U.S. registered investment advisers (RIAs) file a public Form ADV with the SEC that discloses who they are, how much they manage, where they operate, and how they are structured. It is one of the richest open datasets in financial services — and one of the most awkward to actually use. The SEC’s IAPD portal is built for looking up one firm at a time, and the bulk data files are wide, cryptic, and painful to parse. Anyone who needs a filtered list of advisers — by assets under management (AUM), by state, by custodian — usually ends up copying fields by hand or paying for an expensive data vendor.
This guide shows how to pull Form ADV adviser records as clean, filterable JSON you can query on demand or refresh on a schedule — without the manual work or the enterprise price tag.
Who uses Form ADV data
Three groups reach for this data most often. Sales and partnership teams at fintech, custody, and asset-management firms use it to build territory lists of advisers above a given AUM in a given state. Compliance and research teams use it to verify registration status, CRD numbers, and firm structure. Analysts and journalists use it to map the RIA landscape — how many firms operate in a region, how assets concentrate, and how registration types break down.
What the data looks like
Each record is one registered adviser. Here is a real row from a live run:
| Field | Example | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| firm_name | WINCH FINANCIAL | the adviser’s business name |
| legal_name | WINCH ADVISORY SERVICES, LLC | registered legal entity |
| CRD_number | 110194 | the IARD/CRD identifier |
| SEC_number | 801-55488 | SEC registration number |
| AUM | 580,178,144 | regulatory assets under management |
| state | WI | primary business state |
| registration_status | Approved | current registration status |
Records also carry employee count, organization form, registration type and date, phone, and mailing address — every field taken directly from the public Form ADV record, nothing estimated.
How to get it
Run the SEC Form ADV Adviser Tracker on Apify. Give it an AUM floor and, optionally, a state or custodian filter, and it returns matching advisers as JSON, CSV, or Excel. Pricing is transparent pay-per-result — roughly $1 gets you about 6 to 7 firms — so a targeted query of a few hundred advisers costs a few dollars, and you pay only for the firms actually returned. There is no subscription and no seat licence.
Run it on a schedule
The adviser universe changes as firms register, deregister, and cross AUM thresholds. To keep a live list, schedule a recurring run: in Apify, open Schedules → Add schedule, pick the Actor, and use an input like this:
{
"min_aum": 100000000,
"state_filter": "TX",
"max_firms": 200
}A weekly run maintains an up-to-date list of every adviser above your AUM threshold in your target state — ready to sync into a CRM or dashboard.
Prefer it delivered for you?
If you would rather receive curated regulatory-disclosure data on a schedule without running anything yourself, the SEC Filing Monitor data pack delivers clean SEC disclosure feeds as CSV/JSON on a cadence. Grab the free sample on that page to see the exact format before deciding.
Common workflows
Teams typically use this data to: build an AUM-banded prospect list for a state or region; enrich an existing CRM with CRD numbers and registration status; monitor for newly registered advisers each week; or map competitive concentration across a market. Because the output is plain JSON/CSV, it drops straight into a spreadsheet, a database, or a data-pipeline step.
Why work from Form ADV directly
Third-party RIA databases repackage this same public filing data and charge four or five figures a year for access. Because Form ADV is a public disclosure, you can go to the source instead: the fields are identical, the coverage is complete, and you pay per query rather than per seat. The trade-off is that the raw source is hard to filter — which is exactly what this Actor handles.
FAQ
Is this official SEC data? Yes — every field comes from the SEC’s public Form ADV / IAPD disclosures. Nothing is estimated or inferred.
Can I filter by state, AUM, or custodian? Yes. You can set an AUM floor and ceiling, a state filter, and a custodian filter, so you only collect and pay for advisers that match.
How current is the data? Records reflect the latest published Form ADV filings at the time of the run. Schedule a recurring run to keep a list fresh automatically.
Can an AI agent run this? Yes — it uses Pay-Per-Event pricing, so agents can call it via Apify’s x402 support and pay per run in USDC, no account required.
Factual public data — not financial or investment advice.
Related: EUIPO Trademark Search and USPTO Trademark Search for IP records; Startup Funding Tracker for private-capital activity. See also the SEC Filing Monitor pack.
See also: New — UK Trademark Search — UKIPO Brand Clearance API
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