Ep 45: Tech and Regulation will Radically Change your Advice Delivery- Featuring Ian McKenna (Ep 45)

Episode 45 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (40:25)

Episode 45 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Ian McKenna joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman from the UK with a question he puts to insurance and advice executives: do you intend to still be in business in ten years? His contention is that most advice businesses, and most of the firms supporting them, run commercial models that will not survive that long. The specific failure he identifies is charging on assets when clients are young and still accumulating, which is inexpensive for the client and does not generate enough revenue to sustain the advice being given. McKenna also offers a comparison the hosts find uncomfortable. American advisors operate under materially lighter regulation than most of the world, which held costs down and made advice more accessible, but leaves the United States well behind on consumer advocacy and protection.

What this episode covers

• Why an assets-based fee fails when clients are young and still accumulating
• McKenna’s ten-year test for whether a commercial model is fit for purpose
• How lighter US regulation cut both ways for accessibility and for consumer protection
• Why advisors mostly learn best practice from inside their own firm, and what that costs
• Where immersive and virtual technology might fit into advice delivery

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, are advisors seeking modern best practices? It’s an interesting question, Adam. You know, I think that we are all exposed to a variety of best practices, but they are, I would argue, siloed. And how often do we really seek them out? And I go back to my insurance BD days and we learned a lot of great things, but they were from other people in our office or in the community of that company.

And let’s face it, we need to be on the cutting edge as things are transforming faster and faster and faster. And man, I mean, it’s tough being an advisor, Adam. You have so many things to do. And now you’re asking me to go seek out all the best practices on top of the 4,000 other things I’m doing today. Of course, man. You know, you’re an entrepreneur. What did you call it in our last session? An advisorpreneur? Advisor, no, no, you call it, was it a entrepreneur, entrepreneur-visor? Entrepreneur-visor. Whatever it was. Just because we have to mash up everything and rethink. Yeah, we really do. That’s a good thing.

It’s a good question. I think that advisors are, but I think we could do a lot better job of seeking out best practices. I have really seen a lot of fellow advisors take this entrepreneurial spirit to heart, reading books, following blogs, working on self-help. I think we have a fantastic industry that affords us a certain type of lifestyle that allows us the time to invest in ourselves. Even if you are associated with a larger organization, I think there’s a mindset that comes with seeking modern best practices. But the funny thing is I find most of the people probably not unlike myself or you, we’re getting a lot of insight from outside industry, not just let’s be the number one, we’ll call it advisor in our organization.

Let’s just do what the other number ones do or what they did in the past. And I think it’s really an interesting question because it was inspired by this interview that we did with Ian McKenna from the UK, who has some really interesting insights that got us thinking, right, Derek? Yeah, it was really fun chatting with him. He’s totally a futurist. He’s been in our space for gosh, it’s gotta be 30 years, but just the way he thinks about things and challenges things, I mean, it really resonated for us when if you’re talking about rethinking, he is rethinking all of it. Well, and he didn’t pull any punches too about what his thoughts were on the perspective of the United States advisor and the industry, which I think is gonna be really fun to share with everybody here because we had to take what was almost a 40-minute interview and chop it down into some really salient points for Ian, who if you know him or have followed him in the past, he just really has some really great insights.

So let’s introduce Ian because I think for those people who don’t know Ian McKenna, he’s been involved in a significant number of FinTech startups, a consultant, has a team, has programs in the UK and also travels to many of the events we go to here in the States as an evangelist, as an interviewee, as a media personality, columnist. He’s also started several companies. And I think when you hear what his perspective is from traveling the world, Derek, I think you’ll also remember, and I think a lot of our audience will get some really interesting chuckles and insights as to what’s coming. I look forward to debating what he talks about with you.

You ready? Let’s do it. So Ian, obviously you’ve impacted so many of us. You’ve been writing about FinTech for so many years. You have a fantastic consulting firm in the UK. We’ve even talked to you about participating in the many events that you’re supporting. So thank you for taking the opportunity to be here. We’d love to know what’s your unique perspective of the advice market today. I think we are right on the cusp of an unparalleled level of change in financial advice. If we actually look at how it worked, how different is the traditional advice process today from 40 years ago? Yes, we’ve got bits of technology, but we’re still kind of serving the same demographics.

