FINNY founder Eden Ovadia shares how the firm is tackling one of financial advice’s biggest challenges: organic growth. Advisors can spend up to 60 hours to win a single client – consuming their most valuable asset: time. And that doesn’t scale. FINNY’s approach – using AI to identify high-intent prospects and automate outreach – aims to change that. The goal? A more efficient growth engine, especially for advisors with clearly defined niches. In an increasingly competitive business, specialization and smart use of technology can compound over time – separating firms that grow from those that don’t. After all, if you’re not growing, you may be dying on the vine.
Danny Noonan: FINNY is a New York-based AI startup building what it calls the organic growth engine for financial advisors. Founded in 2024 the company has quickly became ubiquitous across the advice industry. Their platform uses artificial intelligence to help advisors identify and connect with the right prospects ideally at the right moment in time. It tracks money-in-motion events like job changes, home purchases, and business exits, then automates outreach across the most effective channels. The results have been hard to ignore. FINNY is growing fast and now serves more than 400 firms across RIAs, broker/dealers, and banks. They've been showered with industry recognition, including Morningstar's FinTech Showcase Winner, The Wealthies "Best Marketing Automation Platform," and the #1 AI Prospecting Tool in an independent study by the Oasis Group.
I'm Danny Noonan. This is Simple But Not Easy, a podcast from Morningstar's Wealth group. With us today is Eden Ovadia, CEO and Co-Founder of FINNY. Eden holds a software engineering degree from McGill University with specialization in machine learning. Before FINNY, she spent two years at BCG working across tech, financial institutions, and private equity.
Today we're going to cover the organic growth challenge in financial advice, what FINNY built, how it works, and what's under the hood, and advisor success stories.
Eden, great to have you. Welcome.
Eden Ovadia: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.
Noonan: Yeah, likewise. Where are you joining us from today?
Ovadia: I'm in our offices in New York City. The office is a bit of a funny story, but we used this old artist loft. So, there's a bunch of interesting components of the office, including a massive jacuzzi tub in the middle of the office. But that's where I'm calling from today.
Noonan: Okay. I'll talk to somebody at Morningstar. We don't have that yet. It's already early April here, so we're a quarter way around the track on the year. How's the year been so far? Off to a good start?
Ovadia: Crazy. I was just reflecting that we are just entering now Q2. I cannot believe that 2026 has flown by so far. It's just been an insane year, both from a FINNY perspective and also just generally AI technology and the rate of change has been astounding.
Noonan: Before we get into all the important topics, I'm interested to hear about your professional journey. How does somebody go from software engineering into a career working with financial advisors?
Ovadia: Yeah. So, there's a personal and professional journey into financial advice. On the personal side, I grew up in a family in Montreal. My dad was a small business owner, and I just didn't have all the best financial literacy tools. And so, when I moved to New York out of college and started working at Boston Consulting Group, it was the first time in my life that I'd really started making any real money. And I just did not have the right skills or knowledge in place whatsoever to feel like a (crypt-managing) finances, even if you ask the right questions. And so, I started my own journey of looking for a financial advisor.
I was really disappointed with the tools out there that were both from an advisor perspective and to help the consumer match with a potential advisor. At that point, I must have been 24, 23. I was making some money, not a significant amount, but some money. And I was getting matched with people who had absolutely nothing in common with on these online forums. People were reaching out to me that were three times my age, what were you saying? And it just off of where I was located, which was midtown West New York, and why I had been really low AUM at the time.
The process felt a little broken from a consumer perspective. At the same time, at BCG, I was working in financial services, actually helping the largest elevators in our space with our M&A strategy, so the inorganic growth side of the business. And it became clear that the number one factor that would help a firm as they were looking to exit, or that would impact their enterprise value, was their organic growth rate. But even the best firms that had any type of sophisticated growth strategy was a clear job in the market. And so, kind of your conclusion between both of those, and so I think this isn't really a worthwhile problem to show ourselves.
Noonan: That's great. Yeah, I mean, organic growth, that's kind of the North Star for every industry, especially it's true for financial advisors. In case of FINNY, sometime over the past 12 months, you jumped on my radar. It felt like there was a span late last summer into the fall, where I couldn't go a week without reading about you all in wealth management news, Citywire, InvestmentNews, wherever else. Before we get into the success you're having, take us back to the beginning. Where did the idea come from?
