Serial tech startup founder Uri Levine famously advised entrepreneurs to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
Most advisors, however, would like a solution to the problem that Eden Ovadia and her team at FINNY AI admit to obsessing over: organic growth for RIAs. FINNY's mission is to automate lead identification, prospect prioritization and appointment scheduling to improve how advisors find and communicate with potential clients, reducing a financial advisor's workload while increasing growth rates.
“Organic growth for the consultant felt like a difficult problem to solve,” she said, making it an attractive challenge for her engineer's mind.
“Literally, my favorite part of the week is Sunday morning, when it's just the three of us founders getting together and planning and solving problems on the whiteboard,” she said when asked if she had any hobbies.
Ovadia comes from a family of engineers and looks for the hard problems. “I taught myself how to code when I was 14 – it felt like 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 team captain.
She attended McGill University, where she studied software engineering and started the school's Women in Tech chapter.
She was working for the Boston Consulting Group on a project for a large RIA when she saw the problem most firms have with prospecting and lead conversion. Honestly, she saw the same issue from across the table as a potential client.
“As a 25-year-old woman, I was looking for a counselor on my own, and I was connected to several men I had nothing in common with,” she said. It was clear that the advisor search tool she was using (but declined to name) was only looking at location and net worth to make a match. She eventually found her counselor through the old-fashioned method of word-of-mouth referrals.
“You want to like the person you're going to work with,” Ovadia said. In a perfect world, clients and advisors would also have a few things in common.
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 perfect what they call the 'F-Score', or prioritization score . This score is unique to each lead and advisor pair and reflects the likelihood that a prospect will convert to an individual advisor.
Ovadia said the team sees F-Score accuracy improving as more data, perspectives and advisors feed into FINNY's large language model and algorithms.
Launched in February, the company has several customers on board and revenue coming in. Its three founders participated in the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, and FINNY won the top prize in Morningstar's annual fintech competition this year – Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor invested in the startup himself.
Ovadia said she thinks younger generations will be far less reliant on personal referrals, preferring to search on their own and expecting technology to help them find their match, as is the case in today's dating world. .
“Regardless of whose numbers you use, a very high percentage of heirs in the highly publicized estate transfer said they would not use their parents' adviser,” she said.