One of the many lessons advisers learned from the 2008 market crash was how poorly aligned portfolios were with clients' appetite for losses. In the decade since, entrepreneurs have tried to address the gap with technology, promising to replace subjective rules-of-thumb and demographic stereotypes with an analytical, data-driven approach to determining an investor's risk tolerance.

Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 39th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today’s podcast is Sarah Fallaw. Sarah is the founder and president of DataPoints, a technology company that’s creating behavioral science and assessment tools for advisors to use to better assess, understand, and coach our clients’ financial behaviors. What’s fascinating about Sarah’s work with DataPoints, though, is the way that they’ve applied research rigor to the fundamental question of, what are the financial behaviors and traits that lead people to actually turn their income into wealth.

In 1996, Thomas Stanley and William Danko released the book “The Millionaire Next Door”, which quickly became a NY Times Bestseller. Stanley and Danko were market researchers who had initially sought – as marketers do – to better understand the tendencies, habits, attitudes, and other psychographics of the affluent (a segment of the marketplace that companies have long wanted to better understand). In fact, Stanley had already published several books on working with the affluent, including “Marketing To The Affluent,” “Selling To The Affluent,” and “Networking with the Affluent”, based on nearly a decade of prior research he had conducted through his Affluent Marketing Institute.

They are young and committed to the technology they've spent years and their own money developing. But unlike some other fintech entrepreneurs, they have no ambition to upend wealth management. Assembled at the annual conference for the XY Planning Network, some of the finalists vying for top prize in its fintech competition are in fact RIAs themselves.