Ovadia: Yeah. So, following what kind of my first-hand experience, I was at BCG. I was an associate there, working with a very large RIA aggregator. They just made 30 really expensive acquisitions. And they came to me and they said, hey, listen, we have 1,200 financial advisors. We have no growth strategy. It's taking them 60 hours of business development to close one new business, one new client. It's just really inefficient. And there's no way for us to pour money into this to have scalable or repeatable growth. Can you come in-house and solve this for us? And this was around 2023, end of May 2023. If you remember at that time, AI was just becoming available for commercial use. You were just starting to see its value in the application layer. And my background actually in college was doing ML research in fintech applications, so quite serendipitous. And I thought, hey, instead of joining this one firm and trying to solve this problem for them in-house, I can actually quit my job and start a company to solve this for all advisors. And that's what led me to quit my job in 2024.
Noonan: Give us that stat one more time. You say 60 hours to develop one new client.
Ovadia: Exactly. And so, Michael Kitces actually came up with a really interesting study last week around costs of marketing and marketing spend. And the number one thing that struck me from that study was that more than 70% of growth costs or marketing costs are what he would call soft dollar. And in that case, soft dollar is basically advisor time, not actually dollars towards marketing. And what's interesting is, people tend to significantly underestimate that as a percentage of cost. And it's really easy to measure, you know, I spent X dollars amount on an ad or on an event, but the soft dollar cost is a lot harder to measure. And as firms grow and advisors become more senior, that soft dollar cost ends up skyrocketing because the advisor's time becomes more and more valuable. And so oftentimes when we're just starting out a firm or an advisor and they're just building your book, the strategies that work really well for them that are super time-intensive are really not going to scale as they have more and more clients. And so, you end up having to just think of new and different ways to shift the spend from time to actually hard dollars that adds up and much more scalable.
Noonan: Yeah, we actually just had an RIA CEO on the podcast last week and they're actually just getting into the advertising space broadly where I think they're spending $15 million a year on digital ads. And they're still early in the journey where they're trying to figure out where the most cost effective spend is coming in terms of client acquisition. So, I know that's something that at the top of the industry, that's a challenge a lot of people are trying to figure out. And I know FINNY is a big part of that.
One of the things I want to talk about was just the early journey at FINNY. I know you got into Y Combinator. For those less familiar, Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that backs early-stage companies. They've worked with some giants in the past, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash being a few examples. What was that experience like?
Ovadia: It was insane. The most insane, crazy, intense three months of my life. And so, the program is essentially three months, then you have it as a startup bootcamp. You move your life to San Francisco. You're in a batch with a few hundred other founders building startup to cost every potential industry. One of my batch mates was sending data centers to space. So, everything from data centers to space to marketing and growth for financial advisors. We were one of the first companies in the last 10 years to be accepted, targeted and specifically building in wealth management. I think there was a bit of a wealth management hangover over the last 10 years. Venture capital was a little bit allergic to that industry. And all of a sudden, we're seeing a pretty big resurgence, especially now over the last two years.
But when we did Y Combinator two years ago, we went in first. So, we moved to San Francisco. We spent three months just basically around the clock building. One of the most intense period is at the end of the three months, you have this thing called Demo Day, where you pitch your company to the world stage and investors. And hopefully out of that you raise a seed round and then you're off to the races to start building the company.
We successfully did Demo Day. We ended up raising $4.5 million out of my call meter. We moved the company back to New York and from there it was just a rocket ship.
Noonan: One of the big announcements in your journey came late last year. You mentioned the first – I believe it was the first fundraise that you were alluding to, but I don't know if it was the second one that came late last year where you raised $17 million at $150 million valuation. From my perspective, that provides some social proof that your business has major tailwinds behind it and you're addressing an important problem. Specific to that problem, organic growth and the advice industry, what should we know from your perch?
Ovadia: Yeah, it has been crazy. So, I think when you put things into perspective, FINNY just as a company is two years old. We're really good in market for a little over a year. So, our platform has been available to advisors and in that year, not only were we able to raise two rounds, so a seed round and then the one you just alluded to, which is our Series A round, we've been able to get some of the top industry names and figures around the table. So, names like Josh Brown from Ritholtz, Jason Wang from Altruist, Kunal Kapoor, the CEO of Morningstar, as well as Bill McNabb from Vanguard and all these people have kind of come on and said, you know, you're solving one of the most important problems in our industry and you're doing the direct way, you're doing it in a different way that we haven't seen before. So that's a testament to how we're solving it, but also the massive problem that is organic growth. It's very rare to see this level of caliber of people pay attention to such an early-stage startup.
