The financial data firm Shook Research found itself in the headlines this summer after its founder secretly paid $6 million to the top editor of Forbes, one of the company’s key partners.
Major financial firms like Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo stopped participating in the company’s lucrative rankings of wealth advisers for fear of being tarnished by association. Shook Research then suspended the rankings entirely while it conducted a review of its business.
Now, the company is hoping to move on from the turmoil with a new name — Veritant — and a promise to conduct annual audits of its wealth adviser rankings. It will also publish a new charter to emphasize the independence and sanctity of its lists.
“The reality is we needed to take a beat to let the dust settle a little bit,” said Molly Bennard, the company’s chief executive.
“We needed to do that to regain confidence and to get ourselves organized,” she added.
The new name, a neologism derived from veritas (Latin for truth, and the motto of Harvard), was selected after a monthslong process that was originally planned to conclude at the end of the year, Ms. Bennard said. But when the founder’s payment became public in August, the company decided to speed up the rebranding.
Founded more than a decade ago by RJ Shook and his wife, Liz, Shook Research became the Consumer Reports of wealth whisperers, syndicating its influential list on Forbes.com and selling logos, plaques and online profiles that allowed wealth advisers to advertise their spot on the list.
But the business ran aground this summer after The New York Times reported that Mr. Shook had paid Randall Lane, the top editor of Forbes, $6 million for services that included help selling his business to PPC, a private-equity firm, for an undisclosed sum. (Mr. Lane has described the payment as a “gift” and said his failure to disclose it to Forbes was a “serious error in judgment.”) Shook Research canceled its wealth adviser summit in Las Vegas, which was only months away.
The company hired Charles River Associates, an accounting firm, to examine its methodology for any hint of impropriety. None was found, Ms. Bennard said.
Veritant has previewed some of the changes to its rankings for major wealth advisers, who want the company to resume its lists, Ms. Bennard said. The company will continue its partnership with Forbes, with which it shares revenue, scheduling to publish its next list in December. A revived summit for financial advisers is also in the works, with a venue to be determined.
The company is also planning to debut a new system for advisers to submit data so their firms can be considered for rankings, Ms. Bennard said. The new system will organize types of data that proved difficult to categorize in the past — such as the ways firms make difficult decisions — to make the rankings more authoritative.
“It’s a lot of information,” Ms. Bennard said. “But it could be organized in such a better fashion.”
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