Indyfin with Akshay Singh | E244

Connecting consumers with advisors based on client feedback.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Akshay Singh, Founder, and CEO of Indyfin; it is the investor experience platform that has redefined the way consumers find, research, review, and interact with financial advisors.

Episode Highlights

  • 1.08: Indyfin is about simplistically setting independence like yelp meets mash.com, but for wealth management, if you think about Indyfin, the most important thing is helping financial advisors and the potential clients establish trust with each other, no platform online or marketplace online digitally is able to do that, says Akshay. 

  • 1.42: One of the key components missing in this industry has been, what are others who work with this financial advisor say about this advisor that social proof has just been missing. Indyfin is built to enable financial advisors present this very simplistically and easily and help with formation of trust online. So that's kind of what we are doing in, says Akshay. 

  • 2.39: This business is not about what advice you are giving specifically or what the tax says. It's really about helping people manage their emotions and helping them make the right decision, and only a human being can do that. So that motivated Akshay to build a platform which enabled the maximum number of financial advisors and entire market to be able to help consumers online.

  • 3.04: In the United States Akshay got the regulators coming in last year saying that financial advisors can now get testimonials and reviews and ratings from their clients and that's just what really crystallized Indyfin to what it is today. 

  • 5.45: Google has figured out that user data or user feedback, what these clients are saying is super important. So, Google is able to identify a lot of these keywords that people are putting in their searches and match that up with the profile of these advisors.

  • 7.07: Akshay talks about the depth by which they are actually collecting data and what it is they are actually looking for when they are collecting the data. 

  • 7.30: We give the clients the opportunity to give the advisor both qualitative and star rating feedback on each of these offerings that the advisor has. Then we also focus on specific types of situational advice. The advisor may have given tailored advice to the client, says Akshay. 

  • 11.26: When someone comes to the advisor's profile, there is obviously an overall rating. There is a tag that the advisor has been verified by us and then there are ratings on key characteristics, says Akshay.

  • 12.23: There is other data-driven information along the lines of how much assets did visor manage, how many households and then there are in depth ratings around various skills that divisor has state planning, financial planning, managing investments, taxes, retirement, followed by in depth reviews from all of the published reviews that this advisor has, says Akshay.

  • 13.47: Indyfin is built in such a way that it is connected with the advisor's calendar when they build their profile so someone can easily set up a meeting with the advisor of their choice. 

  • 17.36: Indyfin also offers affiliate partnerships where Akshay and his team are getting some consumers from and again, they go through the matchmaking experience, and they connect the consumer to the advisors. 

  • 17.44: Akshay talks about the success stories of their customers. He shares his thoughts about consumers adopting Indyfin. 

  • 19.33: Advisors are kind of finding this data to be super helpful. The next stage that we find that kind of once advisors go live with their profile, they obviously have a public profile and that is very exciting, but then when they start to find it. They starting to rank for certain words and that's super exciting. 

  • 22.57: One thing that Akshay could change about the company, or the industry as a whole is, that the SEC marketing rule had been passed two years back, not one year.

  • 23.23: The biggest challenge is when you are trying to build something new in an industry which is, you know, in this case it is, hey, let's get your clients views out. It requires a model and there are regulations involved too, and it requires a lot of education, says Akshay.

  • 24.20: There are some market leaders, some of the earliest adopters. These are visionary arise, they are able to digest regulations are saying, but also understand what the opportunity is, says Akshay. 

  • 26.02: Akshay's vision is in the future; financial advisors would actually be doing zero marketing and that's something that we really believe in and we are just helping the industry transition to that place.

3 Key Points

  1. Indyfin is giving financial advisors a platform that they can count on to help them collect feedback from their existing clients in a highly structured manner. Akshay and his team have done all the research to figure out what are the most important questions to be asking your clients to get valuable insights and feedback that can help you grow your practice.

  2. Through Indyfin how the advisor's benefit is that any prospective client who is going to show up on devices calendar for a meeting to make sure that they are qualified and in the process of their sharing information withIndyfin, which may be helpful for the advisor to show up for the meeting, Indyfin will select that information. It's purely administrative and Indyfin basically gets all that information, explains Akshay.

  3. The most powerful form of business are referrals and those are getting harder and harder, and they are also not very structured. Second most powerful thing is validation and referrals, validation. 

Tweetable Quotes

  • "I have been solving the same problem from the beginning, which is how do we help consumers better manage their finances." - Akshay 

  • "I know we will get to the testimonials; we will get to the growth. But getting the fundamentals right is so important and hear what's driving everything is client feedback." - Akshay 

  • "Too often in our businesses do not collect enough data to from our clients in a structured manner in such a way that we can actually act on it. And that is the first problem Akshay is solving for." – Jason

  • "My job is advisor would be so much even more fun that's you've got to identify who those net promoters are and be able to ask them for the referral." - Akshay

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech