FPA and Snappy Kraken rebuild PlannerSearch around a 12-question client quiz

The Financial Planning Association released a revamped version of its PlannerSearch platform on Oct. 1, and the case for the rebuild is a problem the people who built it describe without hedging: in most directories, the planners look the same.

"Profiles blended together so consumers couldn't really tell one planner from another," said Nikita Nilges, a strategic designer at the financial software firm Smyth Group, which built the new version alongside the FPA and technology company Snappy Kraken. Jamie Smyth, Smyth Group's CEO, described the category's default in similar terms, calling most directories information clearinghouses where "financial planners look remarkably similar."

The release is part of what the FPA describes as a multiyear strategic partnership with Snappy Kraken, and it is a bet about where a prospect actually stands when the search begins. Smyth said the design goals included creating something that was not a directory and that also avoided becoming another ZIP code search service.

What replaces the flat listing is a sequence: prospects answer a 12-question quiz built around the emotional drivers and behaviors that shape how they make financial decisions and how they relate to money, with life events treated as the gateway to an advisor's expertise. Those answers feed something the team calls the Mindset Matrix, a framework that plots a prospect's financial well-being and readiness to engage on two axes; where the two axes intersect, the demo shown on the call says, the matrix reveals four distinct client mindsets, each requiring a tailored approach from the planner on the other side.

"Most people don't start searching for a financial planner on an average Tuesday," Smyth said. "They start looking because something major has happened in their lives."

Nilges said the team held preliminary discussions with planners and examined consumers' needs "before our team wrote a single line of code." That sequencing, standard for any rebuild, is also the explanation for the quiz: if the failure mode is undifferentiated profiles, the fix is to collect enough about the prospect that the match is specific before the profile is ever seen. The design consequence is that the unit of matching becomes a life event plus a mindset rather than a specialty keyword or a firm's name recognition, a shift FPA CEO Dennis Moore described as giving users "more tailored advisor matches based on their concerns or needs," delivered in the format they want.

Moore framed the release around a public that needs better technology to identify "true financial planning and planners," a phrase that carries weight next to the association's separate effort on who may use the title at all. As this publication has reported, the FPA has pushed to protect the "financial planner" title ahead of settling the standards behind it, and a protected title would govern how the phrase appears on bio pages, in pitch decks and on conference badges. PlannerSearch puts a consumer-facing version of that question in front of the public: who gets presented as a financial planner, and on what evidence.

Moore also positioned the tool for the way discovery is shifting, saying it is built for "a world where artificial intelligence is changing how people find answers, compare options and decide whom to trust."

A quiz that narrows a search to four mindsets raises the cost of a generic profile. The prospect has already said what they need, so the page's job is to answer in specific terms rather than to establish that the planner is qualified at all, and the design intent moves the weight of differentiation onto whether a profile names the life events that brought the client to the search. A profile built as a full menu of services reads the way Smyth says the field reads now.

The teams named the underlying challenge plainly: prospects arrive with specific needs already in mind, which is why the quiz treats a life event, rather than an asset total or a service list, as the entry point. Whether four mindsets cover the range of people who show up is something the release does not report, and the demo's own voiceover concedes the spread: "We love it when a client comes to us organized and ready to make the most of their finances," it says. "But we know the reality…It's a massive spectrum."

A directory match is an introduction a planner did not generate through referral, and the profile arriving with it is doing the work of a first meeting. The association's framing may therefore matter more than the interface: it shapes what a matched prospect reads about a practice before any conversation happens.

The FPA has put a consumer channel in front of its members that asks them to describe their practice in the language of a client's life rather than a service list, with the sorting handled by 12 questions and two axes. Whether prospects arrive through that channel or through the AI tools Moore named is something no demonstration call settles.