How to Evaluate and Select an RIA Database: Buyer’s Guide
Marketing teams often approach buying data like scouts purchasing by instinct. But the best approach is a Moneyball approach to empirically find the best undervalued data. However, evaluating an RIA database is often non-transparent. They tell you they have access to everyone, but your CRM will end up with duplicates, stale contacts, and wasted sales effort.
This blog article describes a rigorous 5-step evaluation process so you end up buying a tool that supports a GTM strategy. You’ll figure out how to define the use case, secure data quality, and run a pilot that sinks the contract.
What does “RIA Database” mean (and what doesn’t)
Most commercial RIA databases are effectively enrichment layers on top of regulatory filings. They start with the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) system, but raw regulatory filings are passive data things like AUM, number of employees, etc., that indicate what has happened, but not why, nor who to contact.
A true GTM database includes Active Data as described in Jobs To Be Done — the additional context needed for GTM. The SEC provides structured filings (like the ADV Part 1) that’s good for quantitative segmentation, but then there’s narrative Part 2 Brochures which are PDFs and hard to analyze en masse, and you’ll typically pay for someone to convert these into profiles, exportable and searchable, with contact info that’s not in the regulatory filings.
Step 1 – Use Case Definition (define success)
Before you evaluate software, define what “job” the database is hired to do, inspired by the Jobs To Be Done theory, which says you hire products to solve problems. Who’s the primary user? Is it a Marketing Sciences team that’s gonna export in bulk and analyze, or is it sales reps who need daily lookup? This transforms functional requirements into an experience that encompasses both.
What is the job? Are you doing capacity matching, meaning the data needs to help assess sales bandwidth relative to marketing spend, so leads don’t collect dust? Define 2-3 KPIs like:
- Territory Balance: Are we equalizing lead flow?
- % of Followed Up Leads: Are reps ignoring leads, indicating capacity fail?
- Velocity of the list: How fast can Marketing Sciences consume the list to report to leadership?
Step 2 – Data Evaluation (core make/break for ROI)
Data quality should be the biggest factor in deciding if the database will be trusted or ignored. If you’re building a shortlist, it helps to review side-by-side comparisons of the best RIA databases so you can sanity-check coverage, data freshness, and workflow fit before booking demos. Here are 3 specific things to look for when evaluating vendors:
Coverage and Depth
There are nuances in regulatory data that matter, like differentiating Hybrid Broker-Dealer vs. Hybrid RIA. One is fee-based first with accommodation, the other is commission-based trying to add advisory. Is it both SEC and state? The SEC doesn’t get access to state-registered firm disclosures so if it’s just scraping SEC there’s gaps of smaller ones and assuming NASAA data get added.
Freshness and Change Frequency
B2B contact data has a natural decay rate of 20-25% per year and without active cleaning bounce rate will degrade above the 5% critical threshold putting your email domains at risk. Ask vendors how frequently they update based on Form ADV filings frequency – there’s annual amendments filed within 90 days after fiscal year end, but then there’s other-than-annual when stuff materially changes. These should be captured in real-time to keep things fresh.
Accuracy and Validation Sources
There’s a 20-30% duplicate rate organizations get hit with but quality databases often apply the pillars of data observability – from distribution to lineage – to avoid this. Be sure to look for vendors that have validation sources documented rather than simply a passive scrape.
Step 3 – Workflow Fit (integration, activation, governance)
Databases need to integrate into existing workflows in the Martech stack. Using the Degrees to Money framework, minimize the degrees from accessing the data to revenue creation.
CRM Integration and Marketing Ecosystem
There’s a strategy for Identification, Prevention, and Maintenance with Deduplication – does the vendor have unique identifiers? Hubspot uses email for contacts and domain names for companies but your vendor needs to align or will cause errors. Are there formula fields that can cross objects? You want to see the firm-level AUM update on Opportunity records without reps having to fill it in.
Filters that match GTM?
Can you filter using criteria in the ADV Part 1 filing? A common thing is to segment Large vs. Mid-sized (Item 2) using an actual filter, and then sort columns like what type of clients they serve (Item 5). But these have to be represented as filters, not just narrative. Otherwise, it won’t work as a database for GTM.
Access/Permissions
There’s always Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) needed here. Maybe the partnership leads need to export everything, but a territory rep should only see their territory. Follow least privilege so your license isn’t violated.
Step 4 – SEC IAPD vs. Paid Database (when free is meh)
The SEC IAPD system is decent for verifying individual registration gaps and has historical disclosures going back 10 years, but it weirdly limits to 15 results per page and lacks email/contact info. Makes it unusable for territory planning or outbound strategy though.
Step 5 – Short Pilot Before Buy (7-day test)
Treat as a Vendor Life Cycle inception moment, and don’t just rely on sales demos, but objectively validate data yourself.
The 7-day pilot process:
- Objective profiling: Export a sample and check completeness (nulls/orphans). Do critical fields like AUM, role/title, and email populate consistently?
- Dedupe test: Import a small batch (e.g., 25–50) into a sandbox. Does it match your dedupe rules and prefer the most recently updated record?
- Rollback plan: Confirm you can remove imported records cleanly (without breaking tasks, notes, or sequences).
- Security review: Evaluate controls against your requirements using a residual-risk approach (access controls, retention, audit logs, vendor handling of PII).
- Freshness spot-check (recommended): Pick 10 firms and verify recent ADV changes/leadership info against independent sources to estimate “staleness rate.”
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