WealthReach, VastAdvisor tie-up takes aim at advisors' cold outreach problem

Two wealth tech startups are teaming up to take aim at a rampant prospecting problem for advisors – one that, at its core, might be due to firms running separate marketing operations that were never designed to talk to each other.

WealthReach, the New York-based organic growth platform for RIAs, and VastAdvisor, an AI-driven organic growth operating system for wealth firms, announced a partnership to close the gap between a firm's efforts at organic visibility and its paid digital advertising.

Under the arrangement, WealthReach would help identify anonymous website visitors and people actively researching advisory services online – either thgouth search engines or AI seach like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – then feed those contacts into VastAdvisor's platform, which builds and targets paid campaigns around them across Google, Meta and LinkedIn.

Traffic that responds to those ads generated from the partnership would land back on a WealthReach-built site, where the firm's Convert tool identifies who the visitor is and what they were searching for, allowing an advisor to follow up even if the prospect never filled out a form.

According to the announcement, advisors would benefit from having more of their marketing budget spent on prospects who have already shown some interest, as opposed to throwing money at broad, non-targeted audiences or paid-for leads that may be sold to several competing firms at once.

."Up until now, advisors had no way of knowing if their marketing dollars were being allocated to get in front of the right prospects," said Michael Barrasso, WealthReach's co-founder and chief executive. "Targeting prequalified prospects means a firm's marketing budget stops being spent in a spray-and-pray fashion ... [leading to] better engagement, higher conversion rates and less time and money wasted on cold outreach."

Read more: Prospecting for clients the ‘old-fashioned way’

VastAdvisor's chief executive, Ian Karnell, argued the anemic growth for many financial advisors over the last several years is partly due to their reliance on "lead brokers and referrals, which weren't built to surface the full spectrum of prospects available.

"[This partnership] creates a seamless organic growth marketing opportunity for advisors and firms, from identifying the strongest prospects to having a solid website that validates a prospect’s selection,” Karnell said.

WealthReach co-founder and chief partnerships officer David DeCelle added that scattered, generic outreach has been the central failure of advisor marketing, and that knowing exactly who is in-market allows firms to have a more substantive first conversation.

The partnership is now active for firms that already work with both companies.

Both organizations arrive at the partnership fresh off outside funding. Last week, VastAdvisor closed a $1 million SAFE round led by a group of prominent industry leaders including Carson Group's Dani Fava and advisortech expert Jason Pereira, while WealthReach closed a $1 million seed round in June led by Cecure Corporation, a financial-services holding company  co-founded by Robert S. Schwartz.

Other wealthtech firms are offering their own answers to the organic growth problem for advisors. Last week, FINNY rolled out a radical usage-based pricing model that ties its fees to the assets under management it helps generate – similar to the performance-linked custodian referral programs long available to only the largest RIAs – rather than a flat subscription.

Read more: Schwab's referral hike has RIAs fighting for fewer leads, recruiter says

"Growth in this industry has been rigged for a long time – we're correcting that," said Eden Ovadia, FINNY's co-founder and chief executive. "[We're] creating a true partnership where our incentives stay aligned over the life of the client relationship."