As an advisor, imagine knowing a client’s favorite coffee shop or place where he or she likes to eat lunch, not just where he or she prefers to invest.

That’s part of the goal behind AssetLink’s AI-powered advisory platform, which combines a client’s typical financial data with their social media profiles to quickly analyze the individual and connect them with the right advisors. The platform also provides AI-powered activity summaries for advisors on existing clients. The overarching goal is to transform data in a way that deepens the relationships between advisors and their clients, said AssetLink founder and CEO Devon Drew.

“Relational intelligence is going to be the differentiator for people from a recruiting standpoint, from a distribution standpoint — whether an advisor is trying to see if a client is a good fit for their practice or vice versa — that’s going to continue to be very important,” he said.

Drew said the idea came from his own sense of frustration after nearly 20 years in the advisory industry, during which he spent a lot of time manually transferring PDFs and other documents to different platforms to create portfolio analyses for clients.

“I was a senior director at Vanguard, and I couldn’t find our data, I couldn’t map it to the people I wanted to talk to. And then I had multiple screens open. I was looking at our intranet, I was trying to search,” he said. “And all of a sudden, 45 minutes had passed and I was looking at one person. That’s an industry-wide efficiency problem.”

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Drew left Vanguard in 2022 to help DFD Partners, a distribution services platform, which then became a much broader AI-based platform, AssetLink, in 2023.

This technology provider profile is one of a series mini profile that puts vendors in the spotlight, helping advisors make informed decisions about technology choices.

Name: Resource Link

Website: Assetlink.ai

AssetLink Size: The New York-based firm has 11 employees and works with 137 different firms. Drew said AssetLink has intelligence on 147,000 financial advisors and about 250,000 end investors.

Products and services offered: AssetLink started as a platform connecting advisors with clients, but has grown over time to offer deeper insights into clients, their lifestyles and to offer advisors a chatbot on how to connect with clients.

AssetLink also gives the advisor an “intelligence scorecard” of the customer that shows “who this person is, what their passions are, what their interests are,” he said. “And then we can connect that to a chatbot that says, ‘Hey, here’s the best strategy to connect with them.’”

Going deeper, the chatbot could help show an advisor where “to take them to breakfast, lunch or dinner. And we’ll pull that from Facebook or Instagram based on geotags and posts,” Drew said.

AssetLink cannot be integrated with other CRM platforms used by investment advisors.

Who AssetLink wants to serve: Financial advisors, planners and asset and fund managers.

What kind of problems is AssetLink trying to solve: The basis of AssetLink’s technology is taking hard-to-read documents like PDFs and digitizing everything into so-called clean data, which AI tools can then create real-time analytics and action plans for advisors. The goal is partly to help streamline paper-heavy back-office processes for advisors.

“All of these inefficiencies in 2024 and beyond have to go. Right? And if you don’t embrace clean data and you can’t leverage tools to extract information (that’s) intelligent where you need it, you’re going to get left behind,” Drew said. “The competition is fierce and getting fiercer. You need intelligence as a service to compete in an ever-changing world.”

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How AssetLink differs from the competition: Drew said what sets the company apart is the makeup of its team. Drew came from a more traditional consulting background but began building AssetLink by meeting with tech experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he began building the company with former Spotify techie Surfield Thomas as co-founder and AssetLink’s chief technology officer.

“It gives us a diverse perspective on what we’re building and what the product roadmap is,” Drew said.

How much is it: AssetLink starts at $250,000 per year per business unit or enterprise and goes up. Drew said they will soon introduce a version friendly to individual advisors for about $1,500 per year.

“So the hardest part was creating a simplified version that was priced right for individual clients, investment advisors and retail clients,” he said.

What’s next in development: Without going into details, Drew said the company is working on a prototype of what it calls “the world’s first AI-powered investment salesperson.”

Drew to speak at the first Financial Planning conference dedicated exclusively to AI in wealth management, ADVISE AIon October 9-10 in Las Vegas.