Client vulnerability fintech eyeing ‘breakthrough year’ in consulting industry

Edinburgh-based Aveni first launched in late 2019 with a product that integrated natural language processing into the entire advisory journey, of which vulnerability detection was a part.

But Joseph Twigg, along with two other founders – Lexi Birch and Jamie Hunter – quickly realized upon bringing it to market that advisors weren’t interested in the whole thing, and instead were interested in different parts of the service.

“So we ended up unboxing the rig,” Twigg said. The startup then spent around nine months working with Nationwide to develop its vulnerable client tool, which it has now launched with one of its early adopters, the Key Group.

The tool extracts information from customer calls and passes it to Aveni’s system, which automatically checks for signs of vulnerabilities. Advisors can access the results of these checks via the Aveni dashboard.

The tool also pre-populates things like suitability reports or CRM systems.

“We estimate that we can make the advisory process 50-70% more efficient, which is attractive to larger companies with their growth ambitions,” Twigg explained.

“We can have a pretty big impact on the end-to-end consulting journey.”

Focus on large, fast-growing IFA companies

Rather than focusing on long-tail, one- or two-person IFAs, Aveni has set its sights on “middle ground,” which Twigg describes as companies with at least 20 advisers.

Aveni said private equity-backed consolidators expressed particular interest in its product.

“Relatively small companies that grow very quickly are a good fit for NLP [neuro-linguistic programming]. We have a lot of discussions with them.

Aveni has been actively distributing its services since last July. With only one salesperson to date, the start-up wishes to use the funds it intends to raise in the coming months to build its sales team and develop in the consulting field.

“It’s a complex technology, and the enterprise space is slow on entry. But hopefully it will be slow on exit as well,” Twigg said.

In the coming months, Aveni expects to announce at least three new deals with some of the UK’s largest financial advisory and wealth management firms.

“This year will hopefully be a breakthrough year in financial advice for us,” said the founder, who is also in talks with a digital mortgage broker and an advised platform technology provider.

“The vulnerability in the consultancy industry is interesting because it’s very different from the traditional vulnerability you see in companies like Scottish Power [one of the fintech’s other clients]who is someone who chooses between food and energy,” Twigg explained.

“In consulting, the lifespan of clients is typically 20 years, and initially they are generally not vulnerable. But because you’re managing their money for such a long time, you’re building a library of interactions.”