The traffic column does not move. Everything that improves here is plumbing — capture, response speed, the event you bid on, and the retention cadence.
Indicative shape of managed financial funnels, reported per product line — not a promise about your book.
Vertical 06 — Financial Services SectorRegulated
More leads isn't the goal. Assets under management are.
Financial services converts on advise → open — a 30–180 day window under FCA, SEC, ASIC and DFSA. We index the advice demand you don't own and wire six engines to new AUM that stays.
Every one of these was measured across managed RIA, bank, lender and asset-manager systems before we called it a pattern. Each has a fix, an owner and a number attached.
Leak 01
The brochure website
One firm-overview page, a team gallery and a contact form — while buyers search 'how do I structure my pension at 55' and 'Roth or 401(k) on 52% of my salary'. No indexed advice content, so no owned demand, so the firm is invisible on every query a prospect actually types.
Referrals carry the entire pipeline, and a referral pipeline has no compounding — it retires when the referrer does.
The fix — Product × situation × jurisdiction clusters — educational content that ranks and reads compliant, ending in a discovery call instead of a lead form.
Leak 02
The 30–180 day silence
A considered decision does not close on one call. The buyer shortlists three firms, and the one that goes quiet between the discovery call and the second meeting drops off the list before the next one.
Win rate decays with every day of silence. The pipeline dies in the interval nobody owns — no nurture, no cadence, no reason to come back.
The fix — Suitability-aware nurture journeys that follow behaviour, a 9-second response SLA on every inbound, and automated follow-up exactly where the decision window opens.
Leak 03
The wrong conversion event
The campaign optimizes on form fills because that is the only event the pixel can see. The open account and the first funded transfer live in a core system the platform has never met.
Cost per lead looks healthy; cost per opened account is 6–12× the number on the dashboard. Marketing's number and the board's AUM number disagree every month.
The fix — Server-side open-account and AUM-onboard events back into the platform, keyed on your lead id — no client account data on a third-party pixel.
Leak 04
Referral dependency
Sixty percent of new clients arrive on a warm introduction. When a senior producer retires or leaves, the pipeline leaves with them — and nobody on staff owns the inbound engine, because it never needed one.
Growth is hostage to other people's networks. It cannot be hired, measured or defended in a board deck.
The fix — Owned demand in the firm's own name — indexed editorial, first-party capture, response speed — so the book is an asset of the institution, not of the person who leaves.
Leak 05
The compliance bottleneck
Every campaign goes back to compliance as a new question. No approved claims library, no versioning, no archive — so the fastest path is to do less, and the slowest path is the risky one.
Marketing ships at the speed of legal review. Claims that should be pre-approved are re-litigated every quarter, and creative dies in the review queue.
The fix — A versioned, compliance-approved claims library your owner signs once — we localize inside it at speed, 48-hour SLA, every live page archived with the date it ran.
Leak 06
Unattributable AUM
AUM lands with no source. The board sees assets growing and cannot say which channel produced them — no holdout, no geo test, no model, no reconciliation to the CRM.
The CFO cuts what they cannot see — historically the channels that were quietly working. The budget shrinks every year and the story is always the macro.
The fix — Media mix plus weekly geo holdouts, reported in new AUM and 12-month retention, on one view the board signs — reconciled to your system of record.
02 / The modelAUM math, in the open
Put your own numbers into advise → open.
Four inputs your CRM already knows. The model applies the same lift coefficients we publish below and shows what they are worth across three years of retention — not a 14-day ROAS screenshot.
Qualified conversations / month400
205,000
Advise → open rate22.0%
5.0%60.0%
Average new AUM per client$450K
$10K$2.00M
12-month client retention86%
55%98%
Coefficients applied — shown, not hidden
+18% more conversations from owned editorial search
+25% faster response + application CRO
+4pts 12-month retention points, absolute
−15% cut on cost per opened account
Modeled on your inputs● COMPUTED LIVE
In-force AUM today — 3-year retention
$1235.3M
88 clients / mo
Same book, engines wired
$1899.5M
130 clients / mo
Incremental new AUM
$664.2M
open 27.5% · retain 90%
Cumulative new AUM from this year's openings
Year 1
$700.9M vs $475.2M
Year 2
$1331.7M vs $883.9M
Year 3
$1899.5M vs $1235.3M
A conversation is worth $112K instead of $86K when the funnel is wired to open and the book is held.
Directional model on published coefficients — not a forecast, not a guarantee, and not a substitute for your investment committee's view.
03 / The machineSix engines, wired to advise → open
Same six engines. Financial wiring.
No bespoke methodology, no invented process — the machine that runs in every vertical, configured against the event this category has. Here is what each one actually ships for a financial firm.
Nobody buys all six on day one. The audit names the two engines that own the weakest stages of your funnel — usually response speed and the conversion event — and the rest are added as they pay for themselves.
A mortgage and a family office are different businesses.
One page per line, because the demand, the cycle and the compliance rules are not the same. This is how the machine is configured per book — and what we would start with in each.
