Ep 50: The biggest challenge facing wealth management with Derek Notman and Adam Holt

Episode 50 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (54:24)

Episode 50 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

For their fiftieth episode Adam Holt and Derek Notman ask whether wealth management has a single dominant challenge, then admit they put the question to ten thought leaders at an industry conference and received ten different answers. The threads they find most convincing concern time and ownership. On time, they expect the long-standing benchmark of roughly ten hours to produce a financial plan to shrink substantially as language models mature, which frees capacity for deeper engagement rather than eliminating the role. On ownership, Holt makes the case for data portability, arguing that if the relationship genuinely belongs to the advisor rather than the firm, a client’s data has to be able to travel. He draws the parallel to back-end sales charges, which functioned as a retention mechanism rather than a service and which the industry eventually abandoned.

What this episode covers

• Why ten industry leaders named ten different biggest challenges
• How much plan production time is likely to compress, and what that capacity frees up
• Chatbots as a bridge across data silos rather than another attempt to centralize data
• Data portability, and what it implies about who owns the client relationship
• Peace of mind as the actual reason clients hire an advisor, and what gets overlooked

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. 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. Adam, what is the biggest challenge in wealth management today? You mean there’s only one challenge in wealth management? Well, I’m asking you, is there one? Is there none? Is there a ton? I think there’s probably four, let me think about this, five, six, maybe about 23 challenges right now I can think of off the top of my head.

Keep adding to the list, man. That might be more complaining than it is actually challenges, but it’s a great question, Derek. Why do you ask that question? Well, we had a great community question from Liz in Oregon about like, how do we decide what to talk about on the podcast? Do we worry about running out of topics? You should kind of allude that everyone’s talking about the same things and how are we keeping it relevant? How are we talking about challenges and solutions to help our listeners? So it really is an interesting question. So I’m wondering, one, can we distill it down to just one or the biggest challenge in wealth management or is it more complex than that?

Well, I think you and I have a bias, right? We’ve been talking about this. The last 49 episodes, we have found something to talk about that was challenging our industry either. Obviously we thought of it ourselves or we asked somebody and they told us something new. But it was fun because as you know, we just got back from wealth stack edge where we were on a panel and we figured we would just ask our peers and our friends what they thought the biggest challenge was to see if we could come up with something that was consistent. And what did we learn? We learned a ton.

I think it’s pretty awesome that this is episode 50, man. This is a milestone in itself. So I think it’s pretty cool. We circle it back now and talk about all of the challenges that we’re facing and getting it from these thought leaders out there. We met a ton of great people at wealth stack and while they gave us 10 different answers and arguably 10 different challenges. So I don’t know if 23 challenges is correct, but I would argue if you probably are going to get a different answer from anybody you ask. So it was really cool getting these 10 different perspectives from some really amazing people doing awesome things.

Well, it’s true. You know, Derek, we did a marathon. We interviewed 10 people literally in an hour and had them focus. So we’ve compressed this down for everybody on the podcast to the most salient points that each person said. So this would be a fun listen. We encourage you to listen to each person’s challenges. What do you commiserate with? What can you agree with? What is new for you? You didn’t think was a real big issue and then find out how this applies to you in our great vision of hopefully mentoring you and thinking our current industry and our profession and how we can do it better.

So you’re ready to hear from our first one, Derek, let’s do it. Let’s jump in. All right. So this is Jamie Hopkins, managing partner of wealth solutions at Carson group. Everybody knows him as Mr. Retirement. Let’s hear what Jamie had to say. Right now. I think the biggest challenge is bringing talent into this profession and keeping them here. I think that’s the biggest challenge out there right now. Part of the reason is we’re not a sexy industry for young people to come into. I think there are people that get interested, but then when they start looking at the first couple of jobs that you can get in this world, they’re not the tech world and other places, even though they’ve had their hardships.