We haven’t changed our industry in the way that so many others have. And I think what we are seeing now with a clethora of AIs emerging, and certainly what I’m seeing has been coming up with predictions of how future financial advice systems might work for decades. And there’s been quite a number of people who sort of listen to what I say. They’re like, yeah, okay, and you’ve lost the plot. I mean, my vision of how we will give financial advice less than a decade from now will include a scenario where we’ll be inviting our clients to put on their augmented reality glasses. And based on their current level of savings, we will actually be taking them through a VR of their own future life.

It’s almost like doing the financial services equivalent of a Christmas carol. Because what’s one of the hardest things to do is to get people to save. But there were a series of adverts done over here about five years ago by Aviva. And what they did was they took customers and they got in professional makeup artists, they were costumers, and they dressed these people up in line with their future lifestyle. And they made TV ads about what would they be experiencing as a lifestyle in retirement based on their current level of savings. Because they were real clients they used in this. And they gave them their real future lives.

And some of them were really, really quite shocked. You know, there was one guy, bit of a Jack the Lad in his late 30s, flash car, whatever. He was getting on his bike to go to the library because he wouldn’t be able to afford internet at home. You know, there was another lady who was like, she was going on four and three holidays a year. But if we think about how we interact with consumers today, one of the hardest things to do is to show them the lifestyle they’re preparing for. You can actually do that really, really easy using virtual reality. You can then bring in things like testing on people’s conversation and also through expression testing to understand if they’re actually telling the truth.

Are they telling you what they really feel or are they telling you what they think the advisor wants to hear? So these technologies exist today. We just haven’t put them into practice in financial advice yet. But the big thing that I’m seeing now is with the plethora of chatbots that are around there, all of a sudden people are quite literally coming to me and saying, some of those things you were talking about a few years ago, I thought you were mad. Now I see how it’s gonna happen. And let’s look at Parapanazon as established in the US as they are over here. I remember being at a conference, I think it was 23 last year, and some people were getting excited about the idea of having power planners and what a good idea it was.

And I turned around and said, be very careful what you wish for because the main thing that most advice firms now want to get rid of is all the power planners that they do a very good job, but they’re very expensive. I can think of as one firm immediately springs to mind they’ve got 600 power planners in the business at an average of about 70,000 pounds, so not quite sure of $100,000 a year. The one thing I’ve been asked for by Ceasely in scale advice businesses over here for the last several years is, can you find us a robo power planner? And of course, some of these things are beginning to come to light.

If you look at what Conquest are doing in Canada and the UK, and coming to the US very soon, they just raised 24 million early in the week specifically to come into the US, and that’s a really, really smart piece of care. The advisor can drive the conversation, take it through the different steps, or you can have a guided conversation whether the, if you like, cruise control conversation where the system will just take the advisor through the various steps it would be natural to raise, or the third option is it just does full-on self-driving car. The advisor sits back and watches the tech generate all the advice.

Christmas Carol analogy is brilliant, and I find that a bit scary on the way that that’s coming, but I also do see that as a massive opportunity. So along those lines then, Ian, if that is what the future truly holds, what action steps do you have for those in the financial advice space? We have a lot of great advisors, we have some fintech folks, we have C-suites at insurance companies. What is your message to them? What’s one thing that they should do? I have a simple question. Do they intend to still be in business in five or to push 10 years time? Because if they do, the overwhelming majority of financial advice businesses and all the companies that support them are not adapting their commercial model in a way that will be fit for purpose in 10 years time.

The AUA model doesn’t work if most of your clients are relatively young and they’re still growing their assets. I mean, it works quite well for the client in that environment because they don’t pay very much. Doesn’t deliver a sustainable amount of income. Now, all right, the US does benefit. Well, US advisors benefit from having nowhere near as tough regulations as most of the rest of the world. So some of the operating costs are lower, but we need to completely reinvent the way that we are charging people so that the money that they’re paying advice firms is adequate to sustain their businesses. And by the way, that’s also gonna mean drastically cutting some of the services.

There are immense opportunities out there. There’s an enormous market that is untapped, but could be, but traditional financial advice firms, I don’t see them creating, deploying, and I’m generalizing, there will be a handful that are, I think some over here, but most advice firms have a commercial model that will put them out of business in five to seven years’ time. Probably doesn’t come much more shocking than that, really, does it? So the takeaways here is clearly the insurance industry is antiquated. Financial advisors, if they don’t retool or re-figure out how they’re gonna address the growing market that’s not all wealth only, are not gonna be here.

There is technology that’s still not being utilized that’s available today that our antiquated industry is not even thinking about, like VRAI and even facial recognition, like you talked about. And the bottom line is the reason it hasn’t changed in the United States in terms of catching up on regulation is because the compensation models. Yeah, well, where are we going next and what have we got to prepare so that we can meet the future needs of customers? S. is, I think it’s fair to say broadly, on technology, you were about three years ahead of VRAI. I think that’s down to a year and a half now.