The organic growth in your industry is anemic. I mean, you look at any report and it's low single digits. And what's interesting to us is that really, even those low single digit numbers are averages and that growth is not equally distributed. So, you have some firms – it's almost like a barbell, you have some firms that are growing at, you know, 10%, 15% year-over-year organic growth, who are doing it really, really well. And then you have the have-not are actually declining year-over-year. So, it's a pretty stark problem for a large chunk of the industry.
Noonan: Yeah. If you drill down into those two scenarios that you just laid out about the firms that are growing pretty well organically and the have-nots, other than FINNY, even before FINNY came around a couple of years ago, what were some of the trends you were seeing that were effective for those companies to grow and then vice versa, what are kind of some of the trends you're seeing with those advisory firms that are growing less fast?
Ovadia: Yes, it's the ones that are just truly investing in growth as a real channel. Unfortunately, for a lot of firms, marketing and sales is looked down upon as something that we don't do, or it's looked down upon as just – it's not for them, but ultimately it's necessary to grow your business. It's the only industry that we've heard of where like marketing is a bad thing. And so, the firms that we've seen that grow, there's like 10%, 15% double digit numbers, just investing in a growth theme, in growth channels. They have essentially created organization within the company that are driving growth versus having it distributed amongst every advisor. And they're constantly re-evaluating, just because something worked five years ago doesn't mean it works now. A lot of advisors will say, hey, you know, when I started the firm, it was just purely off of referrals and (TLIs) and hoping that that will grow scalably as the firm grows. But there's some channels that just don't grow scalably. They actually grow linearly, which is not great for advisors that have high growth ambitions.
Noonan: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned a lot of important names across the industry becoming investors and board members at FINNY. I guess I won't ask about any individually, but just I guess the collection as a whole has been cool to have all of them involved with the company.
Ovadia: It's been insane. They are some of the greatest minds that they just have such deep industry experience and what me and my team lacked in years of experience and they got forth with these amazing relationships we have. We obviously are relatively young in the industry and I can't do down in the job, but surrounding ourselves with people who know more than we do and when out of terms, just ask them for advice and whenever we have someone top of mind.
Noonan: If I see Kunal around the office anytime soon, I'll make sure to let him know to bring us from trucks next time he comes to the FINNY office. Okay, I don't want to bury the lead. I want to talk about the product itself. I mentioned at the preamble podcast, but FINNY tracks money-in-motion events, things like job changes, home purchases, sales of businesses, and many other items. How are those events identified?
Ovadia: Yeah, so we will have a database of 300 million potential prospects or leads or people. Everyone in North America over the age of 18, I mean, there's a few ways of gathering information about them. One is just scraping publicly available data. So, we've built really powerful web scrapers that go out and find anything from online, public internet, and so you can think of a high school newspaper article that mentioned someone's pronunciation like track and field all the way down to government records, public property records, and we were able to scrape those. We also have proprietary data agreement with at this point over 20 different vendors that we are able to license all of their data. And so that data like intent signals. So, we actually know, for example, based off people's cookie data, what they're looking up online. And so, we're able to see things like marriage, birth, divorce, house purchasing and selling, promotions, liquidity events, all those things. And then we also know what people are looking up. And so, you can actually tell advisors, hey, these people are people who went to your college are now business owners and they're looking up (exit planning keywords) online. So, it'd be a great time for you specifically to reach out to them.
Noonan: No stone unturned. I think the most impressive stat I've seen on FINNY is that your sales cycle is three days or less when it comes to advisor technology. I'd argue that's almost unheard of. Inertia is a powerful force in a lot of industries, especially true with advisors who are paid for their time. And because of that, they're usually less excited to learn about new technology and even less so to adopt it. How are you breaking through?
Ovadia: Now, let's play. So that number was a number we're really proud of. When we raised our Series A, we kind of said, hey, every advisor that comes through our door, let's say, in two or three days to basically sell them and get them onboarded. We recently did a webinar with an advisor who got started on FINNY recently. And he said something that stuck with me even more. He said, yeah, their sales cycle is quick, but the thing that stood out the most from my experience with FINNY was the onboarding process. I think a lot of advisors have, for better or for worse, shiny object syndrome.
