FINNY pivots to a 'pay-as-you-grow' revenue-share model

New business and revenue generation is one of the primary challenges of financial advisors. And because the lifetime value to the advisor of an ongoing advisory client is so high (e.g., if the advisor manages $1M for the client at a 1% fee, then over a 20-year relationship the client will pay the advisor 20 × (1% × $1M) = $200,000, which at a 30% average profit margin is $60,000 of lifetime profits from a single client relationship over two decades of service), advisors are often willing to pay a significant chunk of that revenue to someone who can bring new business to them.

Historically, this often meant paying a percentage of new business revenue to the person responsible for bringing it in – or as it played out under the old "finder, binder, grinder, minder" model, essentially splitting new client revenue four ways between the person who sourced and brought in the prospect, the one who closed the sale and "bound" the prospect as a client, the one who did the analysis and implementation paperwork, and the one who tended to the ongoing relationship. Which led to what has become an industry standard of paying around 25% of revenue for a business developer who can reliably find prospects and get them onto the calendar (or simply as a case-split for whoever brought a particular client in).

In modern times, while some advisory firms have in-house business development staff who handle the lead generation and prospecting role themselves, more often lead advisors themselves source their own business (and have revenue-based compensation as a heavy component of their compensation to reward their finder efforts), or the firm outsources at least part of the job to a third party – some to lead generation platforms like Zoe Financial, and others to custodial referral programs like Schwab Advisor Network. Throughout the various combinations that have evolved over the years, though, the revenue-sharing model has persisted, and still hovers around the 25% rate that goes back to the old finder/binder/grinder/minder system.

In the context of external providers, the revenue-share model has become especially appealing for advisory firms that are jaded about marketing promoters that overpromise and underdeliver, because the advisory firm only pays for actual new revenue. Which means the person or platform generating the leads takes on the risk that if they're not able to reliably source new business for the advisor, they'll get paid only a minimal amount or nothing at all. But the economic upside for the platform is still substantial if they can deliver new business, since they'll earn a percentage of revenue that each client found through the platform pays the advisor for as long as they remain a client, allowing the successful prospect-sourcing solution to participate in the incredible lifetime-client-value economics of the typical advisory firm.

In this context, it's notable that FINNY, the AI-powered prospecting and marketing automation platform, has announced a new "Pay-As-You-Grow" pricing model that is effectively a 20bps revenue share for new clients sourced through the platform, plus a $50/month flat subscription fee for access to the platform.

The new pricing model is a significant overhaul for FINNY, which previously charged a flat fee from $6k to $12k per year for an advisory firm to use its software. Under the old model, firms were asked to pay a high initial cost (since the entire year's fee was paid upfront) with no guarantee they would recoup that cost from new client growth. Even though ultimately it would take only one to two new clients for most firms to cover that expense, this still made FINNY a difficult sell for advisors, who tend to have high skepticism of marketing solutions with upfront costs but no actual requirement to deliver results – and especially so because FINNY's main function has been facilitating cold outreach (i.e., the software targets prospects and provides automated outreach materials), which at best is still a time-intensive effort to follow up on leads with a high volume of rejection (that advisors would pay for the privilege of pursuing).

FINNY in turn sought to reduce this friction with the launch of "Hunter", their anthropomorphized AI engine to automate as much of the cold outreach process as they could on the advisor's behalf. Still, relatively few advisors actually use cold outreach as a primary marketing technique – only around 7%, according to data from the upcoming Kitces Research Study on Advisor Marketing – and so even if FINNY made it easier to find and reach out to new prospects, the demonstrated market for cold outreach was not large, and the high upfront fee made it hard to convince advisors who were new at outbound prospecting (or spend years growing their practices to the point they didn't have to cold call anymore) to try it out.