There are some areas where your life insurance industry is at least a decade behind ours. S. life insurance industry is the least efficient insurance industry on the planet by an absolute country mile. There are practices that are going on, which it’s incredibly clear that firms could support consumers vastly better, but then people that are being paid very large amounts of money for running factories in the way they used to in the 1970s, your life insurance industry really hasn’t moved forward since the 1970s. S. life insurance policy providers, rather, are truly stuck in a time warp. And you get some of the people quietly off the record and ask them, look, is this really because if you improved all these processes, a lot of people wouldn’t make anywhere near as much money as they do.

And the answer is, well, don’t ever ask me that publicly, but yes. Your life insurance industry is in such a dire state. S. is 40 years behind the UK. Tell us why, that’s good. Is that an exaggeration? Yeah, how do we understand that? S. based financial advisors are not up to speed on what anybody else is doing, just what’s in their backyard. What do we not know? The level of consumer protection provided by Reg BI is less than was provided to consumers in the 1986 Financial Services Act. In the UK? I mean, basically you don’t have any consumer protection worth mentioning yet everywhere else around the world.

Australia, Singapore, various Asian countries, various Arab countries, various African countries and of course most of Europe have got, Canada’s not very far ahead of you. Jason Pereira organized a really good FinTech event in Canada and got well along to talk about the future direction. S.? S. But again, I mean, his statement was the UK was the most advanced nation in the world in terms of consumer protection regulation. Yeah, I’ll be quite clear. We overdo it sometimes, but it’s better than having none. And it’s actually really now beginning to damage American software companies very, very badly because half of your software companies, in all honesty, can’t get over the fact that I know America is a wonderful nation and 360 million people or so.

8 billion on the rest of the planet. And what if only 3% of those are rich? S. How many of them actually take it out anywhere in the rest of the world? S. now means there is a symbiotic relationship between regulation and technology. You can only really achieve the highest levels of regulation with the latest technology. So new regulatory requirements drive the adoption of technology. Technology makes new regulatory requirements possible. We’ve got a huge thing happening over here at the end of July called consumer duty. And so put this in context, an advisor will no longer be allowed to recommend a life insurance policy after the end of July on just a price assessment.

Any comparison service that only looks at price and does not consider value will fail regulatory standards. So and what we’re seeing, if you give people a price comparison list for life insurance, their eyes always go to the lowest price and then it’s really hard to get them to come up. It’s quite a strange one really because if you’re buying life insurance to protect yourself and the people you care about the most, do you really want a cheap one? Which would a good one. It’s a huge commodity effect, isn’t it though Ian? I mean, well, well, yeah. But, but if you start giving people value assessments, so what we see through the, through the use of the system in various pilots that we’ve got going on now is give people the chance to buy a better policy rather than the cheapest one.

And 72% of people will buy the better policy, which will lead to an uplift in premium of about 9% but an uplift in quality of 18%. Oh, and conveniently, hey, premiums are 9% higher. So what does that do to the commission? I mean, yeah, we’ve just done an exercise where we’re working with an organization that currently, and based on the 55,000 policies that they sold last year, that alone will drive an extra 10 million in revenue and an extra two and a half million in retained income for the advice firm after they pay away to the advisors. There’s another thing that’s happening in the UK that isn’t yet happening in the States, I believe.

Small company called Amazon now sell insurance in the UK. It’s coming here. Yep, they’ll do it. So they’ve now got a house insurance comparison site where a multi-product broker site. It’s quite normal for Amazon to go and test things over here where they, they don’t mind getting things wrong in the UK for a bit. They don’t like getting them wrong in the US. So we frequently get stuff and we get stuff for a while and then it goes away because they want to take it back to, Imagine Amazon, well, they’ve not pulled it. Biotech is doing quite well. Google had a direct to consumer property and casualty unit even seven years ago and they pulled it because they found that the humans really were needed.

It’s funny because in 2018, I actually spoke in New Orleans and I put this up on a huge screen in front of the main platform and I said, Amazon will sell live insurance. Google will sell investments, direct to consumer and they’ll know how to position it right in front of you when you’re thinking about it because they heard you and that was five years ago and I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet but I agree with you that it’s definitely coming. It’s coming. Whoa, it’s amazing. It’s definitely an eye-opener because let’s face it, when we find out where we’re really at, then we can start to make improvements and think differently and rethink how we’re doing things and so now when we’re hearing what best practices are happening from a non-US perspective, like, oh wow, and you and I were talking about this earlier today.

