She had decent assets and the qualities I was looking for: She was educated, seemingly successful; she lived and worked nearby, shared the same values as me and was looking for a long-term relationship.

No, this wasn’t online dating. Rather, I was looking to meet the perfect financial advisor, someone who I could entrust with my money and who would have intimate knowledge of my life’s goals.

Just as there are online dating services to help people find romance, there are matching platforms for clients to meet with ideal financial advisors. And they are growing in number and size. Do they work? For both dating and advisor matching, the answer is “sometimes.” And in both cases, the right match could conceivably forge a partnership worth millions of dollars.

Let’s stay focused on the advisor-client business and leave the dating sites for now.

Matching systems are becoming part of a financial world that is increasingly going digital. Online trading has overtaken the legacy practices of calling in buy and sell orders. There’s automated portfolio reporting. Inevitably, then, it should come as no surprise that the last frontier of human interfacing, prospecting, would go virtual—whether it’s through investment questionnaires or by client profiling.

The more common way—the most common way, actually—for advisors to find clients is through word of mouth. Study after study shows the effectiveness of referrals, said Michael Kitces, director of wealth management for Pinnacle Advisory Group in Columbia, Md., writing about the topic in a recent blog. But he also wrote that those referrals might be less about marketing skill and more about dumb luck.

“An increasing number of studies,” Kitces writes, “are showing that a significant portion of growth-by-referrals is not really through any proactive referral marketing strategy, but instead is merely the result of passive referrals that show up on their own.”

Active referral strategies, on the other hand, can be targeted, tracked and tweaked to attract the right type of client to an advisor’s door. This is where sophisticated matching platforms come into play.

These services can geolocate, translate risk profiles into reality (preferred trading strategies), and leverage the power of artificial intelligence to design and map investors’ preferences to advisors’ track records—all at the click of mouse, a push of a button or the swipe of a screen.

My Perfect Financial Advisor, a new system that intends to be the premier matchmaker between investor-consumers and their ideal advisors, breaks down its service into three steps:

Data accumulation. “We learn a great deal about you, such as assets, occupation, even your personality!” the company says in its marketing materials. “We ideally want you to grant us permission to acquire some of this data directly from your institutions, but you can always complete forms if you wish!”

Algorithmic formulas. “Using data, our matching formula and deep industry expertise, we match you to the ideal financial advisor we believe you should hire. Of course, we give you additional advisors to choose from ranked by our fit order.”

Live contact. “The next step is to contact our recommended advisor. If you prefer, you can have the advisor contact you. If you are uncomfortable with this next step, don’t worry, we will provide you with guides and questionnaires on how to interview and select your advisor.”

Nicholas Stuller, My Perfect Financial Advisor’s chief executive, is a 30-year financial services industry veteran. He was prompted to start the service in part to fight ignorance about the subject. “Over the years, I discovered that even savvy, wealthy investors don’t understand advisors,” he says. “The Wolf of Wall Street and all that is a very small percentage of what really goes on. But that gets a lot of attention.”

Advancements and acceptance of financial technology over the past few years made the timing right for Stuller to launch his platform this summer, he says.

While matching services have been around for decades (WiserAdvisor, for example, launched in 1998), the digital revolution for financial advice has only recently become trusted and accepted. One need only look at the rise of robo-advisors as evidence.

Still, Stuller doesn’t so much view his platform as a fintech operation. “We don’t view ourselves as a lead generation company. We view ourselves as an advocate for investors. Our purpose is to improve investors’ lives by matching them with the right advisor,” he says.

Lead generation is a big trap for consumers and advisors alike. An organization that simply trolls both sides doesn’t add much more value than a phone book. A good matching service, on the other hand, provides screening and due diligence, and its technology is efficient.

Another matching platform is SmartAdvisor Match, powered by SmartAsset, a site that offers tools, calculators and content created by personal finance experts to help people with their financial needs. The SmartAdvisor Match creators have come up with a short questionnaire for people seeking advisors, asking them about their retirement plans, their investment goals and advisor preferences. Based on answers and output, the service identifies three advisors clients can choose from in their area. It even offers an online concierge to book in-person appointments.

“We realized that to take our vision to the next level, we needed a more advanced way to help our audience make complex financial decisions that are best informed by professional help,” says SmartAsset chief executive Michael Carvin. “Through our tools, content and calculators, we provide advice on retirement, taxes, life insurance and home ownership, among many other topics, to more than 60 million people each month. Our SmartAdvisor matching platform enables those consumers, searching for financial advice, to get connected directly to financial advisors.”

A point made by virtually every advisor matching service is the value of professional advice. “All the studies and analysis show that you’ll do much better with an advisor than without,” Stuller says.

The SmartAdvisor site points out two widely published industry findings: Investors with a financial plan grew their assets 110% more than clients who didn’t. And individuals using an advisor are twice as likely to report that they are on track to meet their retirement goals.

This data should certainly coax investors into the belief that a good financial advisor is worth having. But what is the attraction of advisors to these sites?

Since many matching services charge advisors to list on their sites, is it worth the price of admission (which can often run into the thousands of dollars)?

SmartAsset’s Carvin says his site facilitated more than 5,000 meetings between investors and advisors in the month of June 2019 alone.

The financial services industry has a high cost per lead. In a recent ranking by HubSpot, the financial services industry came in third at $272 per lead in a survey of sectors. IT was the highest at $380 per lead, while health care came in second at $286 per lead.

Matching services charge anywhere from a $1,000 flat fee per month to less than $100 per lead. In either case, it’s seemingly a good value for advisors—that is, if the leads come in and indeed turn into clients.

Planet of Finance is taking the matching service global. It targets high-net-worth individuals and charges advisors $99 per month (with the first month free) to list on the platform. It rewards those high-net-worth clients who participate with points.

“To reward all our members for their trust and data, we offer them the opportunity to become shareholders of our platform,” says Planet of Finance’s chief executive Olivier Collombin. “When they register, they instantly receive POF points in the equivalent of the value of their profile. Each action taken on our platform rewards them with more POF points that can later be converted into Planet of Finance shares.” He says the site is successful because of its focus on next-generation wealth owners. By example, Collombin says more than $1 billion in portfolio assets has been registered on the site over the past three years. Planet of Finance, run out of Monaco, was launched in 2015.

As people get more comfortable sharing their personal data and interacting online, the prospects for advisor matching services seem strong. In today’s virtual world, it seems inefficient, if not irresponsible, to leave lead generation to chance. The matching services are the future, and should be the present. Financial technology can be a good professional Cupid.