Ask most financial advisors how they grow their business and you’ll hear some variation of: referrals, events, maybe some leads bought from a broker. It’s the way the industry has always done it. The problem, according to Ian J. Karnell, is that none of that can build anything at scale.
Karnell is Co-Founder and CEO of VastAdvisor, an AI growth platform built specifically for advisory practices. Before launching VastAdvisor, he was Chief Revenuer Officer at Truelytics, a practice management company his twin brother, Jeremi, co-founded and which Envestnet acquired in 2022.
Truelytics helped RIAs measure firm value across more than 150 key performance indicators. Organic growth was one such metric—and the data they saw was striking. “What we saw—very clearly—is that firms that systematize growth are valued dramatically higher than those that rely on referrals,” says Ian. “In some cases, we saw 2X+ valuation differences.”
A doubled valuation. Not from a new service offering, not from M&A. From building a repeatable system for bringing in clients. Most firms had never done it—and most still haven’t. “The gap isn’t marketing,” he adds. “It’s infrastructure.”
VastAdvisor’s foundation is exactly that conviction. “We’re focused on solving the organic growth problem—something the industry has never systematized,” Ian says.
Many AI tools in wealth management have tackled back-office efficiency, note-taking, or client documentation. VastAdvisor aims squarely at the front office: attracting the right clients, building owned audiences, and turning every campaign into a process the firm learns from. The urgency behind this approach is real, and the window for firms to build this kind of infrastructure before competitors do is narrowing fast.
Running Campaigns Instead of Building Systems
In general, advisors aren’t failing to grow their practices because they aren’t trying hard enough. The problem runs deeper. “Most firms are running campaigns, not systems,” says Jeremi, now Executive Advisor to VastAdvisor. “Campaigns spend money. Systems learn.”
A campaign is launched, measured, and wrapped up. A system carries what it learns forward. Most advisory firms don’t have the latter. They might generate leads, run some digital ads, see what sticks—but they’re not capturing data in a way that makes the next effort smarter. Every push starts cold. “Right now, most advisors have no mechanism for learning,” Jeremi says. “Every campaign starts from zero. Firms aren’t building an asset—they’re just spending.”
Referrals have long filled in the gaps, but Ian is quick to point out their limits. “Referrals don’t scale,” he says. “You can’t turn them on, you can’t predict them, and you don’t own them.” They work until they don’t. And when they dry up, firms turn to lead brokers.
The Arbitrage Nobody Talks About
Most advisors know lead brokers exist. Fewer have done the math on who the model benefits in practice.
Companies such as SmartAsset saw early that the next generation of investors—digital-first, managing their finances online, set to inherit an estimated $84 trillion from baby boomers—was highly concentrated on social and media platforms. So, they built funnels to capture those investors as leads and sell access to advisory firms. The model worked. It just worked a lot better for the brokers than for the advisors buying in.
“Lead brokers are running one of the best arbitrage businesses in wealth management,” Ian says. “They can acquire a lead for about $50, sell it for $500, and often resell that same lead multiple times.” The same lead, sold to several competing advisors, for $500 each. “Advisors aren’t building assets—they’re renting access. That model doesn’t compound. It resets every month.”
VastAdvisor’s stated goal isn’t to nudge the model—it’s to dismantle it entirely. The aim is to give firms the tools to build their audiences, own the resulting data, and carry the intelligence from every campaign forward into the next.
Intelligence, Not Just Output
A lot of AI tools in the market are production oriented—they generate content, summarize notes, handle documentation. What they don’t do is get smarter about your firm over time. Ian draws that distinction deliberately. “Generic AI produces content,” he says. “What firms actually need is intelligence—systems that learn from every campaign and improve over time.”
VastAdvisor’s learning loop—what the company calls its Intelligence Core—is fine-tuned on an advisor’s own data, messaging, and outcomes, so the model reflects how that particular firm grows rather than generic best practices. A new user enters a URL, and the platform ingests publicly available information—website content, Form ADV, LinkedIn, Google data—to build a base model and generate tailored client profiles. Firms can also feed in CRM data to build lookalike models based on their best existing clients.
“We build a firm-specific model from day one—using your website, ADV, CRM signals, and digital footprint,” Ian explains. “From that, we generate ideal client profiles and deploy campaigns in minutes, not months.”
