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COMPANY Spotlight

The CMO Council sat down with Wealth-X President David Friedman to learn how the company gathers intelligence on the world’s wealthiest consumers.

Please provide some information about Wealth-X and the overall mission of the company.

Founded four years ago by executives at Forbes and due diligence provider World-Check, Wealth-X is the world’s first and only provider of “rich data” and wealth intelligence on ultra-wealthy individuals across 160 countries.

Spanning 13 o!ces on five continents, Wealth-X has more than 180 people manually gathering and curating intelligence on the world’s wealthiest individuals (those with a net worth of $30 million and above).

Because of the proprietary nature of our data, Wealth-X has quickly become the go-to intelligence firm on the ultra-wealthy for the international press. Our executives are quoted and our data is cited on a daily basis across hundreds of news outlets.

Leveraging our proprietary collection of handcrafted dossiers on the world’s wealthiest individuals, we support our

clients by crafting unique bespoke marketing strategies to cultivate deeper trust with their existing top clients while charting a path to identify, connect and engage with their future key ultra-wealthy clients across their sales, marketing and advertising e"orts. Our bespoke marketing strategies enable our clients to increase their mindshare, marketshare and wallet share among both their future and existing ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) clients.

What types of services does the company provide, and how do you segment and target your markets for these di!erent services? We ask our clients (whether they are in financial services, nonprofit or luxury) the same three key questions that form the cornerstone of what we believe to be the only way to grow in the UHNW market:

1. What is your target client profile and the market size? For those who are just embarking on a new strategy, division or enterprise targeting the UHNW market, because of the proprietary nature of our data, we have the unique ability to help

President, Wealth-X

david friedman

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them assess the market opportunity and size at a granular level. Our clients use this information to determine strategies for the penetration of a new geographic market or whether to enter a market at all.

2. Where are your future UHNW clients? We help our clients answer this in three ways since these individuals don’t respond to cold calls and since the other traditional forms of marketing and advertising can be ine"ective at rising above the noise when trying to get through to them as well.

a. Look within your existing database using a wealth screening and client analytics wealth segmentation approach. Before launching a massive media or print campaign to raise awareness or branding in the UHNW market, we tell all of our clients that if they are private banks

who have a retail footprint, NPOs who have a donor database or luxury brands that have a retail database, we can help discover the hidden wealthiest clients that have already bought from them or made donations that they don’t know about. This is the most logical place to start looking, so we always say to start by looking within their existing database.

As part of this exercise, we conduct a client analytics approach that distills the key characteristics of the wealthiest clients into an archetype profile. This is particularly interesting as most clients have never actually thought in terms of net worth and liquidity (except for private banks) versus the traditional categories of average annual household income. Our clients access this service in several ways; they can export their client data under confidentiality agreements and have

our client analytics team conduct this analysis, they can get access to an API of our data to integrate or use internally, or they can access it through an integration of our database directly into their CRM system.

b. They are connected to your top existing clients and donors. We believe philosophically that the primary driver for new client acquisition in the UHNW market is referrals. We have built a mapping exercise that we use called a Future Client Strategy or Future Donor Strategy, where we help our clients proactively identify and uncover potential warm UHNW prospects that reside within the existing social graphs and relational networks of their top clients and donors. This exercise can typically produce anywhere from 100 to 300 warm UHNW prospects from 10 to 20 key relationships.

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We can also segment this pool of prospects by other categories around wealth, a!nities, passions, hobbies and interests. The idea behind this mapping exercise is to provide a systematic and disciplined approach to targeting these individuals.

c. Macro search through online portal. The final way we help our clients answer this question is through our online intelligence asset, which represents the deepest and broadest data set on the world’s ultra-wealthy that has ever been collected and structured into a SaaS platform.

3. Who are they? For this, the Wealth-X bespoke intelligence dossier is the greatest answer. The Wealth-X dossier is the conversation before the conversation—it captures the narrative of an individual’s life that traces the trajectory of their wealth and all the twists and turns that their lives take around that path. It takes our team about a week to complete this process, and it catalogues their interests, passions, hobbies, philanthropy, career trajectory, etc. The dossier provides a 360-degree view of that person, their family, relationships and life—a window into their heart, mind and spirit.

