Want New Clients in Your Neighborhood? Consider SmartAdvisor

2. Second, these are not cold leads that the advisor gets, but rather 'high-intent" leads, as SmartAdvisor calls them. "They opt in" by responding through a "little link on a retirement calculator or on a CNN Money article," says Carvin, that asks 'Are you interested in meeting a financial advisor in your neighborhood?' The prospects then have to answer 20-25 questions about their financial assets and goals, including queries like 'Do you have kids? How close are you to retirement?' which Carvin says help "weed out those who don't want to work with an advisor. Then we get on the phone."

Those calls to prospective clients are made by SmartAdvisor's team of 'concierges,' who match them with the right advisor. Who is the right advisor? It's someone who is local (prospects are 'geo-targeted' by Zip codes that the advisor chooses, since many clients "don't want to drive more than 20 minutes" to an advisor's office, says Carvin) and who already works with a similar kind of client, measured by a range of indicators including investable assets or income or by proximity to retirement.

3. The third differentiator is that the cost seems quite reasonable. There is a one-time fee for each prospect, based on the prospect's level of investable assets. For prospects with over $1 million the fee is $190; for those with $250,000 to $1 million the fee is $90; for those with from $100,000 to $250,000 in assets, it's $40. 'We'll be unveiling soon an over $5 million" level: "You'd be surprised by the number of people who come onto the platform with more than $5 million in investable assets—just shy of 5%," says Carvin.

The intent of the pricing, says Carvin, is that an advisor should have "an honest opportunity to convert every lead we provide them," and one "enormous luxury we have is that we have such a large audience." How large is that audience? Carvin reports that in January 2018 alone, SmartAsset had 37 million unique visitors.

According to the company, in January investors matched to advisors through the platform had more than $4 billion in investable assets; the average individual investor matched had $750,000 in investable assets.

And who are those advisors using the platform? Carvin says they run the gamut from larger brokerage firms to independents, though he reports that the "strongest traction is at fee-based fiduciaries."

As with all good startups (SmartAsset.com itself is five years old and venture capital-funded), Carvin and his team saw an opportunity that wasn't being met efficiently and built a technology platform that brings efficiency to that market. "It's scattered and disorganized," he says of the referral market, "and through our partnerships and the large audience that we have on smartasset.com, we organized that audience of people who are online doing research" and are looking to find an advisor. SmartAdvisor created a "structured marketplace where an advisor can meet those people.  We just connected those dots."