The story behind Couplr
December 2019. A mentor cut me off mid-pitch with four words: “just build it, Derek.” I launched a company that morning — a training program teaching financial advisors how to run a modern, digital, work-from-anywhere practice. Four years later I sold it, having reached advisors in the US, UK, South Africa, and beyond. That business taught me something the industry keeps proving: the profession itself hadn’t caught up to how people actually make financial decisions.
A phone video from the road. Somewhere in that stretch, my wife texted me a video of our son doing something ordinary while I was on yet another business trip, and it hit me: I was missing moments I’d never get back. I couldn’t find anything built for dads trying to be fully present and fully ambitious, so I built that too — REBL Dads, a room of a hundred fathers with a Richard Branson foreword and an annual gathering on Necker Island.
Two hundred books to Johannesburg. Years earlier, my mom being South African, I visited an entrepreneurship centre in Johannesburg and noticed the young founders had almost no books. I flew home, crowdsourced two hundred books from everyone I knew (and lots of people I didn’t), and personally flew them back on my next trip. While there I ended up investing in a company helping South African kids access online education. Funny how the world works.
The through-line — from a training company to a fathers’ community to a give-first trip to Johannesburg — is the same conviction that eventually became Couplr: the thing that matters most, in advice and in life, is genuine human connection. Couplr is behavioral matching built around that conviction. It connects people with the right advisor for who they actually are, always with a human in the middle.
Derek Notman, CFP®, Founder & CEO of Couplr
Derek Notman, CFP® is the Founder and CEO of Couplr, Inc., the AI-powered advisor–client matching platform for wealth management and insurance firms. He founded Couplr to replace cold outreach and broken lead-generation models with precision growth intelligence, built on behavioral science and a 1,300-variable matching engine.
About Couplr
Couplr is the AI-powered advisor–client matching platform for wealth management and insurance firms. Built on a 1,300-variable matching engine and enriched with InterGen Data and Equifax intelligence, Couplr operates as precision growth intelligence for enterprise insurance and wealth firms. The platform combines two engines: Couplr Match (Couplr Match), which converts consumer-initiated web traffic into qualified advisor meetings, and Couplr IQ, which surfaces 20–40% of held-away assets and prioritizes the top 15% of clients ready to act. Couplr is SOC 2 Type II certified, integrated with Wealthbox and Redtail, and was recognized as “Most Likely to Change the Industry” at the 2026 MassChallenge FinTech finale.
Role and Background
Derek is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and a long-time practitioner in wealth management. He spent his pre-Couplr career watching capable advisors struggle to find clients they actually clicked with, and watching consumers settle for advisors who didn’t fit their life stage, values, or communication style. Couplr is his answer to that mismatch, an enterprise-grade system that uses behavioral science and AI to help the right advisor and the right client find each other on what actually matters.
As CEO, Derek leads strategy, partnerships, and fundraising for Couplr. He also writes regularly to his 20K+ subscribers For the Love of Money newsletter on behavioral finance.
Industry Recognition and Partnerships
Under Derek’s leadership, Couplr has been:
- Selected for the MassChallenge FinTech 2026 cohort (one of 18 from approximately 160 applicants).
- Advanced to the Quarter-Finals of the Pepperdine Most Fundable Companies program.
- Recognized for SOC 2 Type II certification: described in independent enterprise-readiness assessments as “exceptional for a company at this stage.”
- Featured in WealthTech Today, Capital Group PracticeLab, and the communications of The American College of Financial Services.
- IB Madison Executive Excellence: Finance & Technology Awards, Technology Finalist (2025)
- Published in Momentum Investments’ 2024 Sci-Fi Report on behavioural finance — Derek authored the opening article, “Using AI to fix our relationship with money and serve our communities better,” alongside contributors including Ryan Murphy, PhD (Morningstar) and Dr. Thomas Oberlechner, PhD (BehaviourQuant). Read the report (PDF).
- ThinkAdvisor 2023 Luminary Award for Thought Leadership & Education
- WealthManagement.com 2022 Rising Star of the Year award
- Named to InBusiness Magazine’s 40 under 40 in 2019.
- NAIFA-Vermont New Advisor Award, 2008 “For outstanding achievement as the leading new advisor in the state of Vermont.”
Couplr’s platform is integrated with Wealthbox and Redtail, with a Salesforce integration available on request and an open API on the product roadmap.
Thought Leadership
Derek writes an ongoing column at Advisor.ca, Canada’s leading trade publication for financial advisors. His most recent piece, “The Cold Call Is Dead” (August 2026), lays out how the advisor prospecting model is changing — from cold outbound toward consumer-initiated matching, behavioral fit as a retention driver, and AI-generated answers replacing search engines as the top of the discovery funnel.
Derek publishes For the Love of Money, a monthly LinkedIn newsletter on the science of money and behavioral finance with over 20,000 subscribers across 80+ editions. Recent issues have covered the behavioral barriers to hiring a financial advisor, drawing on Couplr’s research white paper Cost Isn’t the Bottleneck. Fit Is.
Derek writes and speaks regularly on the broken state of advisor–client lead generation, the role of AI in human-first financial advice, and the operating models needed to serve clients profitably across the wealth spectrum.
“Today consumers find advisors the way they found a plumber in 1995 — referrals, phone book, and a little luck. None of that has anything to do with whether the relationship will actually work. Cost isn’t the bottleneck. Fit is.”
— Derek Notman, CFP®, Founder & CEO, Couplr
NAPFA Advisor — Bylined feature “How the Best Fintech Tools Make Financial Advisory Firms More Human” published in the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors member newsletter (2026). Read the article.
Capital Group PracticeLab – Dedicated Q&A feature “Use AI to make more human connections, with Derek Notman” (June 25, 2025). Read the article.
ThinkAdvisor (ALM) – “Couplr AI Launches Tool for Finding Orphaned Accounts” by John Manganaro (March 12, 2024, filed under Luminaries). Read the article.
INSART SIGNALS – Long-form dedicated interview “Fixing the Organic Growth Problem in Wealth Management” (July 3, 2026). Read the interview.
Kiplinger Advisor Collective – Quoted in “Nine Reasons Why Financial Advisers Should Sharpen Their Soft Skills” (May 31, 2024). Read the article.
Kitces.com – Couplr AI named alongside Finny and Datalign in Michael Kitces’ monthly AdvisorTech roundup (March 2025). Read the roundup.
NAPFA Advisor – Quoted in “Visibility That Builds Trust” by Laura Garfield as a Real Finfluencer on LinkedIn video strategy. Read the article.
Athene Connect – Quoted throughout “3 Success Secrets of Top Financial Professionals” on unique value proposition and client engagement (2024). Read the article.
Momentous Wealth Advisors – Book contributor (2024). See the book.
Advisorpedia – Quoted on LinkedIn video strategy in “Why Advisors Who Embrace Video Now Will Own 2026” by Laura Garfield (January 20, 2026). Read the article.
Fintech Impact Podcast (E285) – Guest on Jason Pereira’s podcast (July 18, 2023). Episode page.
The Customer Wins Podcast – Guest on Richard Walker’s podcast (April 3, 2023). Episode page.
Nitrogen Fearless Investing Summit 2024 – Speaker. Speaker profile.
The WealthStack Podcast – Guest on WealthManagement.com’s WealthStack Podcast (June 2, 2023). Watch on YouTube.
The Get Ready Money Podcast – Guest on Tony Steuer’s podcast (August 7, 2024). Watch on YouTube.
Asset-Map & Redtail Webinar – Featured speaker on “6 Themes Shaping Your Practice” (November 25, 2024). Watch on YouTube.