Serial tech startup founder Uri Levine famously advised entrepreneurs to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
Most advisors, however, would love a solution to the problem that Eden Ovadia and her team at FINNY AI admit they are obsessing over: organic growth for RIAs. FINNY’s mission is to automate lead identification, prioritize prospects and schedule meetings to improve how advisors find and communicate with likely clients, reducing a financial advisor’s workload while increasing growth rates.
“Organic growth for the advisor felt like a hard problem to solve,” she said, making it an appealing challenge to her engineer’s mind.
“Literally, my favorite part of the week is Sunday morning when just the three of us founders get together and plan and problem-solve on the whiteboard,” she said in response to the question of whether she has any hobbies.
Ovadia comes from a family of engineers and seeks out the tough problems. “I taught myself how to code when I was 14—it felt like it was a hard thing to do, something people didn’t think I could do,” she said. As a senior in high school, she joined the physics team—despite not liking physics—and went on to be elected the team’s captain.
She attended McGill University where she studied software engineering and launched the school’s Women in Tech Chapter.
She was working for Boston Consulting Group on a project for a large RIA when she saw the problem most firms have with client prospecting and lead conversion. Frankly, she saw the same issue from the other side of the desk as a potential client.
“As a 25-year-old woman, I was looking for an advisor myself and was matched with several men I had nothing in common with,” she said. It was clear the advisor search tool she was using (but declined to name) was looking only at location and net worth to make a match. She ultimately found her advisor through the age-old word-of-mouth method of referrals.
“You want to actually like the person you are going to work with,” Ovadia said. In a perfect world, clients and advisors would have some things in common, too.
The availability of open-source code to customize large language models and access to massive datasets containing information on hundreds of millions of individuals has helped the FINNY team refine what they call an ‘F-Score’, or prioritization score. This score is unique to each lead and advisor pairing and reflects the likelihood of a prospect converting to an individual advisor.
Ovadia said the team sees F-Score accuracy improving as more data, prospects and advisors are fed into FINNY’s large language model and algorithms.
Launched in February, the company has a few clients on board and revenue coming in. Its three founders participated in the prestigious Y Combinator startup incubator, and FINNY clinched the top prize at Morningstar’s annual fintech competition this year—Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor himself invested in the startup.
Ovadia said she thinks younger generations will be much less reliant on personal referrals, prefer to search on their own, and expect technology to help them find their match, as is the case in the dating world today.
“No matter whose numbers you use, a very high percentage of heirs in the much-talked-about great wealth transfer have said they are not going to be using their parent’s advisor,” she said.