I’ve gone to the Morningstar Investment Conference in London. I’ve gone to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa. I’ve met with different advisors and financial services companies outside of the US and I’ve gone to non-financial conferences as well because we can really learn some pretty cool best practices from outside of our normal sphere of living and working and so forth. This came up a bunch of episodes ago with Becky Tumba from South Africa who was talking about is the US really in the number one spot where we tend to be very ethnocentric if you remember that word from high school and think about our world defined by America is number one and sorry, the United States is number one and I thought it was interesting that he called out that the technology seems to be really on point here in the States, although that gap is lessening but we are really far behind in consumer advocacy and protection which I would tell you for all of my conversations internationally, Derek, most of those advisors told us it was really difficult to just provide financial advice to people which I thought would have been a deterrent from more people getting advice because they’re making the process more difficult where in the States, it seemed like instantly everybody went from financial services salesperson to financial advisor but that helped accessibility, didn’t it?

I think so. You know, it’s funny I hear you say that I’m doing some work with some large companies in South Africa right now and we’re even talking about compensation models and they don’t have half the stuff that we do here. So that’s interesting. What do you mean? Like what do you mean? What do they not have? They can’t charge hourly, they can’t charge a planning fee. At least so there’s five large financial companies if you will in South Africa, the equivalent to like the large wirehouses or insurance PDs here in the States and they’re one of the big five and that’s what they were saying.

We were talking all about the different comp models and how advisors can charge for services and it really just boiled down primarily to commission. But yet they have better consumer advocacy according to Ian. That’s what’s so interesting about it. So, and you’ve commented before about how the compensation structures are all messed up anyways. Well, this didn’t just kind of come up in a couple of episodes ago with Sam Russell. I mean, we were talking about fee transparency and putting, you know, to be transparent for marketing perspectives, putting your fees out front, whether it’s your ADV or your hourly or that you get paid on compensation that’s derived from product sales, that it should be out front.

But it’s interesting that he said that Reg BI was no better standard than their 1986 Financial Services Act, which conceivably gave the consumer more protections against, we’ll call it poor sales practices in financial services. And I know that that specific regulation tended to push an enormous number of financial professionals out of the business, which I thought was not appreciated as certainly by the people that lost their jobs because an entire industry was just eliminated. And so it’s interesting to see this full turn. We’re talking to a lot of people about how, you know, fiduciary best interests on the same team is very idealistic and awesome.

And many of us have been acting this way towards our clients for years without somebody telling us that we had to. But that this is now becoming on the verge of becoming the norm. Whereas it was almost awkward a couple of years ago. Well, the shift has happened already. There’s no question about it. And it’s interesting how Ian talks about how we’re on the cusp of even bigger change. Sam said the same thing. We’ve had a lot of people say we are on the cusp of something. And so it’s not just you and I saying it anymore, buddy. No. Well, he would argue he’s been saying it for years.

I mean, he’s got his VR glasses. Last time I saw him, I was telling you, at an event, he came up to interview me. He had video glasses on and he said, okay, start talking. And his actual glasses had a video camera and he started like interviewing me. Are you sure his name isn’t James Bond? I don’t know. I think he wants to be James Bond. I think so. I was very much imagining him the entire time driving around in his Aston Martin. Totally. He is totally. Right with a martini. He has the insurance and financial services, James Bond. That’s who he is. Maybe that’s true.

Or he’s Q. He could be Q by the way. He totally can be Q in Q branch. No question. He is Q. Well, so tell us your takeaways because there’s some really interesting things from best practices to where our position is and wake up calls. What’d you pull away from this? Well, I think advisors listening to this really should take a moment to think about what Ian is saying. And we’ll cover these bullet points real quick now but Ian does travel over the world and he has a unique experience and exposure to things that we just don’t have. That’s why it’s so cool to have him on is to hear what he has seen and doing.

I thought his point on virtual reality, fascinating. Then the next five or 10 years to be able to use VR. So think about it this way. I use the use case. We talk about retirement planning, quote unquote, for our clients. And it’s just some idea that’s like a wisp of air out there. They can’t really quantify it. What if we could, as advisors, have our client put on a VR set and actually look at themselves 30 years from now in retirement, visualizing the house on the beach or traveling or being with the grandkids. That’s remarkable. And now it makes it real. And I think that consumers would act a lot more on the advice they’re given if they saw things that way.