Like they seem fun and you look at some of the first jobs here and it’s, Hey, go sink or swim and sell insurance to your best friends. And even in the RIA world, like you look at all the job postings and it’s, we want somebody with five years of experience in a book of business. We don’t want people that haven’t worked with clients for, and that’s a really big challenge. It concerns me a bit. I do think the good news is that I think technology is going to allow us to serve more people in a better manner with fewer people in the industry, but we have a talent shortage in here right now and that’s hiring and the competition there of retaining people and training them up is super challenging.

So how is Carson wealth specifically attacking that challenge? Yeah. And I’ll, I’ll point out at three things. So when I stepped in here, I actually sat down with Ron and said, this is super important. And I want a program that gives people coming into this profession, a path to equity in their firm within five years. And the very first time I said that to Ron, he said no chance at all. He then he felt on it a little bit. And we launched a program two years ago. Now that Dr. Julie Raggett’s heads up and that’s our strategies. We are bringing in people directly from college, financial planning programs and giving them path to equity within five years that are firm.

And we think that’s super important to retain talent. And then we also helped launch Fincer Foundation, which is a 501 C three nonprofit Black Rocks, a great sponsor actually asset map has brought us in and worked with us in the past too. So that’s really exciting. We work with about 28 different universities, about 130 students now across the country, which didn’t exist two years ago. Super, super amazing. Actually two Fincer students at this conference, both came up to me and interacted with me too. So it’s lovely to just see that impact occurring out there in the industry. Very cool. So there you go. So the first one we have here is talent.

What do you think? I think you spot on with that. And I like how they’re addressing that challenge because it’s true. This is not a sexy industry. And if you’re looking at your buddies, you might be working over at one of the tech companies or working remotely. Doing some cool stuff. And then you’re told to go sell insurance to your friends, or it’s going to take five years to even get some type of ownership in your business. You’re starting to second guess yourself before you even take the interview. So I love his perspective. I love how they’re fixing that. It is definitely a challenge. What’s the average age of an advisor?

I think it’s high now. It’s gotta be like 60, unless there’s been some change that nobody told us about. Yeah, it’s high. So I like what they’re doing about that. And bringing the younger crew in, because we do need that. We need new ideas. We need new energy in there. And let’s give them a clear, more fun path, a sexier path, if you will, to do what we do. Absolutely. I mean, look, the real challenge for all of us who have created any level of established book of business. If we don’t have next generation, that value is not there for us either. Right? If no one’s going to succeed and we’ve got to exit out to a non-human entity, a roll up or something, then that, you know, for those of us that have commitments to actual humans, that could leave those humans pretty disappointed in the later stage of their retirement plan.

And that’s not really so cool. So definitely think about that in your own firm. If you don’t have a succession plan and how you’re going to bring in talent, what other techniques might you want to consider? All right. You ready for number two? Number two. This is Shana Orzik-Sissel. She’s the CEO of Bonnery and Capital. And if you haven’t seen her on television, you’ve probably seen her on social media, really strong in the alt space. Listen to this. I am the founder of Bonnery and Capital Management. I am the Queen of Alternatives. Queen of Alternatives? Yes. I did not give myself that nickname. I feel like I always have to caveat that because it’s super obnoxious if you give yourself a nickname, right?

But it’s totally, if you self-crown yourself, then it has no credibility. It must have been a great coordination party. But Cynthia Murphy from Tidal gave me the nickname Queen of Alternatives because I was telling her the origin story of how we came up with the name Bonnery. And Bonnery means Queen in Gaelic. And she said, Oh, no wonder why they call you the Queen of Alternatives. And I said, I am immediately going to trademark that. And now I can use that for marketing because I didn’t come up with it. So she is my Shaquille O’Neal to my Paul Pierce. Very cool. That’s really interesting. So from that unique perspective, what’s the biggest challenge you perceive in our space today?

I think for advisors, it’s becoming complacent and not finding ways to add value to your clients, to deepen your relationships. And I’m going to do a little bit of self-promotion here because why not. But I believe that as you look to differentiate yourself for your clients, that you need to find ways to not only provide them with good financial advice and good financial investment ideas, but make sure that those ideas align with your clients’ values and passions. And really the only place you can do that is in the world of alternatives. So I spend a lot of time working with advisors, helping them gain comfort with alternatives because let’s be honest, it’s a complex and scary and intimidating place and there’s lack of liquidity and there’s a lot of things that can be intimidating and many advisors have jumped in, gotten burned and then not wanting to go again.

