Catchlight with Wilbur Swan | E247

Harnessing AI to better manage and close leads.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Wilbur Swan, CEO of Catchlight. It is a company that uses artificial intelligence to help advisors basically find and close better leads. Catchlight AI is dedicated to helping advisors be more efficient in their outreach, personalize their approach, and be increasingly effective in converting leads to new clients. Through rich data intelligence and proprietary AI powered insights for sales and marketing, Catchlight pinpoints an advisor's best opportunities. Catchlight helps advisors quickly identify which leads to pitch and how to best engage them.

Episode Highlights

  • 0.50: Catchlight plays a new kind of solution for advisors which focus on what we call lead optimization, which is common in other industries, but new to financial advisors, says Wilbur.

  • 2.20: When Wilbur started doing research on this 2018, they were talking to a lot of advisors about a bunch of topics within Fidelity Labs and it was interesting like how you can help us grow.

  • 3.48: Wilbur looked at the advisor's space and how they are targeting leads and their approach towards them and felt that how they are approaching is super important to improve.

  • 4.13: Fidelity Labs started with infidelity in 2005 and had a mix of roles in almost 20-year period of working with the businesses to accelerate ideas called as digital acceleration, as well as incubating an entirely new concept, called as full staff incubation. 

  • 5.20: Fidelity Labs for those who haven't seen it is a good combination of subject matter expertise, resources and of course money to help with the ideas for innovation, says Jason. 

  • 6.08: Wilbur's company is now as of T3 publicly launched and available for advisors to subscribe to and it's an ongoing relationship with Fidelity Labs.

  • 10.08: The advisor gets into our web UI, uploads a spreadsheet that includes all of their leads and system then goes toward taking the core data about leads and we enrich it using the same type of data partners that large companies typically use to understand their marketing, says Wilbur. 

  • 11.19: Wilbur has partnered with a number of fidelity partners to actually look at across a large set of people who have looked for.

  • 14.15: With machine learning models we split models capturing like does the person have the means that they would need financial advice? Do they have complexity in their life and are they encountering life invents that suggest how the timing is good for the advisor to pitch that prospect, explains Wilbur. 

  • 16.05: When you aggregate the data across state advisors or across several advisers is super interesting to marketing people who are thinking about personalization, says Wilbur. 

  • 18.30 Wilbur started to think more about how this AI applies to the marketing part of the process. They have firms that have marketers that are basically looking at how do I first incentivize advisors to capture more data on their leads in the system.

  • 19.04: Wilbur is particularly focused right now on a tip of the iceberg and easy solution for advisors to use around how do you gauge better with one-to-one prospects.

  • 21.07: Wilbur says that they are growing really quickly. Just a few months ago they posted 20 open roles and still they are looking for many more.

  • 23.06: Financial advisors provide really valuable service and Wilbur would love to see them be able to provide it to more people at greater scale via Catchlight.

3 Key Points

  1. If you can unlock the potential of your advisors in the marketing and selling, they are doing, it makes them more efficient in terms of use of their time, says Wilbur. 

  2. Catchlight's UI output is almost similar to what Google search does. Its page ranks the best matches for you at the top of page so you can focus on the best places to find your effort.

  3. Fidelity and Fidelity partnership bring to bear large amounts of data to study to figure out how Salesforce actually works.

Tweetable Quotes

  • "We aim to help advisors improve growth through AI powered insights on three things like who should they call, how should they pitch them and what should they pitch them." - Wilbur 

  • "Only 15% of people who basically reach out about your service are ready to buy that time and another 85% might be interested, but they're just not ready. So the focus is on how do I close the people who are interested right now which is valuable." - Jason

  • "We are also continually improving. In our learning model our data science team is constantly evolving in the background to best identify the prospects for a given advisor." - Wilbur 

  • "You are soaking up a ton of data from publicly available sources and serving up against that next best prospect." – Jason

  • "I think anytime you're sitting at the new company, there are the challenges such as brand awareness. We also believe passionately around lead optimization, that's a bit of a new solution for advisors and its challenging." - Wilbur

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech