These Are the Best AI Prospecting Tools for Advisors

Much has been made of AI-driven notetakers, but the technology’s lead-generation capabilities may yield a much bigger bottom-line benefit.

AI prospecting tools, which find and curate potential clients for financial advisory firms, have sprung up alongside notetakers, meeting summarizers and material generators. They pinpoint leads based on location, income and even occupation, scraping public records and firms’ existing databases. That level of hyper-personalization lets advisors target their pitches to the people most likely to be interested, and the amount of data the firms have is only going to increase, experts said.

“[AI prospecting] firms that buy more data tend to [perform] better,” said John O’Connell, who authored a recent report from The Oasis Group on the best tools for financial advisors. “Today, none of these firms get credit card data, but credit card data is very easy to get … Imagine that amount of data and giving that into the hands of a wealth management firm.”

New Leads, New Me

The top tool in terms of overall capabilities is FINNY, which can be integrated with more wealth management software and has better data-exporting capabilities, according to the Oasis report. Catchlight, however, covers more potential use cases, since it can upload and sort through massive datasets of potential contacts, filtering them by demographic characteristics and investable assets to give advisors the best options. “I can look at, for example, ZIP codes where the houses are over a million bucks. That would tell me that these people probably have more money,” O’Connell said. “I can look at job descriptions: Who are doctors or attorneys who have more of a higher-earning position?”

Other standout tools from the report include:

• Wealthfeed, which focuses on converting prospects who are divorced, inheritors and high-net-worth individuals.
• TIFIN AG, which aims to help firms acquire new clients, grow the assets managed by the existing clients and retain current ones.
• Aidentified, which uses machine learning to determine the strength of potential leads based on employment, education level and other factors.

Key Terms. Among the key capabilities that prospecting tools can provide are the ability to search for particular professions, or to conduct Boolean searches that combine key terms to enhance specificity and further tailor results. If a firm doesn’t have a professional athlete division but another nearby firm does, for example, it may want to exclude such clients — something O’Connell said AI lead generation tools should be able to do.

“Think of someone like a Carson Group, or a Wealthspire, that has multiple offices and divisions,” O’Connell said. “Can I set filters that say, for example, ‘I only want to go after people that have over $2 million in investable assets’? But at the same time, can I allow each advisory team to set their own parameters? … The family office division doesn’t want to talk to millionaires.”