So I want to change that experience, but I feel like the best way to help advisors such increase their allocation to alternatives is by finding ways in which they can get excited about presenting ideas in the space to their clients and that means making sure that they align with your clients’ values and passions and if you do that, what you end up doing is deepening your relationship with your client, understanding who they are on a deeper level and ultimately that leads to the retention of the relationship. So it’s really about focusing on building the relationship. I always say that when you’re dealing with individual investors as an advisor, your client is emotionally attached to their money, right?

So if you really want to change the game, why not find ways to help your client emotionally connect with their investments and in the alternative space, I think that’s a great way to do it deep in the relationship, bring something new to the table, have something exciting to talk about and then from a competitive landscape, as an advisor grows their business and has clients that have larger average account size, they’re going to start to compete with private banks for that business. If you want to develop a moat around your business, this is a great way to do it. Private banks are offering this stuff to their clients.

Let’s think about ways that we can use it to our advantage. To keep the client, retain the client, gather more assets and deepen that relationship. So there you have it, Derek. What do you think of from the queen of odds? You know, she talks about basically selling the relationship as a differentiator and she’s exactly right. She also talks about how we are, our clients, all of us are emotionally connected to our money. And sometimes we forget that when we’re doing the financial plan or the portfolio or the risk analysis, but we are very emotionally charged when it comes to our money, at least most people are.

So how do we differentiate and connect? And she does bring up a good point and it’s interesting how they’re solving that with alts of all things and how they’re coming at it from a different angle. So I like that perspective. She’s definitely proving our point that we’ve even discussed in previous episodes about the relationship, emotional intelligence and understanding what’s really driving the client and so forth. You know, it’s true. I mean, most of my business owner clients, when they ask about business, they love to talk about their business and companies. If they’ve made private equity investments, they do dominate the conversation, right? When you have a fund or an index, nobody talks about the underlying holdings.

So you can’t really geek out about, Oh, I love what Apple’s doing. I’m so happy. I have a position in them. But if you have a private equity deal or took a stake in a nursing home locally, because I really believe that market’s going to come off or I bought this technology company that’s solving a major problem I noticed in the market space. It is exciting to talk about that stuff. And frankly, given the fact that alts don’t have ongoing performance requirements for reporting, it’s a lot easier to talk about them because you don’t know if they’re actually winning or losing. But in a sense, it’s true.

You do feel more connected to your investments when you know physically what it’s invested in, or you can see the benefit of it. It’s real. It’s real. It’s more than just a paper statement with some index fund, right? It really, very true. But I think it’s important. She, she makes a comment that private banks are going after our larger clients because they can offer this stuff. Why don’t we start thinking about it? So really important. All right. Let’s hear from number three. Who is number three, Derek? Andreas Mazabel. So he’s a dear friend. He’s an awesome guy. He isn’t in charge of advisor growth, if you will.

We’re at trust and will super cool dude. So let’s hear what he has to say. I hear the word holistic and comprehensive very often, but I see a lot of challenges and advisors really building a process that reflects what they really want to do. So being very proactive about getting their clients to complete their estate plan as an example for us, that’s a big challenge that we face, right? When we talk to advisors, there’s a lot that they’re thinking and have to do from a priority perspective, but it’s really making sure that they built in that process to build in that peace of mind. And then two, I think it’s always a matter of how do you really make sure that the clients is getting the advice that they really need outside of just the investments in making sure that we’re building and they’re delivering a goals-based approach to what the challenges are that we have in life as life kind of changes.

Well, how is trust and will specifically helping advisors address these challenges, making it more accessible. So by having better price points, being able to have a platform where an advisor can actually drive the conversation, get their clients to take action, view their documents. So now we’re starting to see advisors will now go back and say, I can view your documents, come in. Let’s meet with your family who’s named in your estate plan, right? Cause this is some of that clients are asking more help with regarding their estate plan. I always ask, why do most clients hire a financial advisor? It’s a peace of mind, peace of mind.

