The folks at Broadridge are about to extend the reach of a new prospecting tool into another channel for fundsters. It's all about using "prescriptive analytics" to help fundsters identify their best opportunities.

Frank Polefrone Access Data Senior Vice President, Product Development

Frank Polefrone, senior vice president of Broadridge's Access Data unit, confirms that this quarter he and his colleague plan to launch their Opportunity Hunter tool in the independent broker-dealer channel. Watch for them to next push into the bank trust department early in Q2, if not sooner.

The Access Data team debuted Opportunity Hunter in June 2015 in a single mutual fund distribution channel, RIAs. It's a mobile app that can show a mutual fund wholesaler all the RIAs in a given area, scoring that wholesaler's products "against the other products that RIAs." Though the app doesn't reveal those specific other funds the RIAs uses, its does offer the wholesaler "how best to position" their offerings against those incumbent funds. The idea is to help the wholesaler answer that most fundamental of questions, "where do I spend my time?"

"It's location-aware," Polefrone tells MFWire. "We cover 13,000 RIAs" of what he estimates to be 14,000 "real RIAs" around the country.

Six firms have already signed on to the product, Polefrone says, and he's seeing "lots of demand" for extending the tool's reach into the bank trust channel.

"We started with the RIA channel because it's the most diverse and the most difficult," Polefrone says. The Access Data team has "already done a lot of the hard work around the data," so extending the tools' reach into more channels just involves working "through the scoring system around these channels." 

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