Executive Brief: Capital Preferences NZ Limited
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Capital Preferences represents a compelling strategic investment opportunity in the rapidly expanding risk profiling and behavioral finance technology sector, combining rigorous academic foundations with practical enterprise software delivery. Founded in 2014 by Bernard Del Rey alongside UC Berkeley Professor Shachar Kariv and Arizona State Professor Dan Silverman, the company has developed a differentiated position through its proprietary Economic Fingerprint® technology that measures revealed preferences rather than relying on traditional questionnaire-based stated preferences. The firm operates from its headquarters in Christchurch, New Zealand while maintaining a significant presence in the United States through offices in Weehawken, New Jersey, serving a global client base that includes financial advisors, wealth management firms, superannuation funds, and enterprise financial institutions. Capital Preferences' recent landmark white paper released in November 2025, which quantified a $6.9 trillion shortfall in private market allocations among U.S. accredited investors, demonstrates the company's thought leadership position and ability to generate actionable market intelligence. The firm's gamified platform delivers client risk profiling in under 90 seconds while providing statistical confidence levels impossible through traditional survey methodologies, creating a significant competitive advantage in regulatory compliance and client engagement applications.
CORPORATE STRUCTURE & FUNDAMENTALS
Capital Preferences NZ Limited operates as a decision science technology and research firm with its registered headquarters located at 26 Alpha Avenue, Strowan, Christchurch, 8052, New Zealand, and can be reached at the corporate phone number +64 21 873975. The company was incorporated on September 17, 2014, under New Zealand business number 9429041415887, with Bernard Del Rey serving as the sole director from inception and the entity classified under ANZSIC code M696245 for Management Consultancy Services. The corporate structure includes Capital Preferences Limited as the ultimate holding company, which holds 100% of the 1,000,000 issued shares in the New Zealand operating entity. The firm maintains additional operational presence in the United States through offices at 725 Boulevard East, Suite 1000, Weehawken, New Jersey 07086, facilitating access to the North American financial advisory market which represents the largest global opportunity for behavioral finance software. Leadership demonstrates exceptional academic credentials with Chief Scientist Professor Shachar Kariv holding the Benjamin N. Ward Professorship in Economics at UC Berkeley, having previously served as Department Chair and Faculty Director of the UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory.
The company's founding team assembled world-class expertise in game theory, decision science, and experimental economics to address fundamental limitations in traditional client risk assessment methodologies prevalent throughout the financial services industry. Professor Dan Silverman, the Rondthaler Family Professor of Economics at Arizona State University and former Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, leads the firm's research agenda ensuring methodological rigor meets peer-reviewed academic standards. Bernard Del Rey brings commercial leadership and industry insight, having identified the market opportunity to transform academic research into enterprise-grade financial technology solutions serving advisors and institutions globally. The firm has filed two patents protecting its proprietary methodologies, demonstrating commitment to intellectual property development and sustainable competitive differentiation. According to PitchBook data, the company has raised $20,000 in disclosed funding from investors including Wavemaker Partners and Finovate, suggesting a bootstrapped growth strategy emphasizing profitability over aggressive venture-backed expansion. The workforce has grown to approximately 30 employees according to industry databases, maintaining lean operations while scaling platform capabilities to serve enterprise clients across multiple continents.
MARKET POSITION & COMPETITIVE DYNAMICS
The global risk profiling software market was valued at $1.87 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $6.32 billion by 2033, representing a compound annual growth rate of 14.5% driven by increasing regulatory requirements, exponential data generation, and financial institutions' prioritization of advanced risk management solutions. The broader financial risk management software market reached $3.74 billion in 2024 with projections to $14.39 billion by 2034 at a 14.42% CAGR, while the governance, risk, and compliance software market is expected to grow from $21.04 billion in 2025 to $37.71 billion by 2030 at an 11.0% CAGR. North America currently leads global demand commanding approximately 36-40% market share in 2024, driven by mature financial services infrastructure, early technology adoption, and stringent regulatory mandates including FINRA, SEC Marketing Rule, and Regulation Best Interest requirements. The Asia-Pacific region is projected to register the highest growth rate at 17.8% CAGR through 2033, with Australia representing a particularly strategic market given its $3.5 trillion superannuation system and Retirement Income Covenant obligations requiring funds to understand member preferences. Capital Preferences has strategically positioned itself in both established and high-growth markets, maintaining strong relationships with Australian superannuation funds including partnerships with Challenger for retirement income preference research.