The new model, then, creates a much lower barrier for those "come and try it out" advisors, since it only involves at most 1/10th of the flat fee that FINNY charged under the old model. Which results in potentially more users paying a smaller flat fee – but if even a modest number of those firms are successful at generating new business, then the economics will work out favorably for FINNY. For example, if an RIA gains a new client paying $10k/year, then the firm will pay $500 (the flat fee) + $10k × 0.2 (the revenue share) = $2.5k. If they gain three new clients, they'll pay $6.5k – more than FINNY's minimum flat fee under the old model, and even if the advisor leaves after a year, FINNY's revenue-share could continue for a decade or two thereafter. And if the advisor instead remains, and gains three more new clients the following year, they'll pay $6k (the ongoing revenue share from the three clients gained in the first year) + $6k (the revenue share from the three new clients in the second year) + $500 (the flat fee) = $12.5k – and that amount will keep increasing the more new clients they gain, as long as they continue to retain the old clients. All of which adds up for substantially more potential revenue growth for FINNY over the long term, because even though they slashed their flat fee by 90%, the economics of a lifetime revenue share are so good that they could still come out well ahead compared to their old SaaS fee. In fact, overall the revenue-sharing model allows FINNY to drive significantly more revenue overall from a much smaller number of successful firms (who really get clients and pay revenue-shares) than it would have had to under its prior pure SaaS model.

The caveat, however, is unlike the lead generation and custodial referral platforms to whom advisors traditionally have been willing to pay a revenue share (since they do the work of delivering leads willing to meet with the advisor, effectively serving as an outsourced lead generation service), outbound prospecting still takes work on the advisor's behalf, and tends to have a very low conversion rate. And FINNY is still ultimately an outbound prospecting platform, albeit one that revolves around its "Hunter" AI agent to automate an increasing share of the process of researching, reaching out to, and following up with cold-outreach prospects to make them, hopefully, at least a little bit warmer.

So the big question is whether FINNY's AI software can effectively do the work of a lead generation platform or business development employee – i.e., to take substantively all of the work of identifying and reaching out to prospects and only delivering them into the advisor's hands (or onto the advisor's calendar) once they're ready to book an initial meeting – in which case it's possible to see advisors willing to pay a revenue share for FINNY as they are for other platforms that do the same thing (put actual prospect meetings onto the calendar). But if the advisor is still expected to take on a non-trivial (or outright majority) share of the work of sourcing leads through FINNY, they may not be willing to pay a percentage of revenue when they're still the ones doing the work (or conversely, they may simply not be willing to do the work needed to get new clients through the platform, which then results in no new revenue to share in the first place). And on the flip side, advisors who have already successfully been using FINNY under its flat fee model are likely to be upset because now instead of being capped on the amount that they spend for the platform with a fixed SaaS fee (and keeping 100% of any revenue they generate above that), their costs for using FINNY will grow along with the clients they get from it – perhaps causing some to jump over to alternative AI prospecting platforms like Wealthfeed or Finterest or AIdentified that still charge a traditional flat SaaS fee.

The key point is that although advisors are willing to pay a percentage of revenue for people or platforms who will deliver new business – and FINNY's new structure is very aligned to the psychology of advisors who have been burned by failed marketing and growth techniques, for whom there's appeal in only paying for what is successful – it's still an open question as to how much of that process can truly be outsourced to technology, how much of it will still ultimately rest on the advisor, and what advisors will pay for AI agents if they still have to do much of the actual 'Finder' work themselves. If FINNY can position – and sell – their Hunter agent as the equivalent of a business development hire that only happens to be AI, then advisors might be willing to cut FINNY into the portion of the new client revenue split that would have traditionally gone to such a hire. But if FINNY 'just' makes it easier to do outbound prospecting – but still requires the advisor to do the work of getting the prospects in the door – then it might be harder to convince advisors to pay revenue-share fees for a SaaS solution.

This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-sep2026, and has been reprinted here with permission

Ben Henry-Moreland

Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.

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Michael Kitces

Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.

In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.

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