01 — line
RIAs & wealth management
fee-only advisor · Roth vs 401(k) · retirement income · succession
30–180 days
Start: Programmatic SEO. Situation × product clusters with real planning context — not a phone number in a box. Prospects arrive pre-qualified, so advisors stop chasing rate-shoppers and start doing the planning work they were hired for.
02 — line
Retail banking & consumer credit
mortgage · personal loan · savings · balance transfer · cards
7–60 days
Start: Precision Paid Media. Rate-intent search with comparison traffic excluded, a one-tap application that keeps the applicant's data on your side of the fence, and instant recovery on every abandoned application.
Start: Programmatic SEO. Rate × product × locality clusters that refresh with the pricing cycle, a broker-friendly application that prefills, and speed-to-lead where the buyer is talking to three lenders at once.
04 — line
Private banking & HNW
family office · multi-generational wealth · estate liquidity · concierge
90–365 days
Start: Video & Multimedia. Discretion-first editorial and principal films that earn the introduction, with a no-form path: one conversation request, handled like a private client from the first second — because it is one.
Start: Precision Paid Media. LinkedIn-led ABM on the real buying committee, research-led editorial that ranks where professionals search, and CRM cadences that nurse a quarterly cycle without going dark.
06 — line
Asset & fund management
fund launch · institutional distribution · research · fund of funds
90–365 days
Start: Lifecycle CRM. Two funnels, one architecture: distribution content that converts advisors, research that converts committees. Retention runs off portfolio events and market moments — not open dates.
07 — line
Fintech & embedded finance
white label · open banking API · embedded lending · B2B2C
30–120 days
Start: Web Core. Developer-grade product pages that index, app-store-grade onboarding that converts, and B2B plus B2C journeys running on one event map — so the platform team and the growth team read the same number.
05 / The 90 daysWhat ships, in what order
Measurement first. Then demand. Then capture. Then compounding.
Ninety days to stand the machine up; rolling 30-day after the first quarter. Every phase has an artefact you can keep if you stop.
01Days 1–14
Instrument the funnel
Nothing is bought, built or rewritten until the number is agreed. This is the phase most finance teams have never done — and the reason their reporting has always been arguable.
Conversion event defined and signed by marketing, finance and compliance
Server-side tag: inquiry · discovery · application · open · funded · 12-month active
Baseline cost per opened account by product and source
CRM / core-system attribution wired to the lead id, end to end
02Days 15–40
Index the advice demand you don't own
The cluster map is the strategy session — product, situation, jurisdiction, objection. Then the pages ship in waves, with schema and internal links from day one.
product × situation × jurisdiction cluster map, scored by demand and difficulty
First 60–400 pages live, entity-unique, schema'd, compliance-clean
Crawl, index and canonical plan — no doorway sprawl
Indexation and conversation-rate dashboard on one view
03Days 41–70
Capture with value, not with auctions
Paid is rebuilt around the open-account event the measurement phase created, and the application flow is fixed where it actually leaks.
AUM-value signals feeding bidding
Negative lexicon, geo holdouts and a real budget split by product line
Application-flow CRO on the two weakest steps, tested not guessed
Creative per product line, with the approved claims library enforced
04Days 71–90
Make it compound
Retention and response are where a financial funnel pays twice: once at the open, again at every review after it.
Onboarding, review, cross-sell and win-back journeys live
Advisor scorecards and a cross-sell gap report per account
First board-grade read: new AUM, retention, cost per opened account
06 / ComplianceRegulated category, regulated practice
The funnel that survives a supervisory review.
In financial services, the fastest way to lose is not a bad campaign — it's an unapproved performance claim, a pixel holding client account data, or a landing page nobody can produce from last quarter.
Claims go through your review
Every ad, landing page, email and video is built from a versioned, compliance-approved claims library. Your marketing-compliance owner signs the master; we localize inside it — never around it.
No client account data on a third-party pixel
First-party, server-side measurement with hashed identifiers and Consent Mode v2. AUM tiers, balances, application data and PII stay inside your stack and out of any ad platform's browser pixel.
Licensing and disclosure, per jurisdiction
Form ADV, FCA Firm Reference Number, AFSL and DFSA license numbers, plus product disclosures, checked market by market before a page goes live — not after a supervisory letter arrives.
Marketing-rule clean by default
Performance claims only in the compliant format, no guaranteed return anywhere, time-stamped archives of every live page — built for SEC 206(4)-1, FINRA 2210 and FCA PERG 8 / PRI 3.
Measurement your board signs
New AUM and 12-month retention are the reporting currency. Incrementality comes from geo holdouts and a modeled mix, and the reconciliation ties back to your system of record, not to a platform export.
Suitability-aware by design
Pages educate; advice stays in the advisory relationship. No personalized investment advice is served through the funnel, and anything that could be read as advice goes through the same pre-approval as a claim.
What we will not do
We don't sell, rent or swap lead lists — we build the owned side of the funnel.
We don't publish a performance or return figure that isn't in the compliant format your regulator allows.
We don't run a dollar of media on a claim your compliance owner hasn't approved.
We don't need your client database. We need an event and an API.
