SmartAsset is using a form of artificial intelligence to hasten its progress of creating a public profile for all 300,000-plus registered investment advisors in the United States.
The company that offers a digital lead-generation service for advisors called SmartAdvisor is currently using some of its $28 million investment led by RIA aggregator Focus Financial to build a user-friendly directory with detailed, public-facing profiles of all RIAs, regardless of whether they sign up for the service or not. In September, 10,000 profiles went live on the company’s SmartAdvisorMatch.com website and the goal was to have 100,000 before 2019.
That goal has since been adjusted. In less than two months, the company added another 40,000 profiles and with the help of natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, SmartAsset expects to have a profile for all 300,000-plus RIAs by the end of next year. At least one well-known advisor, Ron Carson, already has a profile. Carson couldn’t be reached to comment for this story.
All the profiles are created using data from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency and other online resources such as advisory firm websites and LinkedIn. The profiles are free for advisors, who can also edit them at no cost.
The profile pages also serve as a way for advisors to capture attention through search engines, which the webpages are optimized for, a SmartAsset spokesperson said.
“No one has ever used advanced natural processing software for a project anything like SmartAdvisorMatch.com, much less at the scale we’re achieving,” SmartAsset CEO and Co-founder Michael Carvin said in a statement.