4. How do you engage them? This can be the most challenging part, but the paradigm that we are pioneering is what we call bespoke marketing. The idea behind bespoke marketing is developing a sales and marketing strategy that is customized for reaching an individual person that we have identified and profiled.

How does Wealth-X help companies create or build relationships with UHNW individuals, and how has this strategy proven valuable in the past?

Once we have taken a client through the process outlined above, there are several ways that bespoke marketing can be applied. One is at the individual level by simply asking for a referral base. The results often connect dots in relationships that they did not know they had or provide them with an angle around a passion, hobby or interest that allows them to create a “coincidence.” Our clients often notice that similar relationships sit on boards of nonprofit organizations,

for example, and then determine the strategy from there. An example might be buying a table at the annual gala for a nonprofit in order to create the platform for their existing relationship to make an introduction to their prospects. We are further assisting our clients in crafting events that are mapped to the interests and hobbies of their target prospects and leveraging existing relationships to share the invitations. The right events o"ering the right content will connect to the right future clients. As many people are saying, “Content is the new black,” and we have seen tremendous response to the content that is being generated on top of our proprietary data. Having great content is another way to reach the UHNW market. We are co-branding great content with clients in di"erent verticals to help generate awareness and strategically position their brands within the UHNW market. This type of content marketing is a fast-growing area for our firm. Our clients are then wrapping a bespoke marketing strategy around this content to connect with their future UHNW clients and drive mindshare.

Wealth-X has o"ces in multiple regions of the world. In your experience, do the strategies for helping companies make these valuable connections vary from one country or region to the next? What are some examples of this?

They do. In the U.S., asking for and leveraging referrals and introductions are more common. In other countries, culture and society norms can have an impact. However, the principle that a friend’s suggestion is always better received than a brand’s own contention means the most e"ective strategy is always going to be word-of-mouth marketing. However, we were working with a luxury brand in the UAE for which we were asked to do an email campaign to around 20 ultra-wealthy individuals for an event where the price of the featured item was in the millions. We questioned whether this type of campaign would be e"ective but executed a strategy anyway. The results were quite interesting in that eight of the 20 invitees responded to the blind email invitation.

What countries or regions have proven to be the most valuable markets for

Wealth-X, and how are you localizing content to cater to these markets?

Asia is obviously of keen interest to most of our clients in the luxury and private banking space. However, most of the luxury purchases by Chinese buyers, for example, are made outside of China. Our research and intelligence for this market o"er us a virtual monopoly since it is one of the most robust data sets we have. But the reality is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder for a client. What market is the most valuable really depends on the client. For our American banking clients, the family-owned business in Nebraska that no one knows about is the most important prospect. Because of this, we have not had to do much localization of our product since our clients are often located in one geography while targeting another, whether Asia or Latin America.

What are your primary marketing strategies? How are digital, mobile and social media used to connect with prospects and increase engagement?

To illustrate the power of great content, we have become one of the most quoted sources in the global press due to the proprietary and granular nature of our data and intelligence on the UHNW market. This has helped us to create a global brand in four short years and capture mindshare among our own top client prospects. We have also recently launched a daily news product that has become a must-read for our prospects and clients. The data has also helped position our executive team as thought leaders on the topic of wealth.

Moving forward, do you have plans to expand into additional markets? If so, what do you feel will be key to the company’s success in these new areas?

We do plan on expanding into the additional market of compliance for our luxury and banking clients, who have to validate the origin and source of wealth of their large donors, clients or VIPs. This is a natural extension of leveraging the platform and engine we have built to address a new need in the market that is not addressed by the existing tools and o"erings in the platform. We will also continue to expand into the market of bespoke marketing in advising and helping our clients with events and marketing strategies.

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Finally, we are experimenting with leveraging our data on wealth segmentation to o"er our clients digital advertising strategies that allow them to segment and qualify by net worth, something that has never been done before.

CONNECTING YOU TO WEALTHWealth-X News is a news and analysis platform dedicated to the life and times of the world’s UHNW individuals, an indispensable daily read for the UHNW industry.

David Friedman is the Co-founder and President of Wealth-X. Previously, he spent several years as Managing Director at CB Richard Ellis, an advisor to the Saudi Royal Family, Jumeirah Capital, Kuwait Finance House, the Government of Puerto Rico and the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Friedman is a noted author and

speaker on UHNW business development practices and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, InvestmentNews and The Telegraph.

BIO