Niharika Shah moved into her role as CEO of Clout, an automated marketing platform for financial advisors, just eight months ago. But her long background in marketing for financial services prepared her for the job, she said.
Clout is one of a dozen startups within the fintech incubator and holding company Tifin Group, which recently raised $47 million in a series C funding round, made multiple media acquisitions and recruited Ark Investment Management’s Cathie Wood to its board of directors.
“I’ve been on the inside at large firms bringing in new talent and new technology throughout my career,” Shah said. Most recently, she spent almost a decade in senior management and executive roles
at Prudential Financial before joining the Tifin Group as a partner two years ago. A few months after that, she took the reins as CMO for the entire group, in addition to the leadership role at Clout.
“Quite a few things came in handy,” she said of her past experiences. “Orchestrating, understanding messaging and marketing in addition to having empathy with the clients,” she said.
Clout is “a marketing platform for growth through better engagement,” said Tifin Group CEO Vinay Nair in a previous interview. The idea is to improve how well and frequently advisors engage with their clients—but doing so in a largely automated fashion by using artificial intelligence. Clout can take in everything from a client’s data on an advisor’s CRM system to holdings from portfolio management and then match up relevant content, whether news or from social media, that is important to them.
“Clout being able to answer ‘what is the next best content to serve up to my client, prospect, investor or visitor, whatever the use case is,” she said, adding that the mission is to seamlessly “match people to insightful advice and content ubiquitously.”
Inside the Tifin Group, it sits alongside other well-regarded startups—including Totum Risk, Magnifi and Positivly, among others—which are focused on risk profiling, hyper-personalized investment recommendations, and helping advisors target and reach purpose- or viewpoint-driven investors, respectively.
The group, which was founded by serial entrepreneur, investor and academic Nair in 2019, has grown to more than 175 full-time employees across nine startups, based in two offices in Boulder, Colo., where the bulk of the team works. There are also team members in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Mumbai, India.
Shah said there were “platform integrations where Clout is able to learn from Totum or Magnifi or Positivly and others here within the group,” noting that all the startups are based on open architecture; clients can tap into one, several or the whole network of Tifin platforms.
“I think 2022 is going to be a big year for Clout,” she said, referring to work already underway as well as enterprise relationships she could not yet discuss, though others have already been announced for the group, including deals with Broadridge and Morningstar, respectively.