In a 30-day window a buyer makes their shortlist. In a 180-day window they make their decision. Everything on this page is how you stay in both.
— The Growlith financial services desk
How to read these
Indicative results across managed client systems, reported per engine and per product line on one telemetry view — board-grade numbers, not platform-inflated screenshots. No client is named without written permission, and no figure here is a forecast for your book.
A growth engine is infrastructure, and infrastructure only pays when the operator can build alongside it. Two minutes of honesty here saves a quarter of each other's time.
Right fit
RIAs, wealth platforms and banks with a book to grow and a pipeline to build
Mortgage and consumer lenders with a cost-per-funded-account problem
Private banks and HNW firms where the introduction is the whole funnel
Fintechs with an app, an API or an embedded product and unit economics to prove
$50K–$5M+ a month of marketing-influenced revenue or AUM target across one or more lines
Someone in the room who can sign a claims library in two weeks
Not a fit
Buying a lead vendor under a growth-engineering label
Wanting a guaranteed AUM or return figure in writing before an audit
No marketing-compliance owner available for the next six weeks
An application flow nobody is permitted to touch, at any price
A brand refresh wearing a performance brief
Minimum engagement is 90 days. After the first quarter every tier is rolling 30-day — Ignition (any two engines), Momentum (any four engines) or Full Machine (all six, principal-led).
10Questions
Fiduciary checks.
The questions a financial operator asks before letting a growth firm anywhere near an application flow. If yours isn't here, a principal answers within one business day.
We write it, you approve it. Every headline, performance reference and ad variant is drawn from a versioned claims library your marketing-compliance owner signs once, then we localize inside it at speed. The review loop is a 48-hour SLA on new work, and every live page stays archived with the date it ran — which is exactly what a supervisory review asks for.
That's where the funnel actually closes. We integrate against the common platforms — Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Envestnet (Orion, Black Diamond, Redtail), AdvisorPro, Finacle and FIS core banking, Encompass and Lenders One for lending, and the mainstream CRM APIs — through webhooks or a middleware layer where no API exists. Where there's genuinely nothing to integrate with, we run the event through a secure SFTP/ETL drop instead of pretending the attribution works.
No. We don't sell, rent or swap lead lists, and we don't broker your surplus to a lead network. Leads are rented; funnels are owned. What we build is indexed demand, first-party capture, response speed and a retention cadence — the parts of the funnel that are still opening accounts if a lead vendor changes their price next quarter.
It depends on the line more than on the agency. Consumer credit is a rate-shopper war: high volume, thin margin, and the number that matters is opened accounts per thousand impressions, not CPL. A private-banking introduction can cost 50–500× more per click and still be the cheapest AUM you buy, because the relationship compounds for a generation. The audit returns your own baseline and a target cost per opened account per line — not an industry benchmark lifted off a slide.
Your system stays authoritative. We define the open and 12-month-active events with you, fire them server-side from the CRM or core system (API, webhook or ETL), and carry the click and lead id end to end so the ad platform optimizes against AUM value while finance reads the number out of the same table they already trust. Reconciliation is a deliverable, not a discrepancy in a monthly deck.
It changes the architecture, not the ambition. Clusters are built per market with that regulator's rules baked into the template. New York covers the SEC Marketing Rule, FINRA 2210 and Reg BI; London handles FCA PERG 8/PRI 3 and UK GDPR; the DIFC desk runs Arabic-first landing systems with ar-ae hreflang and WhatsApp response paths; Sydney covers ASIC and APAC hours; Toronto covers IIROC and bilingual en-ca/fr-ca pages.
Both, with different funnels. An advisor's growth is local, niche and speed-of-response — plus a book that isn't portable by whichever producer leaves. A bank's or asset manager's is product pages, distribution recruiting and institutional trust at scale. Tell us which one you are in the first call and we'll size the tier accordingly.
Response speed and the paid conversion event move inside the current cycle — 30 to 60 days, because nothing new needs to be trusted. Editorial clusters index in weeks and compound over 60–180 days. Retention pays at the first 12-month checkpoint after the journeys switch on. Anyone in this category promising you a 14-day ROAS is describing a different industry.
You keep them. Code in your repo, templates and schema in your CMS, audiences and conversion actions in your ad accounts, journeys and automations in your CRM stack, and a handover call plus documentation. That's the difference between infrastructure and a service, and it's the reason we can offer rolling 30-day terms after the first quarter.
Yes, with a tighter claims library and a pre-approval workflow rather than a lighter one. For HNW and private-client work we default to no-form paths — one handled conversation request — and anything that touches a client's financial data stays first-party and de-identified on GLBA-aware processors. We don't build an audience off a balance sheet, and we won't be talked into it.
11 / Next moveOne 30-minute audit
Q4 audit window open — financial services desk
Stop renting conversations. Own the AUM.
The audit reads acquisition, application flow, response speed and retention against the open-account event, then names the two engines to fix first. You leave with the model above rebuilt on your real numbers — whether or not you build anything with us.
High-ticket means high-intent — on both sides. Four questions route you to the right bureau pod — then a direct line to the Academy Team, if you'd rather not wait.