Can my kids go to college? Can I retire comfortably? But we forget the biggest thing is not if I pass, but when I pass, do I have the peace of mind to say, I know my kids are going to be taken care of. We can avoid probate all that. So we forget, I think one of the biggest things by focusing so much on certain tasks, if you will, it’s really getting to know that family dynamic and understanding what that looks like, but I’m sure we’ve all heard of 57% of clients assets is going to be inherited by 2045. Only 13% of advisors connect with the clients children.

So it’s a huge opportunity. There you go. What do you think about that? Trust and wills different take than investments. Definitely a different take, but it’s very, very important because if we don’t do what he’s talking about, it opens up a world of problems for the next generation and even stress for us, if you have a spouse, a parent that needs help, something like that. What I like is that he’s talking about essentially building a peace of mind process as part of a holistic approach to helping your clients. And if we are talking about life insurance or beneficiaries on a retirement account and so forth, we are already, we already have one foot in the estate planning realm now, because we’re talking about what happens when you’re not around.

So as advisors, I mean, at least that’s what I think you say is we should really be thoughtful about talking about that a little bit more of other than just off the cuff. Oh, do you have a will? No, they should probably get one. And then you leave it at there. That’s not doing your clients any service. That’s true. I know it’s got to go deeper than that. No, that’s a huge challenge. And I last, I heard there was something like less than 20% of Americans actually have a will. So I think a hundred percent will die. I’m pretty certain of that one, maybe 99% if the medical goes well, but, you know, look, I think the reality is if we’re going to say that we’re holistic and we’re on an advocate for people’s financial wellbeing, we got to get on this too, right?

We can’t let them roll off the lot and say like, yeah, the seat belts don’t matter. This is, this is an important aspect that, or you don’t need auto insurance. Ah, forget the, what a waste. You need the documents in order. I think it’s really important. So that’s clearly a big challenge that I don’t think people are talking about enough in this space. All right. Who do we have next? Johnny Paulson. Yeah, really cool dude. I met him for the first time at wealth stack, but he’s the CEO over at income labs. And, uh, well, let’s just hear what he has to say. I think an interesting question is how does an industry that for so long and rightfully so has been focused on accumulation and building wonderful tools and investment strategies to solve for that, turn around and provide quality distribution planning.

Jamie Hopkins will tell you that we spend decades telling our clients to save more and spend less. And then one day we turn the switch and we tell them it’s time to live off your money, it’s time to spend you. And that’s not a minor tweak. It’s not a minor adjustments. And I quite frankly, don’t think simply building new and better tools is the solution. I think that is important. Clearly the analytics, the math in distribution planning is fundamentally different than it is during accumulation. But I think we really needs to completely change our mindset. And at income lab, we leave what effectively gets you to retirement is not going to be very helpful through retirement.

So that was interesting because Johnny Paulson, who comes from the income distribution world, spending years actually at Jackson national and got then teamed up with his partner, Justin to create a distribution mindful platform first. So financial planning from the distribution phase versus the accumulation phase, and it’s really interesting because I think this has come up a couple of times, but so many advisors have focused on the accumulation planning as does their planning tool. Very few have focused more than the 4% rule or the Monte Carlo approach. And that should be good enough. What do you think about that? Yeah, it’s true. Not only is it from a technical perspective of how do we plan around distribution planning.

Mark Faff even mentioned this in our episode with him about how a lot of people retiring today are retired more years than they worked. So you have to have different strategies. But I think the other thing that Johnny alludes to is that we have to help our clients with that mindset. In our mind, it might be a light switch thing. Oh, we’re going to stop putting money in your retirement account. We’re going to start taking it out. But our clients, this is a huge deal. They’ve spent decades putting money away and all of a sudden you’re telling them to stop that and take money out.

