With the January launch of a service called Accretive Advisor, the business of prospecting for clients in Canada will have fully entered the online relationship era.

Accretive Advisor, an Internet-based matchmaking service (www.accretiveadvisor.com) for financial advisors and clients created by Oakville, Ont.-based Accretive 360 Inc. , will operate in a way similar to the services provided by eHarmony Inc., which offers to match single people based on compatibility.

Accretive Advisor will put both advisors and potential clients through a “discovery process,” a series of scientifically-based questionnaires designed to help advisors identify their market and to help people looking for financial assistance outline what they want from an advisor.

“By the end of that process, [potential clients] will have created an avatar of the type of advisor they are looking for,” says Randy Ambrosie, founder of Accretive Advisor and former president of Toronto-based AGF Funds Inc. His company’s service will recommend three to five suitable advisors to a client, based on the questionnaires.

Although the concept of a central industry matchmaker for client/advisor relationships is new, this isn’t the first time financial services organizations have tried to help prospective clients find advisors online. The Toronto-based Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada has a “Know Your Advisor” page on its website, an initiative that helps an investor check an IIROC advisor’s references, disciplinary history and the firm for which he or she works. Similarly, Toronto-based Advocis has a “Find Your Advisor” page through which potential clients can search a database of Advocis-member advisors for the credentials the searcher is looking for in an advisor.

And some financial services companies also have created online tools to make the process of finding a new advisor easier. Last year, Toronto-based Sun Life Financial Inc. launched its AdvisorMatch tool. With this service, a prospective client can create a virtual image of himself, as well as create an image of the ideal advisor — including gender, age and area of expertise.

Although these previous efforts strive to simplify the process of finding an advisor online, they have limitations. Both IIROC’s and Advocis’s websites don’t provide detailed background on advisors or any information about the kind of clients they seek, their investment philosophies or track records of client satisfaction. And potential clients using Sun Life’s service receive recommendations of only the firm’s advisors.

Accretive Advisor, however, will feature advisors under both the IIROC and Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada sides of the business. Any firm’s advisors can join the service, and matching recommendations are based solely on profiles of individual advisors and prospective clients.@page_break@Ambrosie says the idea for the Accretive Advisor service came about partly as a result of his experience in the mutual fund business, in which he often saw mismatched client/advisor relationships unravel, and partly from the success of online relationship services. “With one in eight marriages being found off the Internet, I just thought to myself, ‘Why not this?’” he says. “Why can’t inves-tors log onto a website, look into a universe of advisors and find the perfect advisor for them?”

Advisors who use the website can become “Accretive Certified.” To do this, they must ask their existing clients to complete Toronto-based Advisor Impact Inc. ’s Client Audit tool, which assesses how effectively an advisor serves the client in critical elements. The score will not be published, but does allow the advisor to put the Accretive Advisor seal on his or her online profile.

This advisor certification makes the process of finding what’s deemed a “good” advi-sor online easier, says Ambrosie: “Without adding these standards how is an investor going to know that someone is good at what they do or that a person is right for them?”

Some big Canada Canadian brokerages are on board with Accretive Advisor. Management with Montreal-based National Bank Financial Ltd. , Toronto-based Assante Wealth Man-age-ment (Canada) Ltd.,Van-couver-based HSBC Global Asset Management (Canada) Ltd. and Toronto-based Richardson GMP Ltd. all have given the go-ahead to their advisors to sign up. The annual fee for an advisor to sign up for Accretive Advisor’s basic service, and to set up a profile, is $250. If the advisor wants to become Accretive Certified, the annual cost of the certification program is $3,000, which includes Advisor Impact’s Client Audit online tool. NBF will subsidize its advisors’ costs of joining Accretive Advisor; Assante advi-sors will have to foot the bill for the service themselves.

Accretive Advisor should help potential clients find the advisor that’s right for them a lot quicker, which is why NBF is supporting the service, says James Porter, senior vice president of NBF: “Prior to Accretive Advisor, a client would start their search for an advisor on Google, then go visit five or six advisors at different firms to figure out who was right for them. Now, they can save all that time and frustration by setting up a profile on Accretive Advisor and having the website screen advisors.”

The website also validates an advisor’s professional image, says Steve Donald, president of Assante, because the website screens the advisors permitted to sign up. That screening isn’t a service a single firm or regulatory organization could supply single-handedly, he says: “Having a third-party validate the view that having a professional advisor is beneficial for the industry.”

Online matching services such as Accretive Advisor come at a time when many people are looking to the Internet for professional financial help. Says Joanne Ferguson, president and co-founder of Toronto-based Advisor Pathways Inc.: “Since the downturn, a lot of people are going online to look for more information on advisors and, most of all, want to find the advisor that’s right for them.” IE