The competitive landscape features several established players across different geographic and functional segments including Neuroprofiler (France, acquired by Mantu in October 2024), FinaMetrica (Sydney, merged with PlanPlus Global in 2017 and partnered with Morningstar), Dynamic Planner (United Kingdom, founded 2003), Oxford Risk (United Kingdom, founded 2002 by Oxford University academics), and Nitrogen formerly Riskalyze (Auburn, California, founded 2011). Nitrogen represents the largest competitive threat in the North American market, having invented the Risk Number® methodology built on Nobel Prize-winning academic frameworks and serving tens of thousands of financial advisors through an integrated client engagement platform with pricing starting at $99/month for basic plans and $250/month for full subscriptions. FinaMetrica claims over one million risk tolerance profiles generated in more than 20 countries, leveraging partnerships with major platforms including Charles Schwab Advisor Services. Oxford Risk differentiates through ESG preference profiling and financial personality assessments, targeting wealth managers, pension providers, and digital advice platforms seeking comprehensive behavioral insights. Capital Preferences differentiates fundamentally through its revealed preferences methodology, which observes actual decision-making behavior through gamified activities rather than asking clients to self-report risk tolerance through questionnaires that behavioral research demonstrates are unreliable predictors of actual investment behavior.
PRODUCT PORTFOLIO & INNOVATION
Capital Preferences' technology platform distinguishes itself through five proprietary capabilities that competitors have not successfully replicated, beginning with the Economic Fingerprint® diagnostic system that creates a multidimensional behavioral profile capturing how each client approaches goals, risk, private markets, values, retirement income, and tax considerations through interactive decision activities completed in under 90 seconds. The gamified simulator technology employs revealed preferences methodology developed through 18 years of academic research, observing how users allocate hypothetical capital across competing investments with varying risk-reward profiles rather than asking them to self-assess their risk tolerance through traditional questionnaires that behavioral economics research demonstrates are fundamentally unreliable. The FitScore algorithm ranks an advisor's range of asset allocation models against each client's measured risk tolerance and loss aversion, providing a quantitative compatibility metric that transforms portfolio recommendation from subjective art to defensible science with statistical confidence intervals attached to every result. The platform measures loss aversion separately from risk tolerance, recognizing these as distinct behavioral characteristics that require different measurement approaches and have independent implications for portfolio construction and client communication during market volatility. The couple profiling capability addresses the common advisory challenge of serving households where partners exhibit meaningfully different risk preferences, enabling advisors to navigate this complexity with data-driven insights rather than relying solely on interpersonal skills to manage competing priorities.
The company has expanded its product suite to address emerging market opportunities including ESG preference profiling that helps investors translate personal sustainability values into portfolio choices, retirement income certainty measurement particularly relevant for Australian superannuation funds navigating Retirement Income Covenant requirements, and private market suitability diagnostics responding to the democratization of alternative investments. The November 2025 white paper "The Client Alignment Challenge: A $6.9 Trillion Private Markets Advice Gap" demonstrates application of the platform's behavioral insights to identify that 82% of accredited investors could hold some level of private market allocation, yet industry-wide under-allocation stems from misalignment between investor behavioral comfort zones and product structures. The TrueProfile advisor-facing platform launched in February 2018 at $99/month introductory pricing, subsequently increasing to $129/month, providing independent financial advisors access to the same behavioral science capabilities deployed at enterprise scale. Integration capabilities connect with major CRM, portfolio management, and client reporting platforms, enabling behavioral insights to flow throughout the advisory technology stack rather than remaining siloed in a standalone application. The company maintains an active research partnership with the Financial Planning Association and T. Rowe Price, conducting ongoing studies into advisor best practices and the evolution of client understanding methodologies in response to technological and regulatory change.
TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE & SECURITY
Capital Preferences operates its platform on Amazon Web Services infrastructure as evidenced by its AWS Partner status, leveraging cloud scalability to serve global clients while maintaining the performance standards expected by enterprise financial institutions processing sensitive client behavioral data. The platform employs gamification design principles developed in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory, which Professor Kariv directed from 2009-2014, ensuring the decision activities accurately reveal preferences through properly designed economic experiments rather than introducing measurement biases common in poorly constructed behavioral assessments. The 60-second client experience reflects extensive optimization balancing comprehensive behavioral measurement against user engagement and completion rate requirements, with the platform generating statistically confident results across risk tolerance, loss aversion, and decision-making consistency dimensions from brief interactive sessions. The firm's mobile-first approach through Xmobile, a platform for conducting social science experiments leveraging smartphone ubiquity and functionality, enables client profiling during initial prospect meetings, annual reviews, or whenever behavioral reassessment provides value to the advisory relationship. Data architecture supports API integration with enterprise wealth management platforms, enabling financial institutions to embed behavioral insights within existing workflows rather than requiring advisors to operate separate applications during client interactions.
Security and compliance considerations are paramount given the sensitive financial and behavioral data processed, with the platform designed to meet requirements of regulated financial institutions operating under FINRA, SEC, MiFID II, and Australian ASIC oversight. The revealed preferences methodology provides documented evidence of client suitability assessment superior to traditional questionnaires, strengthening compliance defensibility when regulators examine whether investment recommendations align with demonstrated client risk capacity and tolerance. The platform generates audit trails capturing how each client made decisions during profiling activities, creating contemporaneous documentation unavailable from questionnaire-based approaches where clients simply select from predetermined answer choices. Enterprise deployments support single sign-on integration, role-based access controls, and data residency options appropriate for global financial institutions operating under varying national data protection regimes. The firm's AWS partnership suggests adherence to cloud security best practices including SOC 2 compliance standards expected by enterprise financial services clients conducting vendor due diligence.
PRICING STRATEGY & UNIT ECONOMICS
Capital Preferences employs tiered pricing strategies addressing different market segments from independent financial advisors to enterprise wealth management firms and institutional investors. The TrueProfile platform launched at $99/month per advisor introductory pricing in February 2018, increasing to $129/month thereafter, positioning competitively against Nitrogen/Riskalyze's $99-250/month pricing range while emphasizing methodological superiority justifying any premium. Enterprise pricing follows customary SaaS models with per-seat licensing, implementation services, and ongoing support structured to align vendor revenue with client deployment scale and success metrics. The firm's research collaboration model with organizations including Challenger, Financial Planning Association, and T. Rowe Price generates thought leadership content and market intelligence while demonstrating platform capabilities to potential enterprise clients without requiring direct sales investment. The relatively modest disclosed funding of $20,000 suggests the company operates profitably or near profitability, having grown through customer revenue rather than consuming venture capital to subsidize customer acquisition as common in growth-stage SaaS businesses.
The behavioral risk profiling value proposition demonstrates compelling customer ROI through multiple channels including client retention improvement, regulatory compliance documentation, advisor productivity enhancement, and new business development acceleration. Capital Preferences' November 2025 research finding that 30% of investors who previously held private market assets exited due to behavioral misalignment quantifies the cost of inadequate client understanding, positioning behavioral profiling as churn prevention insurance with readily calculable return on investment. Firms implementing behavioral science approaches to client profiling report improved client satisfaction scores, reduced complaint volumes, and enhanced willingness to recommend, creating network effects as satisfied advisors advocate for the platform within professional communities. The gamified client experience transforms a compliance checkbox into a value-added engagement moment, with advisors reporting clients express surprise and appreciation at the depth of understanding generated through the brief interactive assessment. Implementation timelines for enterprise deployments vary based on integration requirements and customization needs, though the SaaS delivery model enables rapid advisor onboarding once platform configuration completes.
SUPPORT & PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Capital Preferences provides implementation support appropriate for enterprise financial technology deployments, working with client technology teams to integrate behavioral profiling capabilities within existing advisory workflows and technology stacks. The firm's research team led by Professors Kariv and Silverman offers thought leadership consulting helping enterprise clients understand implications of behavioral economics research for product design, client communication, and regulatory compliance strategies. Training programs ensure advisors understand how to interpret Economic Fingerprint® results, communicate behavioral insights to clients in accessible terms, and apply preference data to portfolio construction and ongoing relationship management. The Australian market presence includes research partnerships with superannuation industry participants navigating Retirement Income Covenant requirements, positioning Capital Preferences as both technology vendor and subject matter expert on member preference measurement. The company participates actively in industry events including Schwab IMPACT conferences, FPA annual meetings, and Finovate demonstrations, maintaining visibility within the financial advisor community and generating sales pipeline through thought leadership positioning.