So I thought that was really fascinating. Well, I haven’t actually, that’s an interesting. I just had this vision of having our clients in the room and showing them their Monte Carlo analysis. And now in the VR, they’re 82 years old. And all of a sudden they get evicted from their house and pulled out and now they’re homeless and they’re walking around like, this is the choice because you decided to have no savings. Make it real. You’re making it real. Okay, here’s another example. So my wife and I love the show, Million Dollar Listing. They were selling 20, 30, $40 million homes in Las Vegas, but because the homes weren’t built or even developed yet and the land was barely even there, they were selling these things through VR and they were getting people to commit massive checks to buy these homes completely sight unseen.

So VR can get people to act like that with their money. It can definitely work in the work that we do as advisors too. Do you see why we need to do this now, making it really emotional? I thought that was really interesting that they’re testing this. And I know that when he mentioned the facial recognition, it’s interesting, gosh, in 2016, I saw from Invisio, actually Edmund Walters introduced me to it. It was basically biometric testing on risk profiling. So you could see whether they’re lying when they say they wanna take a lot of risk. Like read their face and said, nope, they can’t take risk.

They’re just telling you that for ego reasons. So it’s true. There’s a lot of technology that is just far off from really being implemented in our space. But, and he didn’t bring this up. I’m gonna bring it up. Should we implement it? Oh, well, isn’t that the big question today? Should we be implementing artificial intelligence chatbots? You probably have already seen the, what are they called? Well, they have that open letter to AI for taking a break. And I even did a post on LinkedIn about it because we are anticipating turning on our AI and coupler is part of the work we do. And what I don’t want is Skynet to take over.

I really don’t. And if I put myself in the consumer shoe and you’re asking me as an advisor, yeah, we’re gonna do a biometric scan of your face to see if you’re lying. And all these other things. If I’m over 25, I don’t know if I’m gonna do that. So I don’t know, but Ian did mention is that, this is the point is he talked about the compensation models all messed up. And he made a really good point about, are you gonna be in business in the next five to 10 years because of the younger generations and the comp models are not what they should be and so forth.

So when you combine that with AI and all that other stuff, I don’t know, man. I can see the VR benefits because that’s not too intrusive. Heck, you can record those videos and give it to them. Right? Send them the link to the video later or put it on VHS for them. Well, so funny you say that because we even saw implementations in the late 2015, 16s using financial planning in VR space, basically meeting over VR and they’re like, okay, you got a virtual screen in front of you and there’s your pie chart and there’s your burn down chart. And did that make it more engaging?

No, it’s kind of more like kitschy. It’s not like, well, the infrastructure for clients aren’t there either. It’s not there. But neither was Zoom though. Think about it. Neither was Zoom. I mean, if everybody has an Oculus at home eventually because their kids have it, it’s actually interesting because Panos Leleidakis from Greece, he travels literally around the world. You’ve probably seen him. He’s got a huge social presence. I met him at MDRT in Gamma years ago. We traveled once to Taiwan together and he’s been wearing these goggles forever. He just hit, I think, 50 or 60 stages around the world in the last year talking about, and he shows up on the stage with the VR goggles and says, this is the future.

And I think a lot of people are catching on. They’re saying, no way, this is true. And they will accelerate that. I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard to really think, Derek, that we’re gonna get a bunch of VR goggles and it’s not gonna be taken sort of seriously. Well, we’re gamifying your financial life. But gosh, that is how we take action, isn’t it? There will be some challenges there, but if we can sell that value, Sam talked about sell the value, what’s your value prop? If you can sell that and say, listen, I can show you what happens. Let me tell you what, when I say show, and really get into there, I would be as a consumer, I think I’d be willing to go that far.

Be like, what? So if I buy this boat today that I have to finance instead of funding retirement, this is what happens in 30 years? Huh, I guess I don’t need that boat so much anymore. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know what I just remembered? It was a conversation you and I had two years ago. It was one of our first podcasts. We talked about the future of financial product distribution. We did. We said it’s gonna change radically. Here we have Ian talking about Amazon distribution. Maybe the whole point of the VR and the next level of tech and social is that the product distribution or the solution distribution will really be through these types of products too.

Maybe you will be playing your VR goggles and playing golf and all of a sudden you’ll see a billboard off in the background that says, buy your insurance or your mutual fund now because we already know your portfolio is a mess. And you literally just click on that and say, like, hey, what do you want? Here’s the value. Here’s the boom, done. Like, is that possible? The interesting thing about what he said is that the reason that the US hasn’t had the level of innovation that one would have expected given all this amazing technology is because the bottom line is that the margins are stopping innovation.

