As an advisor, imagine knowing a client's favorite coffee shop or where they prefer to have lunch, not just where they prefer to invest.
That's part of the goal behind AssetLink's AI-powered advisor platform that combines the typical financial data of a client with their social media profiles to quickly analyze the person and pair them with well-suited advisors. The platform also provides AI-powered actionable summaries to advisors on existing clients. The overarching goal is to transform data in a way that deepens the relationship between advisors and their clients, said AssetLink's founder and CEO Devon Drew.
"Relation intelligence is what's going to separate folks from a recruiting standpoint, from a distribution standpoint — whether it's an advisor trying to see if a client is a good fit for their practice or vice versa — that is going to continue to be very important," he said.
Drew said the idea came from his own sense of frustration after nearly 20 years in the advisory space in which he spent a lot of time manually pulling PDFs and other documents across various platforms to create portfolio analyses for clients.
"I was a senior executive at Vanguard and for the life of me, not only can I not find our data, I couldn't map our data to who I wanted to talk to. And then I had multiple screens up. I was going through our intranet, I was trying to do searches," he said. "And all of a sudden, I'm 45 minutes in and I'm looking at one person. So it's this industry-wide having an efficiency issue."
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Drew left Vanguard in 2022 to help DFD Partners, a distribution service platform, which then became a much broader AI-powered platform, AssetLink, in 2023.
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Name: AssetLink
Website: assetlink.ai
Size of AssetLink: The New York City-based firm has 11 employees and works with 137 different firms. Drew said AssetLink has intelligence on 147,000 financial advisors and roughly 250,000 end-investors.
Products and services offered: AssetLink started with a platform that matches advisors to clients but grew from there to perform deeper analysis on clients, their social lifestyle and to offer a chatbot to the advisor on how to engage those clients.
AssetLink also gives an "intelligence scorecard" of the client to the advisor that shows "who this person is, here's their passions, here's their interests," he said. "And then we're able to tie that together with the chatbot that says, 'hey, here's the best strategy to engage with them.'"
Going deeper, the chatbot can help show an advisor where to "invite them to breakfast, lunch or dinner. And we'll pull that from Facebook or Instagram based off of geotags and posts," Drew said.
AssetLink can not be integrated with other CRM platforms used by RIAs.
Who AssetLink aims to serve: Financial advisors, planners as well as asset and fund managers.
What kind of problems is AssetLink trying to solve: AssetLink's technology at its core is taking the difficult-to-read documents, like PDF,s and digitizing everything into so-called clean data that AI tools can then create real-time analytics and action plans for advisors. The purpose is partly to help streamline the back-office, paper-intensive processes for advisors.
There are "all of these inefficiencies in 2024, and beyond, that needs to go away. Right? And unless you're adopting 'clean data' and being able to leverage the tools to extract information [that's] intelligent to where you need it, you're going to be left behind," Drew said. "The competition is fierce and it's heating up. You need intelligence as a service to be able to compete in an ever-changing world."
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How AssetLink is different from competitors: Drew said what makes the company different is the makeup of its team. Drew came from a more traditional advisory background but started building AssetLink through meeting tech experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he started building the company with former Spotify technical Surfield Thomas as AssetLink's co-founder and chief technology officer.
"It gives us a diverse perspective, what we're building and the product roadmap," Drew said.
What does it cost: AssetLink's starts at $250,000 a year per business unit or enterprise and increases from there. Drew said they are soon rolling out an individual advisor-friendly version at about $1,500 a year.
"So that's been the challenging part trying to kind of get kind a more watered-down version to fit the price point for the individual, RIA or advisor," he said.
What's next in development: Without giving too much detail, Drew said the firm is working on a prototype in what he calls, "the first ever investment salesperson" as an AI.
Drew will be speaking at Financial Planning's first conference solely dedicated to AI in wealth management,