Customer success approaches emphasize driving advisor adoption and utilization rather than simply completing technical implementations, recognizing that behavioral profiling value realizes only when advisors consistently incorporate insights into client interactions and recommendation processes. The platform provides advisor dashboards enabling practice-wide visibility into client behavioral profiles, identifying households requiring attention based on preference misalignment or life stage transitions suggesting reassessment appropriateness. The firm maintains active online communities and podcast participation including appearances on Netwealth's wealth management podcast and Ensombl's advice technology series, building awareness within the Australian financial planning community particularly around retirement income preference measurement applications. Documentation and knowledge base resources support advisor self-service for routine questions while preserving human support capacity for complex implementation and interpretation inquiries. The partnership model with research institutions and industry associations extends support capabilities beyond the firm's direct employee base, creating ecosystem resources available to clients seeking deeper engagement with behavioral economics methodology.
USER EXPERIENCE & CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Financial advisors utilizing Capital Preferences technology report meaningful improvements in client engagement quality and compliance documentation confidence based on testimonials captured in company announcements and industry press coverage. JC Abusaid, President and COO of Halbert Hargrove (a CNBC FA 100 top-ranked RIA managing $3.5 billion), stated during beta testing that "TrueProfile provides candid insight into how a client rationalizes their decisions" and that the platform helps "identify which clients we need to be more proactive with in good, and more importantly, tough market conditions." Scott MacKillop, CEO of First Ascent Asset Management, characterized the solution as offering "a clear path for advisors to differentiate themselves, in a way clients will understand and appreciate," noting that "the solution puts clients, rather than their portfolios, at the center of the process." The gamified client experience transforms risk profiling from a compliance burden into an engaging discovery moment, with advisors reporting clients frequently express interest in their results and appreciation for the sophistication of the assessment approach. The 60-second completion time eliminates the common client frustration with lengthy traditional questionnaires while generating richer behavioral data than competitors requiring substantially more client time investment.
Glassdoor reviews of Capital Preferences as an employer provide indirect insight into organizational culture, with the single published review awarding 4.0/5.0 overall rating and highlighting strengths including "dynamic, fun, highly collaborative, intellectually stimulating" culture while noting that "things happen very fast and it can seem chaotic at times." The firm scores 5.0/5.0 on Culture & Values and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion dimensions, suggesting a mission-driven organization attracting employees aligned with the company's purpose of improving financial decision-making through behavioral science. Customer retention metrics are not publicly disclosed, though the firm's research demonstrating 30% investor churn from behavioral misalignment implicitly argues that Capital Preferences' own clients would benefit from applying behavioral insights to their own customer relationships. The Australian superannuation research partnership with Challenger produced data showing 78% of pre-retirees don't feel prepared for retirement while retirement income preferences are highly individualized and uncorrelated with demographics, validating the platform's value proposition that traditional member segmentation approaches are inadequate for personalizing retirement solutions.
INVESTMENT THESIS & VALUATION
Capital Preferences presents an attractive investment opportunity characterized by strong secular growth tailwinds, differentiated technology positioning, and expansion runway across multiple geographies and market segments not yet fully penetrated. The company operates in a market growing at 14-15% annually with expanding use cases as regulatory requirements, AI integration, and client experience expectations drive financial institutions toward more sophisticated behavioral understanding capabilities. The academic pedigree anchored by UC Berkeley and Arizona State University faculty members creates competitive moats difficult for well-funded competitors to replicate, as the 18+ years of research development underlying the platform cannot be accelerated through capital deployment alone. The revealed preferences methodology represents a genuinely differentiated approach supported by peer-reviewed academic literature, distinguishing Capital Preferences from competitors relying on variations of traditional questionnaire-based risk profiling enhanced primarily through user interface improvements rather than fundamental methodological advances.
