FactSet, a global data and technology provider to the financial services industry, has invested $12.5 million in the prospecting and relationship intelligence platform Aidentified Inc.
In a nutshell, Aidentified provides tools to identify, qualify and convert new client relationships and works with financial advisors, marketing teams and other sales professionals across many industry verticals. According to co-founder and co-CEO Tom Aley, more than 80% of its business is in the financial services sector.
“Prospecting has been a frustration for our clients since I started in this business,” said Greg King, the head of wealth management at FactSet, who has now spent 28 years with the firm in various roles.
“We’ve seen the struggles advisors have had both in new client acquisition and in terms of engaging with clients at the right time, for example, knowing when a money-in-motion opportunity is occurring but not having a direct connection to the right person—both require superb people data and relationship connections for which Aidentified excels, he said.
Aley and co-CEO Tom Rauker said the company would 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 about Aidentified in 2021 and how it uses AI-enabled technology to discover and analyze prospecting networks by aggregating data on individual- and household-level career moves, wealth events (think executive-level promotions, publicly filed stock option awards, etc.), wealth scores, household income, personal interests and hundreds of additional data points.
“Categorically—almost by default—we fall into the almost CRM-adjacent prospecting [technology space], but at the end of the day, you have 100 million people in one bubble [professional profiles] and 200 million in their consumer lives on our platform,” said Rauker.
“Think about a Venn diagram, and we push those bubbles closer and closer, you are getting closer to the real connections in relationships—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) across 210 million consumer and 100 million professional U.S. data profiles.
Another part of Aidentified’s machine learning performs 'entity extraction.' It scours daily news feeds, which include some 350,000 articles and blog entries, looking for financing announcements, role changes and M&A events, among other things.
“It is really matching people to events—not companies—that nobody else is doing in the industry,” said Aley.
“Everyone in the B2B sector of our space is pretty good at tracking public executives and boards, but as you get beyond that to tracking where everyone works and lives, that is where our technology excels,” he said.
FactSet’s King said his firm’s datasets, which include everything from SEC filings, data on options exercises, supply chain data and M&A and ownership data, have the potential to further enrich Aidentified’s matching abilities.
“This is a great opportunity for us to take all of our public and private data analytics and layer it into the relationship data and give real efficiency to financial advisors,” said King.
