FINTRX or the SEC: Where Your Prospect Data Actually Lives

There is a category of paid data vendor — FINTRX, Altss, AdvizorPro, and adjacent — whose marketing material implies that no firm serious about selling into the registered-investment-adviser or family-office market can operate without them. The pricing reflects the implication: roughly $10,000 to $20,000 per year per seat for FINTRX, $12,000 to $15,500 per seat for Altss, similar bands for the adjacent products.

For a venture-funded firm trying to deploy capital into family offices, the math probably works. For a solo founder, an early-stage firm selling services to RIAs, or an established firm trying to sharpen its outbound motion against the June 3, 2026 Reg S-P deadline, the math probably does not.

Here is the argument.

FINTRX is built for the inverse motion

FINTRX is built to help capital allocators raise money from family offices. The product is optimized for finding family-office decision-makers who allocate to private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and real estate. The contact records are curated for the purpose of soliciting investment. The intelligence layer focuses on what each family office invests in, which managers they back, what mandate sizes they prefer.

That product is, structurally, the inverse of the motion a cyber-and-governance services firm needs to run. Selling services into a family office requires understanding the operational reality of the family office — who is the chief operating officer, who runs information technology, who chairs the family council, what is in the firm's Form ADV Item 5F cybersecurity disclosure, what regulatory exposure the firm carries, what vendor relationships the firm has documented. FINTRX has some of that data. The product is not organized around it. Paying $15,000 a year for the wrong organization of largely overlapping data is a category mistake.

The same argument applies to Altss. The product is built to help allocators find family offices. The license terms forbid bulk export. The integration story is built around accessing the database from inside the Altss platform, not around feeding the data into an outbound CRM or sequencing engine. Paying for a database the license terms prevent the licensee from using the way they actually need to use it is a contracting mistake on top of the category mistake.

What the SEC actually publishes for free

The SEC publishes, for free, a consolidated historical archive of Form ADV Part 1 filings from November 5, 2011 through December 31, 2024. The archive is two zip files totaling several hundred megabytes. It contains the most recent Form ADV for every SEC-registered investment adviser as of end of 2024. Every name. Every SEC file number. Every state. Every assets-under-management figure. Every Form ADV Item 5F cybersecurity disclosure. Every vendor relationship Schedule D. Every disciplinary history. Every officer registration from Schedule A.

The download is at sec.gov/foia-services/frequently-requested-documents/form-adv-data. The compliance with SEC's fair-access policy is to set a User-Agent header that identifies the requesting party with contact information. The cost is zero. The license is public domain.

For 2025 and 2026 updates — new registrations, AUM changes, vendor additions — the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website provides per-firm lookup at adviserinfo.sec.gov. The website is not a clean public API, but it is a usable secondary source for the small fraction of firms whose 2025 or 2026 changes matter for a specific outreach decision.

The combined data covers approximately 21,000 sub-$1.5B AUM registered investment advisers — the entire universe DeepSweep needs for the Reg-S-P outreach motion. The Reg-S-P deadline-proximity scoring layer — the part that determines which RIAs are most likely to engage on a thirty-day compliance program — runs over that data with no further enrichment beyond a single news feed for breach disclosures.

The combined cost is zero dollars per year.

What FINTRX or Altss might be worth, later

There is a defensible case for FINTRX after the first five paying clients are signed. By that point, the firm's outreach motion is calibrated, the conversion rates are known, and the marginal value of richer family-office relationship data — the data FINTRX is actually optimized for — becomes calculable. The license is then an investment with a known return, paid out of revenue, against a sized prospect universe.

The defensible case for Altss is narrower. The product's no-export license terms continue to constrain what a services firm can do with the data. The right play is probably to revisit Altss only if the firm has signed a specific class of UHNW family office whose data is uniquely covered by Altss's editorial focus and not adequately covered elsewhere.

There is no defensible case for either of them in the pre-revenue period of an HNW-pivot services firm. The opportunity cost of the license is two or three months of founder time spent on the work that actually produces the first signed client.

The free path, end to end

The operational sequence is short. Download the SEC's two consolidated Form ADV zips from sec.gov. Unzip into a working directory. Parse the IA_ADV_Base_A file, which contains the firm-level base table — name, SEC file number, AUM, state, Item 5F. Dedupe by SEC file number, keeping the most recent filing per firm. Apply the AUM cap to filter to the sub-$1.5B universe. Score each row by Reg-S-P proximity — a function of days to the June 3 deadline, presence or absence of an Item 5F cybersecurity disclosure, AUM band, and any recent breach signal. Sort descending. The top three hundred records are the outreach cohort for the next thirty days.

The same data, organized for the opposite direction of motion, is on sale for $15,000 a year. The firm that pays for it pays for the framing, not for the data. The framing is the wrong one for selling cyber-and-governance services into the wealth-management sector.

The free path is what we run. It works.

Brad McEvilly writes on the operating reality of agentic AI governance, Reg S-P, and family-office cyber. He is the founder of DeepSweep.