Executive Summary

Farther is a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm that leverages technology to empower its team of nearly 200 financial advisors. Prior to implementing VRGL, Farther's advisors faced a significant pain point: the time-consuming and manual process of analyzing prospective clients' portfolios and generating compelling portfolio proposals to new investors and potential client couples. This often involved manually entering data from client statements into other tools, which could take 20 to 30 minutes per account, meaning well over an hour just for a single family's portfolio.

Since adopting VRGL, Farther has streamlined its client acquisition workflow, enabling advisors to quickly generate a visual, data-driven comparison of a prospect's current portfolio versus a proposed Farther allocation, complete with back tested returns from the 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year performance histories. Today, that same process takes just 10 to 20 minutes per prospective client, resulting in a 70%-80% reduction in prep time for advisors across the firm.

Uncovering $600k in Hidden Assets

During a prospect call, the Farther team initially reviewed about $350K in children's trust accounts using a VRGL proposal. The clarity and impact of the side-by-side comparison prompted the prospect to disclose more assets — nearly $600,000 that had not been mentioned upfront. As the conversation continued, the client revealed they held just under $1 million in total investable assets.

By showing how Farther's strategy could outperform their current holdings on both performance and risk-adjusted returns, the team positioned themselves to win the full relationship. What began as a modest portfolio review turned into an opportunity nearly three times larger, driven by the trust and confidence VRGL helped establish.

A More Confident Approach to Winning Business

Farther's advisors rely on VRGL primarily as a proposal and portfolio comparison tool during prospecting conversations, as well as new client portfolio strategy meetings, where new cash is being placed into the markets or existing investments are being reallocated.

As Brad Reichert, CFA®, CFP® — Financial Advisor at Farther, explains: "In our conversations with prospective clients, we are almost always asked at some point along the way, 'what are you guys at Farther going to do with my money if I bring it to you to manage for me?' And that's essentially what I'm using the software for."

The ability to show prospects a side-by-side comparison of their current portfolio and Farther's proposed allocation has become central to the conversation. As Mario Battistini, CFA®, CFP® — Financial Advisor at Farther, put it: "The visualizations really enhance the conversation. Clients don't just want words, they want to see it."

With VRGL, advisors can extract holdings, fees, and allocations in minutes. That same work previously took up to 30 minutes per account. As Reichert notes: "The alpha of using VRGL is the time savings. It saves me a ton of time I use it, and that's what I need most, especially given the volume of prospects we're talking to on a weekly basis."

Return on Investment

Before VRGL, preparing a prospect proposal meant up to 20-30 minutes in manual entry of a prospective client's share position (and cost basis) per account. For a typical household with 6-8 accounts, advisors could easily spend an hour and a half or more just to get a basic comparison. Then, there is the additional time spent comparing risk vs returns data and coordinating performance attribution of the advisor's portfolios vs what the prospect has currently.

With VRGL's AI-supported data extraction capabilities, that process now takes as little as 2-3 minutes per account, representing a nearly 90% decrease in prep time. Across nearly 200 advisors performing just one portfolio analysis per day, this translates into 4,200 hours per month that can be reinvested into revenue-generating activities like client meetings and relationship building.

The efficiency gains have a direct impact on growth:

• Advisors themselves can easily handle up to two additional portfolio proposals per day (or up to 10 more per week) effectively scaling their outreach without adding headcount.
• Faster, more compelling proposals that are easy to understand can help accelerate decision-making for prospects. And if done properly, it can lead to decision making that can be completed in a couple of days versus a couple of weeks.
• Effective, easy-to-understand client-facing visuals strengthen the trust a potential client has in an advisor, which has already helped uncover opportunities such as the $600K in additional assets brought to light during a single proposal conversation.

As Bryan D'Alessandro, Managing Director at Farther, summarizes: "The proposal is the main thing." By transforming proposal prep from a manual chore into a strategic growth lever, VRGL enables Farther's advisors to win more assets, deepen client trust, and scale their businesses faster.

If you are interested in learning more about how VRGL can help your firm streamline the investment proposal process and accelerate client acquisitions, please reach out to sales@vrglwealth.com or connect with us by visiting www.vrglwealth.com/contact.