FactSet, a global provider of data and technology to the financial services industry, has invested $12.5 million in research and relationship intelligence platform Aidentified Inc.
In short, Aidentified provides tools to identify, qualify and convert new customer relationships and works with financial advisors, marketing teams and other sales professionals across multiple industry verticals. According to co-founder and co-CEO Tom Aley, more than 80% of its business is in the financial services sector.
“Search has been a frustration for our clients since I started in this business,” said Greg King, head of wealth management at FactSet, who has now spent 28 years with the firm in various roles.
“We've seen the difficulties advisers have had in both acquiring new clients and engaging with clients at the right time, for example, knowing when a money-moving opportunity is happening but not having a direct connection with law. person—both require great people data and relationship building that Aidentified excels at, he said.
Aley and co-CEO Tom Rauker said the company will use the capital to fund additional research and development, further improve data quality and grow its team to help meet and drive demand.
WealthManagement.com first wrote for Aidentified in 2021 and how it uses AI-enabled technology to discover and analyze search networks by gathering data on individual and family-level career moves, wealth events (think executive-level promotions, publicly traded stock option awards, etc.) .), wealth scores, household incomes, personal interests and hundreds of additional data points.
“Categorically – almost by default – we fall into search (the technology space) almost adjacent to CRM, but at the end of the day, you have 100 million people in a bubble (professional profiles) and 200 million in their lives customers on our platform”, said Rauker.
“Think of a Venn diagram, and we push those bubbles closer and closer, you're getting closer to the real connections in the relationship — this person lives in my neighborhood, or he sat on the board of this person's company,” he said. .
The company's machine learning technology has mapped more than 16 billion first-degree connections and 800 billion second-degree connections (up from 5.5 billion and 100 billion, respectively, in 2021) to 210 million consumers and 100 million professional profiles of US data.
Another part of Aidentified's machine learning performs 'entity extraction'. It sifts through daily news feeds, which include around 350,000 articles and blog entries, looking for funding announcements, role changes and M&A events, among others.
“It's really matching people with events — not companies — that no one else is doing in the industry,” Aley said.
“Everyone in the B2B sector of our space is pretty good at tracking executives and the public board, but as you move beyond that to tracking where everyone works and lives, that's where our technology shines,” he said.
The FactSet king said his firm's data sets, which include everything from SEC filings, options exercise data, supply chain and M&A data, and ownership data, have the potential to enrich more beyond Aidentified's matching capabilities.
“This is a great opportunity for us to take all of our public and private data analytics and layer it into relationship data and bring real efficiencies to financial advisors,” King said.