The onboarding process is designed to remove every excuse for delay. “We can take you from signing up to being live with a targeted campaign in less than 30 minutes on our platform,” he adds.
Compliance Without the Bottleneck
Compliance is where a lot of marketing momentum dies in advisory firms. A campaign is built, legal becomes involved, revisions go back and forth, and by the time anything can go live, the moment has passed. VastAdvisor is built around the idea that review shouldn’t be a separate step.
Jeremi describes an approach where generative AI builds campaigns while simultaneously checking them against SEC and FINRA rule sets—reviewing both AI-generated and human-created content before anything goes live.
“Campaigns are generated and evaluated against SEC and FINRA rules in real time,” he says. “Compliance isn’t a step—it’s embedded in the system.” The company has filed a provisional patent around its approach.
AI in financial services is under serious regulatory scrutiny, and firms have already been fined for how they’ve deployed the technology. Building governance into the architecture from the start—rather than treating it as a policy layer applied after the fact—is central to how VastAdvisor was designed.
“Compliance isn’t bolted on—it’s built into the architecture,” Ian emphasizes. “Every output is auditable, explainable, and aligned with regulatory requirements. That removes one of the biggest bottlenecks in advisor marketing.”
A Harder Problem on the Horizon
Even if a firm solves for growth, a bigger challenge is coming. The next generation of investors doesn’t just want a competent advisor—they want personalization, digital access, and responsiveness at a level that most practices aren’t built to deliver. At the same time, the advisor workforce is shrinking.
“Firms aren’t going to replace retiring advisors one-for-one,” says Jeremi. “They’ll rely on AI systems to scale service, personalization, and decision-making. The firms that adopt that model will win.”
On the revenue side, the pressure compounds. “The next generation of investors has completely different expectations—always-on, highly informed, and digitally native,” Ian notes. “That’s going to accelerate fee compression and force firms to rethink how they deliver value.” The firms coasting on basis points and quarterly check-ins are going to feel that tension first.
None of these challenges is distant. Younger investors are already showing up to advisor meetings with AI co-pilots, having done more research before the first conversation than clients a decade ago did in a year. The bar for what counts as a valuable advisor relationship is rising, and firms that haven’t invested in the systems to clear it—on the growth side and the service side—will find themselves squeezed from both ends.
The Enterprise Math
VastAdvisor’s pitch doesn’t stop at individual RIAs. The platform also targets enterprises—broker-dealers, asset managers, aggregators, and OSJs managing large advisor networks—where the aggregate spend on lead brokers is massive. Ian puts the number at over $8 billion annually. “That’s not growth—that’s dependency,” he points out.
At the network level, VastAdvisor aims to do more than cut acquisition costs. The platform seeks to centralize intelligence across multiple firms while preserving local execution—surfacing which client profiles are resonating, which campaigns are converting, and how individual firms benchmark against each other. Governance and oversight are enforced at the platform level without creating operational drag. “We’re giving enterprises a way to own that entire layer—and the intelligence that comes with it,” says Ian.
Firms on the platform are already generating qualified leads in the $30–$70 range—leads they own outright, in audiences they can continue to develop and refine. “Compare that to $500 shared leads, and the economics break quickly,” Jeremi notes. Given that lifetime client value in wealth management tends to be high, even modest improvements in acquisition efficiency can move the needle significantly.
The Bigger Picture
VastAdvisor’s current capabilities center on paid media, with social media management, funnel building, and connected TV outreach on the roadmap. The product philosophy, as Ian frames it, comes down to one thing: making client acquisition an operation advisory firms own rather than a service they perpetually rent.
The framing Ian and Jeremi keep coming back to is less about technology than about what kind of firm you want to be. The advisory practices that will grow aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most—they’re the ones building systems that get smarter with every dollar spent. “This isn’t a marketing tool,” says Ian. “It’s a growth operating system—designed to make client acquisition systematic, measurable, and continuously improving.” The firms that treat growth as infrastructure, rather than as a recurring expense to manage, are the ones positioned to compound that advantage over time.
“The industry spent decades building infrastructure to manage assets,” he adds. “The next decade will be defined by who builds the infrastructure to acquire them.”
