Turning Mortality Data into Actionable Wealth Intelligence

Transcript: Wealth Management and Mortality Data Insights

Jason LaBonte: Hi everyone, I’m Jason LaBonte, CEO of Veritas Data Research. Today I’m sitting with Steve Marshall, the Chief Product Officer for Aidentified. We’re going to have a really interesting discussion. Most folks know that Veritas Data Research mortality data is used in healthcare applications, but today we’re going to talk about wealth management and how mortality data plays a role there. Aidentified does really interesting things, and it should be a great talk. Steve, it’s great to have you. Why don’t we start with an intro to yourself, your role, and the problem you’re trying to solve for your clients?

Steve Marshall: Sure. Thanks, Jason, and thanks very much again for having me. As you said, I’m Steve Marshall, the Chief Product Officer at Aidentified. We are a relationship intelligence platform built to help financial advisers and wealth managers accelerate their organic growth. The problem we’re solving is simple but structural. Advisers know they need to grow their books of business, but they lack clarity on who their best prospects are, how to find them, and when is the right time to reach out. They need to know when assets are most likely to be in transition and, critically, what is the warmest and most efficient relationship pathway to reach that person and eliminate the dreadful cold call.

We combine our capabilities to solve all of those things. First, we help advisers identify their highest probability growth opportunities. We don’t just find broadly affluent households; we find prospects who fit their ideal client profile and with whom they might have a meaningful connection. We have a massive data set of over 300 million people in the US and up to 200 attributes per person. If you have a good idea of your ideal prospect, you’re likely to find many of those people through our platform. That centers around the “who.”

Then we help you understand when it’s the right time to reach out based on need-based intent signals. Wealth management growth is not just dependent on who you know; it is about showing up at the right time with the right tools. This intent timing signal is critically important. Lastly, the third leg of the stool is relationship intelligence. Because we have so much information, we understand who knows who based on where they’ve worked, where they live, and their social circles. We help you identify the warmest relationship pathways, which increases the odds of success in any prospecting initiative significantly.

Jason LaBonte: That makes great sense. I want to key in on that timing piece. What is it about life events, or particularly deaths in the family, that make those interesting moments where assets might move?

Steve Marshall: Assets rarely move randomly in wealth management. They move during transitions like retirement, liquidity events, new jobs, divorce, business sales, and obviously, death. These are the moments when big financial decisions are made. These conversations often happen around kitchen tables, frequently amidst a fog of tremendous grief. People make impactful, sometimes irreversible decisions when they probably need the help of an experienced and objective expert.

Research shows that 60% of people who have a financial adviser hired them on the back of one of these life events. There is a tremendous signal there. The adviser with the information advantage who reaches out quickly wins, as that information gets stale fast. In the case of mortality, it is much more than simply knowing who passed away. Wealth advisers know we’re in the midst of a massive intergenerational wealth transfer between Baby Boomers and Millennials. It totals almost 100 trillion dollars over the next 20 years.

Understanding that someone passed away is a tragedy, but it is also a piece of data. Understanding the loved ones in that household and what assets are likely to move helps service providers assist a family in a time of need. Tracking life events indicates both need and timing.

Jason LaBonte: As you built your platform, how did you approach the data you wanted to bring in? What is the bigger barrier: finding data with a signal or pulling insights from that data to understand intent?

Steve Marshall: It’s really both. The world is awash in data, and wealth management firms are drowning in it. The world does not need another company to give them more data. We need people who can remove some data and replace it with real insight. That is where the gap lies. I see many things happening, but I don’t always understand why or what I should do.

Firms have CRM notes, portfolio analytics, and marketing tools, but they lack a reliable way to understand what that information tells them. A mortality record by itself is just an event. Understanding who is impacted and the size of the assets moving provides the insight. Data answers what happened; insight answers why it matters and what you should do about it. We think of ourselves as a relationship intelligence layer and an insight provider rather than a data provider.

