When it comes to financial advisors, investors often face a paradox: picking the right professional is critical, but keeping tabs on them afterward is harder than it should be. AdvisorCheck, a fintech startup focused on investor protection, wants to change that.

The company has rolled out AdvisorCheck Essentials, a free monitoring service that continuously tracks an advisor’s professional status and emails key updates directly to investors. Instead of manually digging through FINRA’s BrokerCheck or the SEC’s IAPD—often clunky, fragmented, and out of date—users can now just follow an advisor and wait for the alerts.

How It Works

Sign up, follow any advisor, and you’ll get monthly AI-summarized updates on changes to their license, firm affiliation, or disciplinary record. If something shifts, you’ll know—without having to refresh multiple government databases.

“Families deserve better than being blindsided when something changes with their advisor, whether the news is good or bad,” said Michael Fox, Chief Product Officer & COO at AdvisorCheck. “Essentials is the first of its kind, providing clear updates and direct access to the full story.”

Why It Matters

Trust is the foundation of any advisor-investor relationship, but oversight has traditionally been a DIY project. The problem: the regulatory tools available are clumsy, fragmented, and sometimes require upfront costs. Essentials takes the opposite approach—continuous, automated monitoring for free.

For consumers, that means peace of mind. For the industry, it could mean pressure on advisors and firms to raise the bar on transparency. If investors start expecting automated oversight as standard, the days of opaque advisor-client relationships may be numbered.

Premium for Power Users

Essentials is just the entry point. For those who want deeper oversight, AdvisorCheck also offers Premium, which adds more frequent alerts, additional data sources, and even firm-level monitoring. Think of it as Essentials for those who don’t just want to monitor an advisor—they want to monitor all the advisors tied to a firm.

Fox framed it as part of a broader mission: “Choosing the right advisor is only the beginning. Continuing to monitor them is essential to protecting that trust.”

Bigger Picture

The timing is notable. As AI reshapes investor tools, platforms like AdvisorCheck Essentials may reflect a broader shift: investors expect automation not just in trading, but in trust-building. If robo-advisors made money management easier, services like this could make monitoring human advisors safer.

Whether rivals move to replicate AdvisorCheck’s model remains to be seen, but for now, the company has positioned itself as the first to make advisor oversight free, simple, and proactive.