In other words, someone’s getting paid an enormous amount of money relative to the value they’re delivering which causes a stymie relationship in the innovation, right? When several people are making way too much money, they just use that to say, hey, let’s not make any changes, okay? Because this is a good thing. Don’t break it. It’s not necessary. This is good. I can go buy that boat. But if the consumer base stops valuing what the guys making the margin are really generating on arbitrage, they’ll be forced to change. And maybe that’s really what’s happening is that the consumers, the next generation of much more value-minded, conscious, not as relationship-driven that I’ve got to have an advisor that I trust, that boomer mentality that controls a lot of the money right now there, I think is that kind of loyalty and legacy is gonna wane on the AUA or AUM model because I don’t know if I’m basically helping my parents who are now in their 80s, I don’t know if I’m happy with them paying 1% or 10 or 20 grand a year to an advisor when they haven’t built a relationship with me, they’re not using the newest tech, they’re still to do an asset allocation model.

I think the value proposition is gonna be lost on next generation. So it’s not just that you have to worry about, well, when my clients pass on, maybe that model is done. I think that the kids are gonna get involved in the later years of the baby boomer clients. No question. You’re gonna be forced. That’s kind of my prediction today. And if you show up with a VR headset, you’re probably gonna win those kids over. Maybe, maybe. You’ll be like, wow, this guy’s modern. Yeah, you got a better shot, right? You’re gonna make an impression. We’ve referenced Sam’s episode a lot, but there’s a lot of similarities there of what she was talking about.

Any other bullet points, things you wanna just point out to advisors before we wrap this baby up? I think the US comment about Advice Tech not being designed to go global is very true. Like I said before, the US market is built for the US. It’s like, it’s the biggest market. Let’s just stay here. Why go overseas? But I thought it was cool that he said, hey, we’re 360 million people. That’s 3% of the global population, or 4%. Whatever. There’s a huge market out there. You guys have the best tech. You’re in the lead. Why are you not building for the global community? Ironically, AssetMap is.

So that’s my plus. And so it was Coupler, right? So you and I are built for this idea because maybe we’re more exposed than most, right? We’re not just operating in our single silo of I sell this or I sell that and this is how I do it. And that’s how I hang out with the same kind of people and we all look the same and we take best practices from each other. And that’s good enough and awesome. And that’s worked. We’re exposed. We’re just exposed and we see it. And so you can’t unsee it, right? So we’re building AssetMap and already have, like you know, South Africa, UK, using AssetMap because we built it to be cross border agnostic.

The ups and downs of that. But I think that’s a really important aspect of helping the entire ecosystem and saying the addressable market is just massive. It’s huge. We can serve a lot of people that way. And again, to Ian’s point, we can learn from these other countries and companies that are global and we can take those learnings back even all the way down to the granular level of what is the solo advisor shop doing today that maybe they can do a little bit better. So yeah, we’ve thrown a lot at people in this one. This one definitely is more of a futurist, vendor, doctor who, whatever you want to call it type of thing.

But when you’ve got the James Bond from UK on your show, you got to go with it. Ian McKinnick Q. That’s right. Well, that’s a great, I’m glad you wrapped it up because thank you Ian for what you’re doing. Really, really exciting, interesting stuff. I’m glad that you pushed the envelope on the futurist stuff because that really forces us to think. And as we all know in this podcast, we’re trying to force a rethinking of our whole industry and good things will come out of it. It may not always be comfortable, but hopefully we’ll get the reality of that honest dialogue to help figure out where we want to take it personally.

So with that, thank you Ian for everything you’re doing. Derek, why don’t you bring us home? I already am home. Why don’t you bring the rest of the people home? Sorry, this is bad jokes. I’m really good at bad jokes, my wife says. Anyways, yeah, thanks everybody. Another awesome episode. We are closing in on 50 and we’ve got some pretty awesome guests in the pipeline, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you need to follow us on LinkedIn. The links are right below in the show notes. All you got to do is go down there and click. So just click those things and do that. You want to learn more about us, our companies, what we do on Saturdays, just go do that.

Is that in there? I don’t know, I don’t know, maybe. Just ask Adam’s mom what he does on Saturdays, she’ll tell you. She doesn’t know. Awesome, well Derek, thank you as always. Thanks, good to see you. Everyone else, do something good today. That’s right, invest in yourself and others. We’ll look forward to seeing you at the next pod. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector.

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