Knomee founder and CEO Marla Sofer.
Marla Sofer, whose leadership experience includes roles at BlackRock and JPMorgan, explains how gamification and AI can help elevate client engagement and understanding for advisors.
For decades, wealth management has excelled at tracking balances, holdings and performance. But when it comes to understanding what clients actually want from their money, the industry has fallen short.
That gap between cold financial data and the complex, evolving goals of real people is exactly what Knomee, a behavioral discovery platform, is aiming to close.
“Understanding how much money someone has, their concentrations, their balances, what kind of products they own – that’s very commoditized now,” Marla Sofer, the fintech firm’s founder and CEO, said in an interview with InvestmentNews. “[What’s] incredibly inconsistent and not tracked, and certainly not dynamically tracked, [is] what people actually want the money for.”
Over the course of a roughly 20-year career, Sofer has seen the industry from nearly every angle. From the mid-2000s, she held leadership roles at JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, before founding Knomee in 2023.
In its own words, Knomee is a “behavioral discovery platform that helps financial advisors connect faster, personalize advice, and retain clients through life transitions.” It’s featured on Michael Kitces’ authoritative Financial Advisor Technology Map, along with roughly a dozen other names in the “Behavior Assessments” category such as Financial DNA, Life Stage Insights, Shaping Wealth, and Wealthfully.
Doing behavioral discovery for life
The story of advisors acting as behavioral coaches is not exactly new. From Vanguard’s long-running research on Advisors’ Alpha to Morningstar’s support for advisors as financial therapists, there’s no shortage of voices highlighting the human touch as a defense against the threat of algorithm-driven robo advisors and DIY investment platforms.
But Sofer argues that coaching is ineffective without first understanding where a client is coming from.
“You can’t coach if you don’t know where somebody is and where they stand. You don’t even know where to start,” she said. “It’s the same as if you go to a doctor and the doctor is giving you a diagnosis before [asking what you’re] feeling.”
Today, Sofer says the process of discovery across the industry is spotty at best – not all advisors take notes and put them in a CRM, for example. And while some advisors rely on one-time surveys or assessments, those are often not written with the client in mind, nor designed for a digital, engaging experience.
“The discovery process is 100% inconsistent,” she said.
To address that, she says Knomee’s approach is designed to make the process consistent, digital, and client-led. The platform is rooted in behavioral science, drawing on more than two hundred research papers and the expertise of Dr. Meghaan Lurtz, a leading authority in the psychology of financial planning.
Sofer also highlights the importance of ongoing, event-driven discovery. Unlike many models relying on client catch-ups done annually or quarterly, the platform allows advisors to capture life events and emotional context as they happen.
“You’re understanding what’s happening in that client’s life and in their brain, their emotions as they’re going through those life events,” Sofer said. “That really makes the quality of the advice bump up and differentiated.”
Gamifying with purpose
Sofer says Knomee’s digital experience is modeled after popular non-financial apps such as Noom, Duolingo, Strava, and Hinge. The goal is to create a platform that can immediately engage clients.
“When a user comes in to Knomee, it’s familiar. … It feels fun and gamified, and they know how to do it,” she said.
Sofer is quick to distance Knomee’s strategy from how some other gamified platforms approach engagement. Research from the CFA Institute in 2023 casts gamification as a double-edged sword that, like finfluencers, could encourage excessive trading and a fixation on short-term outcomes among retail investors. Perhaps the poster child for that is Robinhood, which in 2024 agreed to pay the Commonwealth of Massacusetts a fine of $7.5 million over a 2020 charge that it used game-like features to harm inexperienced investors, among other alleged shortfalls.
As Sofer tells it, Knomee uses gamification to help clients discover what’s truly important to them. By using AI, it synthesizes client data and provides advisors with actionable conversation starters tailored to each client. The AI also surfaces motivating language, values, goals and confidence trends, giving advisors a stronger grasp of their clients’ evolving needs.
“The outcome is you [as a client] know what is in your best interest, and your advisor knows what’s in your best interest,” she said.
Knomee claims to have driven significant success among early RIA users, with onboarding rates going up by as much as 4x. To encourage more adoption, it has announced a one-month free trial, giving advisors a limited number of client slots to experience select features of the platform.
The mind game of money
While the science around behavioral finance has been established for decades, Sofer says wealth managers have traditionally dismissed it as “fluffy” science, insisting that clients are more concerned about investment performance and beating benchmarks. But study after study over the past few years has confirmed the importance of psychology in the wealth management business.
One research paper from Cerulli highlighted common behavioral pitfalls afflicting affluent investors – including availability bias, confirmation bias, and herding – which make them more prone to self-sabotaging decisions. And as succession planning comes into sharper focus at family offices and businesses, so does the need for advisors who can have honest conversations around values and purpose.
“Everyone can allocate. Not everyone can go deep and understand what it is that you want in your future and help you put that into a plan that makes sense for you,” Sofer says.