The latest technology news in the wealth management sector from around the world.

Denver-headquartered RIA Mercer Advisors is enhancing its digital marketing and client acquisition strategies through a partnership with Catchlight.

Catchlight – founded in 2020 and backed by Fidelity Labs – helps advisors to be more efficient in their outreach, personalize their approach, and be more effective in converting leads to new clients. It uses data and AI-powered insights as part of its offering.

Through this partnership, Mercer intends to refine how it identifies and engages high-value prospects through advanced insights and analytics. 

Such a move shows how wealth managers, operating during a period of multi-trillion wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to successive generations, must compete for a slice of this wealth, as well as newly-generated wealth. An element of the process is using technology, such as prospecting tools, to identify who has come into wealth and might be a potential client.

Mercer Advisors said it will use Catchlight’s insights of prospective clients to build a more complete understanding of each prospect’s financial background and anticipated needs. Insights such as the Catchlight Score(SM), a prediction of a prospect’s likelihood to convert to a client, and estimated investible assets and other key characteristics, can position Mercer Advisors to optimize its client acquisition processes, and initiate more meaningful, personalized contact with its leads.

Mercer Advisors will also use Catchlight’s insights to help validate and improve its marketing strategy, the firm said.

The group has been one of the most vigorous exponents of wealth sector M&A in recent years (see an example here), tapping into a need to build economies of scale to handle rising regulatory, technology and personnel costs, as well as provide older advisors with a retirement route. A period of ultra-low interest rates also galvanized private equity firms, among others, to enter the M&A fray. Rising interest rates in the past two years have blunted this trend somewhat, but it remains robust. For more analysis, see this article from US correspondent Charles Paikert.