Strategic acquirer interest could emerge from multiple categories including incumbent wealth management technology platforms seeking behavioral analytics capabilities, enterprise software companies building financial services practice areas, and data analytics firms targeting financial services vertical applications. The bootstrapped funding history and New Zealand domicile may create valuation complexity, though the company's global revenue base and U.S. operational presence position it appropriately for cross-border transaction structures. Private equity interest in wealthtech companies has increased substantially as the sector demonstrates recurring revenue characteristics, high gross margins, and consolidation opportunities within a fragmented competitive landscape. The firm's research collaborations with T. Rowe Price and Challenger demonstrate ability to engage with large financial institutions as clients and partners, validating enterprise market positioning beyond the independent advisor segment served by lower-price-point competitors.
ECONOMIC SCENARIO ANALYSIS
Base Case (55% Probability): The global risk profiling software market continues growing at projected 14.5% CAGR through 2033 with Capital Preferences capturing expanding share particularly in Australian superannuation and U.S. wealth management enterprise segments. Revenue grows 20-25% annually as existing client expansion and new logo acquisition compound, with operating margins improving as platform development investment moderates relative to revenue scale. The company reaches $15-25 million revenue within five years while maintaining profitability, positioning for either strategic acquisition at 4-6x revenue or continued independent growth supported by operating cash flow generation. Regulatory trends favor behavioral profiling adoption as SEC, FINRA, and international regulators increase scrutiny of suitability documentation and client understanding practices.
Optimistic Case (25% Probability): Accelerated enterprise adoption driven by regulatory mandates, competitive displacement of questionnaire-based incumbents, and successful expansion into adjacent use cases including private market suitability, ESG preference measurement, and retirement income planning creates revenue growth exceeding 35% annually. The $6.9 trillion private markets opportunity identified in the November 2025 white paper generates substantial enterprise client interest in behavioral diagnostics for alternative investment suitability. Strategic acquisition at premium valuations (8-10x revenue) occurs as major wealthtech platforms or financial data companies seek differentiated behavioral analytics capabilities. The Australian superannuation market mandates behavioral preference measurement as part of Retirement Income Covenant compliance, creating regulatory-driven demand surge in the firm's strongest institutional market.
Pessimistic Case (20% Probability): Well-funded competitors including Nitrogen/Riskalyze successfully replicate key platform capabilities, compressing pricing power and extending sales cycles as enterprise clients evaluate multiple comparable alternatives. Economic downturn reduces financial services technology investment as wealth management firms prioritize cost reduction over capability enhancement. The niche focus on behavioral economics methodology proves insufficient to displace established competitors with broader platform offerings, relegating Capital Preferences to specialist positioning limiting total addressable market. Revenue growth moderates to 10-15% annually while margin pressure from competitive dynamics prevents profitability improvement.
BOTTOM LINE
Capital Preferences represents an optimal solution for wealth management firms, registered investment advisors, superannuation trustees, and enterprise financial institutions seeking to transform client understanding from compliance checkbox to competitive differentiator and genuine relationship enhancement capability. The platform suits organizations prioritizing regulatory defensibility where demonstrated client suitability through observed behavioral preferences provides superior documentation compared to self-reported questionnaire responses that behavioral research demonstrates are unreliable predictors of actual investment behavior. Financial advisory firms competing on service quality rather than price will find behavioral profiling particularly valuable for differentiating client experience, with the gamified assessment creating memorable engagement moments that generate referrals and strengthen retention. Superannuation funds navigating Australia's Retirement Income Covenant requirements require member preference measurement capabilities that Capital Preferences delivers through purpose-built retirement income certainty profiling validated through research partnerships with industry participants including Challenger. Enterprise wealth management platforms seeking embedded behavioral analytics can access capabilities through API integration rather than building proprietary solutions, accelerating time-to-market while leveraging 18+ years of academic research development. Organizations should avoid Capital Preferences if seeking lowest-cost compliance solutions without differentiated methodology, if technology integration requirements exceed current API capabilities, or if organizational culture resists behavioral science approaches to client understanding that challenge traditional advisor intuition. The optimal purchaser recognizes that client behavioral alignment drives both regulatory compliance and business outcomes including retention, expansion, and referral generation, justifying investment in genuinely differentiated technology rather than commoditized questionnaire alternatives.
Written by David Wright, MSF, Fourester Research