New York-based Vestorly has landed its first custody/clearing firm and largest client yet, with Pershing putting the start-up’s digital content marketing tool on its NetX360 technology platform this week. Pershing has over 1,500 clients, 800 of which are broker/dealers with 100,000 affiliated financial advisors.
“Many of those broker/dealers are using legacy systems for newsletters and social media, and they’re just having trouble,” Wisz said. “It’s hard to provide interesting content marketing tools to advisors that people actually want to read. Advisors aren’t getting any good data on the people that are reading it, if they are reading it. And it’s difficult for compliance departments to deploy.”
Vestorly’s new “browser-in-the-cloud” technology allows broker/dealers to use its digital marketing platform while also being compliant. The new technology also allows advisors to access a new set of data on the identity and behavior of the people using the browser.
“From a surveillance or oversight perspective, the broker/dealer is able to control how this tool is utilized, which is highly important to Pershing as well because of the differences in the types of clients we have,” said Maureen Duff, managing director and global head of marketing. “Because the broker/dealer community is such a large part of our client base, that was a must-have in deciding on a marketing and communication tool.”
An advisor can choose a story from the tens of thousands of articles pulled into the browser each day and immediately share those with a content library hosted in the browser. Then, the content can be pre-approved by the firm’s compliance department, said Justin Wisz, CEO of Vestorly.
The advisor then can push the content out to clients and prospects via email, social media and on websites. Pershing liked the fact that the content could be fed through multiple channels.
The custody and clearing firm was also attracted to the tool’s analytics dashboard, which captures the names and contact information of anyone who reads, shares or clicks on the communication, Duff said.
“The level of personalization and the wide variety of content that the Vestorly tool connects with across the web was highly appealing and what we thought would be highly appealing to the advisors on our platform because clients today demand content that’s relevant to them,” Duff said. “Consumers are too savvy. They’re not going to read canned communications.”
