signals in client behavior or the financial markets by reaching out to clients with information, content, and services that are relevant to them.
How Technology Can Help
TIFIN Intelligence uses first-party data aggregated from various TIFIN solutions as advisors and end-investors interact with TIFIN technology and content across a vast ecosystem.
TIFIN Intelligence further enriches its offering through second and third-party data, with algorithms that continue to learn as more information becomes available.
“For example, if you have three advisors within the same firm, their ideal customer profile might be different, and the algorithm will learn and incorporate that over time,” said Shah. “We integrate with their CRM and existing customer data and use that to build out prospect models that look like existing customers. But if there are characteristics related to future investors you want to work with that aren’t currently part of your client profiles, those can be incorporated into models as well.”
As growth opportunities are identified and activated based on engagement and signals—say, a new job, graduation, or the birth of a child—TIFIN Intelligence’s algorithms are optimized. It is a closed-loop system, building lists of prospects, prioritizing them, and re-prioritizing them over time.
Platform users are delivered insights via an intuitive dashboard and connect to various CRMs.
Advisors can upload lists and adjust the weights they assign to certain client characteristics to hone and re-hone the algorithm, and they can also indicate the efficacy of the algorithm and the outcome, which helps the system optimize itself through machine learning.
Beyond Prospecting
Advisors with multi-disciplinary offerings can use TIFIN Intelligence to find the best wealth management prospects within their workplace retirement, tax planning, or mortgage businesses—to name a few examples.
“We can mine participant data to find who might be ready to have a conversation,” said Shah. “We can use predictive models to look forward to key life stages and proactively alert advisors with signals so they can get ahead and be proactive about opportunities within a person’s next life stage.”
Use cases can even extend to advisor recruiting. “If an aggregator firm is looking for wirehouse refugees or folks who are looking to go independent or sell their practice, the platform can identify opportunities. This same methodology can be used for firms looking to find ideal profiles of other firms for mergers and acquisitions,” said Shah.
Getting Started
The firm of the future needs to be able to use data and technology as sharp weapons, said Shah—and while advisors are good at managing money, their firms are generally not built to handle big data. By seeking out partners like TIFIN Intelligence to wrap their arms around their data needs, advisors can focus on efficiently doing what they do best—protecting and growing their clients’ wealth.
