A small team of Utah entrepreneurs and developers launched Slant this week.
They contend that the AI-driven platform they have built will be a modern (well, for now) reinvention and replacement of traditional customer relationship management software.
In addition to announcing Slant’s official launch, Pageport, the startup company behind it, also announced a $3.3 million seed round of funding from the venture capital firms 2048 Ventures and Matchstick Ventures.
Slant’s founders refer to it as AI-first CRM, and they contend it will, over time, empower advisors to support more than double the current maximum number of clients they can serve (200 to 250, they estimate) and help ease the coming advisor shortage crisis.
“The [existing advisor] CRMs are our straight-line competitors,” said Slant co-founder Thomas Clawson, noting that their platform has migration tools for an advisor to bring over their existing data from their current CRM if they have one.
“Our sweet spot is an advisor with an admin or two,” he said.
Their mission is to serve those advisors and enable them to consolidate their tech stacks, replacing Wealthbox, Redtail, Salesforce or other CRM platforms, AI-notetaker platforms, as well as project management and next-best-action tools (sometimes referred to as to-do tools), including Bento Engine, Hubly, and Knudge. In other words, the intent is to natively replace an advisor’s overlapping engagement tools.
“One of the most frustrating things [about starting as an advisor] is coming up with all the many different tools you need,” said Brian K. Seymour, the principal and CEO of Prosperitage Wealth near Atlanta, GA. He is a solo practitioner with one administrative assistant.
“I’ve used so many other systems,” he said, describing how he was replacing his current non-advisor-specific AI notetaker application with Slant and liked how the latter managed all his meeting-related tasks and that he no longer had to manually copy and paste into his CRM or into Outlook for writing client emails.
Slant’s replacement of existing technology also includes those advisors who might have their own paid subscriptions to ChatGPT, as Slant is built on top of the LLM’s version five. The Slant team plans to add additional choices in AI models as part of its roadmap.
The initial pricing of Slant is $150 per seat per month, with a discount for an annual subscription and for the 40 or so beta users who have been working with the company over the last year or so. This represents a significant cost reduction if an advisor can trim down subscriptions for three to four other pieces of their tech stack.
As for custodian support, Slant has built integrations with Schwab, Fidelity and Pershing and would like to do so with Altruist, but has yet to make that connection.
While Slant is new and has had a relatively small set of beta users, the company’s eponymous Pageport product now serves more than 1,000 advisors, according to its founders. That product helps advisors automate lead conversion, marketing, and client communications through the creation of personal video landing pages.
“For a long time with software, you had to build very structured data,” said Slant’s other co-founder, Max Metcalf.
“AI is great at handling unstructured data…and we are trying to minimize usage of custom fields—you can always ask Slant chat what it is,” he said of non-labeled or non-obvious data.
Slant takes a fundamentally different approach to how CRM technology has traditionally been built.
In simplest terms, the startup’s team of nine has laid down the AI technology first and is adding CRM-like features on top of it. If they are successful Slant will accelerate churn among advisors using the many AI-notetakers I’ve been covering these last two years (oh boy,
One of the many ways that Slant departs from traditional CRM is that its components are made up of AI agents, programs that do specific tasks on a fairly automated basis, acting as “proactive teammates” according to the founders, to do a lot of the more manual tasks advisors and their admins typically perform.
Three such agents have been rolled out in the initial launch of Slant, including Nudges, Meeting and Scheduling Agents, and Chat.
Nudges are both reminders and little programs, agents that actually do work for you, from notifying you about client birthday reminders and generating correspondence, to meeting follow-ups to reminders about a client’s upcoming RMD. It will draft an email or text about it and schedule the communication.
Next is the Meeting & Scheduling Agent, which prepares a personalized agenda for advisor-client meetings, brings in needed documents, and surfaces any key client details. It will also reach out to the client and do the scheduling, including confirmations and reminders and takes care of logging post-meeting notes, updating client or prospect records and preparing follow-ups.
Finally, there is Chat, what the founders refer to as an AI-powered assistant embedded in Slant that answers advisor questions, from client details, to locating documents, and drafting outreach.
One of the several beta users of Slant I interviewed for this column (who has also been using PagePort for the last year and a half) is Daren Blonski, president and CEO of the 10-advisor firm Sonoma Wealth.
“Take something as simple as a client DOB, in theory it should sync across all my applications and platforms,” he said hypothetically, “but I’m excited that the Slant agent will go through and reconcile that because it is not always the case with my current tech stack.”
“When you are adding 30 clients a month, a lot of new inbounds, the idea that I could have an AI agent in the background 24/7 verifying all the data is correct or letting me know that they have or haven’t been contacted in X months—that is huge—it is one of the things that keeps you up at night,” said Blonski, whose firm manages just under $1 billion in AUM for almost 3,000 households.
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