Fidelity Clearing and Custody, a unit of Fidelity Investments, has joined forces with FirstPoint Financial, a subsidiary of Mariner Holdings, to provide its registered investment advisors (RIA) access to client segmentation solutions.
FirstPoint has developed consultative services to help advisors analyze their current and prospective client base and develop strategies to segment their clients in order to support emerging and mass affluent investors.
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According to Fidelity’s most recent Millionaire Outlook study, emerging affluent investors – investors ages 21-49 with investable assets of $50,000 to $250,000 – are well positioned to attain millionaire status.
Yet, new Fidelity research finds that 76% of financial advisors continue to focus their current client acquisition strategy on investors 49 years of age or older, or those with $1 million or more in investable assets.
Further, 45% of financial advisors have no plans to target emerging and mass affluent investors over the next five years.
Fidelity Clearing and Custody executive vice president, practice management and consulting David Canter said, "We’re seeing an interesting dichotomy among firms: some are finding success by expanding their client base to include emerging affluent investors, while others are staying focused on the traditional high-net-worth target client profile. This offering may help address the client segmentation needs of many RIAs who want to ‘stick to their knitting’ and focus on their core clients, while still providing an advice option to those emerging and mass affluent investors who are seeking it out."
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By GlobalDataMariner Holdings CEO Marty Bicknell added, "We chose to offer this program because we’ve heard from many RIAs that they haven’t been able to figure out how to scale and serve this segment profitably. We made a strategic decision to invest in helping RIAs develop client segmentation strategies because we believe it meets a critical need in both the advisor and investor community."
Advisory firms interested in working with FirstPoint can begin with a comprehensive review of their current client segmentation approach.
Upon completion of that review, the advisory firm would have the opportunity to work with FirstPoint on their client segmentation strategies, including potentially entering into a solicitation arrangement to have FirstPoint serve those clients that may not fit the advisory firm’s current acquisition strategy or their current account minimums.
FirstPoint Financial leverages leading technology solutions and a dedicated team of advisors to offer a comprehensive wealth management solution to emerging and mass affluent investors.
Canter further said, "We’ve seen in our benchmarking data that the large majority of high-performing firms have a target client profile, primarily driven by investable assets, and that they rarely stray from that profile. We’ve also found that to be high-performing, a firm needs to continually re-evaluate its existing business model to stay competitive. Our goal with this collaboration is to help firm leaders consider how their businesses may evolve and develop a strategy to serve this group of investors today which may prove valuable in the future."