And so, inertia is really important to get them started, but getting them started is only half the battle. It's actually then encouraging adoption and getting them to the point where they actually see value. And we've invested so much in a success team at FINNY so that when an advisor does start, they are onboarded properly through one-to-one sessions with someone on our team. It's not with a robot or anything. And then after that, for the first two months, it's incredibly hands-on. You almost have an entire team behind you trying to get you to your first customer win. And so, at that point, then you can be relatively autonomous and let the platform work for itself. But we're really, really hands-on in the first two months. And I think that's been the biggest degree of success.
Noonan: That's great. In terms of age, practice size, what's the typical advisor profile you see using your platform?
Ovadia: The advisors that want to grow and have a great idea and a good sense and need to work with us. And so that can be anyone from a young advisor who's just building a book to a more established book, an older advisor. I think as long as they have done the work to say, this is my clear niche and this is why I can work with them better than anyone else. If you come to FINNY with those things, we can help you without a doubt and you will see success in the platform.
Noonan: My dad is an advisor in his early 60s. I don't think I would ever accuse him of being an early adopter with new technology. And to be fair, he's not alone. That's pretty kind of standard for his age cohort. With those later career advisors, are you seeing any traction?
Ovadia: We actually are. You can do that, FINNY, as a platform that we call it, like, do it for you where the best advisors are logging in the least. So, it's like a little opposite of historical technology platforms where it would measure adoption based off like how often someone logging in. For us, it's a success if a couple of months then you're really logging in once a month, tracking on a platform, making sure the campaigns are running and not checking it back then after that.
So, we're really not trying to be another tab in their browser that they have to remember to log into every single day. And so, because of that and because of our success to (indiscernible) incredibly hands on, we've been able to see pretty big and pretty great traction amongst older cohort of advisors.
Noonan: Tell me about the power users, the people that are having the most success on the platform. What are some of the cool success stories that you've seen?
Ovadia: We've seen insane stories. The ones that see crazy successes on the web but come out of the box ideas that are well researched. And so, I'll give you an example. We have an advisor who came to us and said, hey, I want to target Sherwin Williams, executive of (indiscernible) Air Group for years. And I have a couple of clients there already and I know their com package is really, really well. And so, I know if I can get in front of them, I can convert them as clients. And so, he launched a campaign in January, but since six weeks, he had six client meetings, three of which converted, $15 million of net new assets, converted into his book after just six weeks in the platform. So really crazy. And when you think about what that means for an advisor, you can just assume a flat 1%, that's $150,000 of the new first business in six weeks and I don't know, now it's your work, not a bad day.
Noonan: Not a bad day at all. That's cool. I mean, it's that kind of the biggest trend that you're seeing is advisors that are kind of going very deep on specific niches and trying to drive that type of client base?
Ovadia: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, my theory on where the industry is going is, you have to have a niche to stand out. We're going to have so much AI slop out there and so much noise. The only way to win is to have a really well-defined niche and content out there that will make you stand out in that niche. So, I mean, what we're helping our advisors do right now is, first of all, define that niche, but then be visible and so create content. But if someone goes, for example, on ChatGPT and says, hey, I'm a Sherwin Williams executive. I've been there for four years and I'm thinking about the next step in my career, who should I go to for financial advice? That advisor should be the number one person that ChatGPT or Claude or whatever model lists them as number one. And there are things that an advisor can do to make sure they're listed when their ideal clients are asking.
Noonan: A lot of times I think of the financial advisory industry as kind of a very local business. You work with an advisor that lives in your town. I know of the advent of the internet and all the years that have past, it's less true now. But in the example you gave with Sherwin Williams, I assume, I think they're based at Cleveland, I would assume it's a local advisor that probably is serving that type of client base. You could tell me if I'm wrong, but I guess the question I'd be curious to know is, are you seeing a lot of advisors win clients that are not local to them, whereas they might be in different states or regions of the country?
Ovadia: It's actually a good question. I think about this a lot. We ran a study on this actually recently. Location is a driving factor of conversion and correlation between let us know more work with an advisor or not. But it's not always. And so, I think the specialization is key here. And so, the heuristics we try to use is, if you're launching a campaign on (indiscernible) and you're targeting a certain group, that group size should be a few hundred in size. So, it's just like 200 to 500 people that your message should apply to. And so, the easiest way to do that would say, great, I'm going to say local people in these five zip codes who match this certain criteria, that's the best way to make that group a little smaller and more targeted, thinking like how low targeted message is. But if you're the advisor that is the premier orthodontist business owner, advisor in the whole country, then location is going to play a little bit less of a factor. And if there's an orthodontist in Orlando who's 45 and looking to tell us practice, you're based in New York and you're known as the guy for orthodontist practices, then you have a right to win and you should be reaching out to that person. And so, I would think of it more as location as a defining criteria or another filter to build a really good niche and really strong message, but it doesn't always have to be location.
