Financial Planning - January 2013

high net worth

Stalking the
Perfect Client
For a price, new data-mining services
offer access to stunningly detailed
personal information on clients
and prospects. By Elizabeth Wine

It might be easy for advisors to feel overwhelmed with all the data available to help them do their jobs. There’s new software that tracks the tweets and Facebook activity of prospects and regular clients, plus old-school investing tools that keep tabs on hot stocks and sectors as well as the portfolios of their clients.

Now add one more chunk of information to assimilate: wealth databases. A small group of determined data miners are slicing and dicing the world of high-net-worth individuals to extract easily digested sets of prospects: officers at public companies with stock options, people with a certain amount of investable assets, those with expensive hobbies like golf or yachting, and so on.

A stunning (some might say
alarming) amount of personal in-
formation is public. Sell a home, get
married or donate to a certain cause;
it’s all recorded someplace that any-
one can access. And the wealthiest
people, despite their best efforts,
leave the biggest trails of all. But the
trouble is, much of that informa-
tion is scattered all over the place,
in nooks and crannies no one would
think to explore. Enter cutting-edge
technology.

PU TTING DA TA TO USE

WealthEngine says that, last year, one RIA firm requested a list of 500 ultrahigh-net-worth prospects, each worth at least $20 million, who had contributed at least $10,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The firm then invited these high rollers to an exclusive $10,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner with President Obama in New York.