Financial advisors are finding client growth and deeper relationships by meeting prospects through digital matchmaking applications reminiscent of online dating app profiles.
Client questionnaires have been around for some time, but firms like Merrill Lynch, Edward Jones and Mercer Advisors are all taking different approaches in how they match clients to advisors. Some use digital platforms, while others use human matchmakers.
Merrill, for example, launched a platform in 2022 that asks prospects questions more about their personality and interests, then uses an algorithm to match the responses to advisors who share similar interests. The client prospect is then given a list of matching advisors and can choose who to contact on their own time.
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"Many of these people have never worked with an advisor before. They're not quite sure what to expect. And just like how dating goes, you don't want to talk about how much they make in salary on a first date, right?" said said Julie Kim Smith, a director and business strategy and initiatives executive at Merrill Lynch. "Likewise, we want to just have them understand our advisors, understand our capabilities and how we can help them before getting to any of that."
Some of the questions in Merrill's match program ask prospects about their personality, like whether friends say they're laid-back or not; how they respond to a home repair and whether they fix it themselves or call for help; and whether they prefer talking just business or having a social relationship. It also asks prospects for their preferred language, hobbies and communication — whether they like phone calls or meeting in-person, and how often.
For Mary Jo Harper, a Merrill advisor whose practice is based in Philadelphia, it was about more than just work; she was looking for clients who could also become close as friends.
"I'm very clear that I have a very big bias to want to be friends with my clients. … So I really wanted people who wanted to have that kind of relationship. And the irony is, I've had two big successes with Advisor Match," she said. "It's one more way for me to be able to get my name out and get my practice known, and to be able to attract the best kind of clients our practice really wants."
Roughly 7,400 Merrill advisors are in the match program, with which about 60,000 prospects have engaged. Smith said "several thousand" of those prospects have converted to clients.
Part of that growth can also be attributed to more people preferring digital channels of communication in recent years. Edward Jones, which launched a questionnaire-based match program in 2020, has also seen client growth from the approach, though the questions are focused on finance and investment goals rather than personality.
"Tens of thousands of prospects use the quiz every month with many finding a financial advisor that lives nearby, shares their values and is driven to help accomplish their long-term financial goals," said Richard Yang, head of growth marketing at Edward Jones. "Ultimately, we are always evolving our digital presence to better understand clients and investors and make it easy for them to engage with us in whatever way they choose."
In the case of Mercer Advisors, the firm has a matchmaking program but in a much different way. Instead of a digital platform or individual advisors prospecting for clients on their own, there is an internal team of human matchmakers called RVPs (regional vice presidents) who seek out prospects, analyze them and then pair them to select advisors and a customized team.
"We believe very deeply in the importance of a hand-picked advisor whose job is to serve you, not to find the next client," said Daniel Gourvitch, president at Mercer Advisors, who noted his tech executive sister was matched with another Mercer advisor who had clients in the same industry. "It leads to much better outcomes for clients. We see our advisors are spending three times the industry average with end-clients because they're not out there going and trying to find the next one."
Though Mercer's system depends on a human team as matchmakers rather than an algorithm, he said that tech has played a key part of the process.
"We certainly use technology to aid our team in doing that, but it's very much a getting to know you process. … Advisors end up really valuing the fact that they're getting matched with clients who they really enjoy serving," he said. "We don't think that the way to do that is simply through a digital survey but we think that it's definitely a step in the right direction as folks start to adopt that."
At Merrill, Smith said part of the reason the firm launched a digital match program was to capture the online audience that was drifting through their website.
"Despite having millions of users who visited our website every single day, there was a little bit of a disconnect in converting that traffic into meaningful connections with our financial advisors," she said. "Recognizing this gap, we did take a step back and just really think about our strategy, about how we interact with people online and turn those into clients."
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Merrill is now updating its Advisor Match program. It recently allowed advisors to add videos about themselves to the written bios. Smith said they are also incorporating a form of AI called natural language processing within the search function so a prospect can put in a series of words, like, "Show me advisors who speak Mandarin," and get a list of advisors immediately.
"The level of granularity in these profiles is really amazing. And we love our prospects being able to read through and search through the advisor profiles on their own time," she said. "It provides them with convenience. And it allows them to find people who align with what they're looking for, which has, through our data, really improved the quality of these connections."