Noonan: So yeah, a factor, not the factor. On your website, it mentions you automate outreach through the most effective channels. I'd like to kind of dig down into what exactly that means. I think most companies, Morningstar included, we're always asking ourselves some version of the question, are we too reliant on sending emails? In terms of effectiveness, what channels are resonating? It sounds like a lot of it is email. Is there any other channels that are resonating? And if the answer is going to be that email is the most effective form factor, I'm guessing it's some level of personalization, which we've already touched on that is kind of driving those results then.
Ovadia: Yeah. So, email is a big one. LinkedIn is playing more and more a factor and we've been releasing more functionality there. I think back to my earlier point about AI noise, there's going to be a resurgence of what's in network cost and things that people who you'll catch to deal with it are stupid or something that (indiscernible). And LinkedIn has a visibility of job that kind of help you use (indiscernible) that social graph. So, you can call the LinkedIn – FINNY, for example, you can help you identify money, motion, and people who are 1 or 2 degrees better than you and then get one shows or just reach out to a person via LinkedIn. That helps a ton.
So, email, LinkedIn, direct mail, which is hilarious, but direct mail actually works quite well as well. Good old fashioned cold calling. I mean, I know people roll their eyes, but when it's done properly, it works, especially when you have some like a right or like a intense signal that you know, this person is looking up something recently. So, all of those are incredibly effective. And then one channel that I think is underrated is actually just driving inbound. And so, creating content that'll actually drive the prospects to you.
Noonan: Any examples of good content items that have worked?
Ovadia: Yeah, it's been something like educational material around like helping your niches and so back (indiscernible) were kind of like here, but then you should think about when – if you're working at Sherwin Williams about how to maximize X, Y, and Z, just like becoming the authority or the block leader in that really niche specific segment of the market, well then help (indiscernible) audience.
Noonan: Interesting. Yeah. One of the guests I have on my shortlist to get on is somebody that deals with kind of some of the stock options inside of Anthropic and OpenAI and some of these AI startups where they have liquidity events coming, but they've also had secondary share sales and he's very involved in that niche where he's trying to maximize returns and tax consequences of how you do that. So not surprised to hear that. I know that one. If you can develop that niche and develop that clientele, you're off to the races as an advisor.
You mentioned Michael Kitces earlier. I have a question related to him. Over the weekend I was looking at one of his marketing studies that he does every year. What the study shows is how advisors are attracting new clients. At the top of the list, it's the usual suspects. It's referrals, it's centers of influence. It's in-person networking. Five years from now, where does FINNY show up on that list?
Ovadia: Yeah. So, we want to – the goals of FINNY have always been an organic growth engine. We started with prospecting because it felt like an (easiest) in this case for AI. A lot of research, all great things that I'm glad can actually help with automate the way. But the idea is we want to be the platform that can help with all of those growth strategies on Michael Kitces list. And so, a lot of that's encouraging referrals, building relationships with CLIs, driving them down through content, hosting events, all of those things. We want to have an AI agent actually help you do. So, I would say FINNY is well-positioned to be a booster or a course multiplier for any strategy that is already working for a firm.
Noonan: That's great. Obviously, you're delivering results. The press releases and the success we've talked about here kind of tells the story – delivering an important topic for advisors. So, congratulations on that and wishing you continued success in the future. If any advisors are looking to get in touch, what's the best way to reach out?
Ovadia: Yeah, they could just go to our website, finny.com. So that's f-i-n-n-y.com and click the download there. We can talk about a three-day sales cycle. We can just get you started within three days basically if you go out and click the download on the website.
That's probably the easiest way. We're actually pretty active on (indiscernible). So, if you want to just stay up to date on (indiscernible) FINNY, you can follow us on LinkedIn. And those are probably two best ways to stay in touch with us.
Noonan: And thank you for joining us on Simple But Not Easy.
Ovadia: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Danny.
Noonan: And there you have it, another episode of Simple But Not Easy. We're grateful to Eden for making time for us. Before we depart, please consider leaving a 5-Start review on Apple or Spotify. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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