Jason LaBonte: How do you separate meaningful intent from background noise to know which signals are important?

Steve Marshall: That’s hard to do. Many players spend time thinking about intent, but we look at it differently. Typically, intent signals reflect behavior, like researching a product. That is very noisy. We are deliberate about not treating every data change as an alert.

We look at intent based on need. If there’s a death in the family, those people are struggling with a transition. They may not have Googled what to do yet, but there is an indication of real need. If I’m selling food, I would rather sell to someone who is hungry than someone who just researched food. We focus on demonstrating need based on actual events: moving employers, a company acquisition, or an IPO. These indicate significant intent and help us reduce information overload.

Jason LaBonte: In your role as Chief Product Officer, what insights can you give regarding the process of evaluating data partners? How important are transparency and provenance?

Steve Marshall: We take this very seriously. We are a SOC 2 Type 2 compliant organization. We are committed to data with the highest ethics and responsibility. In the data business, you can do everything right for a long time, but a few mistakes lose you the right to compete. We are talking about human beings, so we treat data with utmost respect and require the same from our vendors.

We put vendors through a rigorous due diligence process. We want to understand the provenance of the data and the internal processes for privacy and security. Our clients operate in a highly regulated environment, so this is essential. Our ability to select vendors is a core competency that differentiates us. Veritas is at the top of that list. There are data sets I would love to include, like scraped social media, but they don’t pass the smell test for privacy and ethics. We will not use them.

Jason LaBonte: As a data supplier, we appreciate that commitment. When you explored mortality data, were there other sources you considered?

Steve Marshall: There were others, but we found Veritas early. Veritas stood out immediately. Mortality data requires a higher threshold for quality and accuracy than any other data set because of the risk of errors. If you miss a death, you might lose potential business, which isn’t great but isn’t earth-shattering. However, if you think someone passed away and reach out to the family only to find they are alive, you obliterate trust. That is humiliating and hard to recover from.

We needed a level of quality that was defensible and consistent. The fact that we can see a death certificate if there’s a question about a record gives us great confidence. If I don’t have confidence in my vendor, I can’t ask our clients to have confidence in me. That made the decision to go with Veritas easy.

Jason LaBonte: Can you talk about the implementation process of bringing our data into your workflow?

Steve Marshall: We have a rigorous process because we manage 300 million profiles. We take a large sample of mortality records and test our ability to match them to our data. Before this, we didn’t have a way to mark someone as deceased; they would just eventually fall out of the data set. Marking them is important for data quality and identifying asset transitions.

Once we saw a very high match rate, we scaled the process. Every month, we run the new data through our pipeline. We mark individuals as deceased and create a “wealth trigger” to indicate where inheritance might be headed. We don’t know the specifics of a will, but we know a transfer of wealth will happen. We show an environment where assets will likely transition, and these people may require expert services. We automated the ingestion so it runs by itself.

Jason LaBonte: Have there been measurable improvements or examples of clients taking advantage of this data?

Steve Marshall: Every day. Our “potential wealth transfer trigger” is our first proprietary signal where we combine different data elements. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the great wealth transfer. Between 70% and 80% of people who inherit money are likely to fire the legacy adviser. This is a transfer of wealth from old-school advisers to those leveraging the best signals.

We combine your mortality data with our consumer data to provide a signal that this event is part of the great wealth transfer. We show the relationship pathway to make a successful outcome more likely. Our clients are really excited that we’ve started to help them navigate this. We are really just beginning.

Jason LaBonte: This is a problem we don’t hear a lot about outside the industry, but the scale is impressive. I love that you’re inventing new things using our data. This was super informative. I hope folks reach out if they have questions about your platform.

Steve Marshall: Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

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Would you like me to:

• Summarize the key differences between how Steve views “behavioral intent” versus “need-based intent”?
• Draft a LinkedIn post highlighting the “great wealth transfer” insights from this transcript?
• Format this into a Q&A style blog post for the Veritas website?