You might like to check out the http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/t/parents-of-the-hs-class-of-2022-3-0-3-4/ thread. There are many parents of B+ students there as well and they have good thoughts on what schools will give merit money for a B average. There are many that will, but maybe not the ones you selected.
Another thing you can do if you want to do a deep dive into the numbers (which being a Finance guy you might like) is do a search on “college name Common Data Set” which will turn up a document for the college you are interested in that gives the breakdown on how many students receive merit aid amongst many other stats. If the number of kids who get merit is small it might not be worth pursuing, but if the number is high, maybe throw an app in that direction too. There are some schools where every single student gets $20K merit or more.