They’re probably going to be scared. There’s going to be uncertainty. So how do we address that emotional aspect as well when we’re making this transition? Absolutely. All right. See now we already have four different perspectives. Let’s hear from the number five, Matt Gardner, the chief education officer at FinLit Tech. Only because I’ve been in the industry for 20 plus years, I know what it’s like to be an advisor. I think the biggest challenge that we have as an industry is a lack of education. Honestly, I ran across a fascinating stat and it’s that the financial services industry has a budget of about 30 billion is what they spend on marketing.

Less than 1% of that is spent on financial education. So I just, I believe as advisors, we serve a very unique role and that we’re in people’s financial lives. And I think a lot of people as different tools are becoming commoditized and free compression and you can kind of go do a lot of things on your own as advisors. We got to be able to bring something a little different to the table. I think financial education and perspective is that thing. Talk about the work that you’ve done though, about helping the next generation. Cause that’s really intriguing. I think advisors have this interesting, we’ll call it opportunity slash obligation as the educated party.

I’m trying not to blow you up too much, Adam, because you’ve been a huge supporter of what we’re doing in our mission for some time. But yeah, we believe that an advisor has an obligation, not just to the people that they’re sitting across from and giving the advice to, but the generations that are coming behind them, which is why we wrote the Four Money Bears book because if you as a child or if you as a parent receiving this information, how can you teach your child? And so if you’re an advisor and that you’re playing the space all the time, why not develop tools to be able to pass that on?

Heard a great line. Someone said, if you take care of a client, they’re thankful. If you take care of their child, they’re forever grateful. And what do you think? Well, initially what really struck me is that of that, what do you say, 30 billion in annual marketing spend, only 1% is on financial education. That’s crazy. So talk about a challenge and an opportunity. And okay, so marketing, we spend money in marketing to drive revenue. I get it. But we’ve also talked to a number of people that if you increase financial literacy and education, you’re empowering that client to do a better job with their money.

They’re probably going to be a longer-term client with an advisor, which means your lifetime revenue generated from that client is probably higher and their satisfaction overall outcomes are also better. So it just seems like it’s a no brainer to lean into financial education. Maybe I’m just naive, but that’s why I’m taking from it. Well, unless you’re trying to basically sell product to an uneducated party and you’re afraid that if you educate them, they may not buy your product. I don’t know that I’m trying to take the alternative side of it. I mean, there’s a good question here about whether we are aligned in our interests, right?

The companies that are spending 30 billion on marketing are trying to sell something, right? That makes sense. That’s a business, that’s a capital decision. So those that are, that are educating. And I think what he brings up is a really interesting point. It’s incumbent upon the advocate of the household, the financial professional to actually educate their client, leave them better than they found them, not just on the balance sheet, but also educate their next generation, not just because it’s good business, but because it makes sense to help the next generation. Guess where loyalties will lie when they become the advocates of their own parents’ assets.

Oh yeah, for sure. Doesn’t that, doesn’t that pay itself forward a hundredfold? Isn’t it just in the best interest of everybody, just to educate people and get them more confident to make decisions. I think that’s a real big issue here. And I’m glad that he brought it up. Um, but big surprise that literacy was his, uh, his big challenge. Are you ready for Jason Pereira? Yeah, he’s cool. I consider him the Canadian fintech guru. So cool to hear what’s going on to the North and let’s see what he has to say. So the biggest challenge I see is basically the fact that not enough attention is being paid to the actual experience of the client with technology.

I have a friend whose name is Dennis Mosley Williams, who speaks on it. Yeah, exactly. He talks about the experience economy. He has this saying that efficiency is the enemy of experience. And that, that bothered me because I’m a tech and efficiency guy, but I also deeply value the experience with the clients. So basically, so I went back and look at it. I said, you know what? 90% of the tech we have is for making our lives easier. And 90% of what spits out a either printed document or a PDF that looks at the printed document. What a horrible experience that is and how would a failure to actually take advantage of the mediums that we’re using today.

So when you look at what exists though, a lot of the technology that we do have can be either tweaked or used in a lot of ways to create compelling, interactive and meaningful purposeful conversations with clients live where it’s not just about, let’s go through what the PDF looked like on screen. Let’s actually have a collaborative interactive conversation around this and actually engage. And I mean, credit to Adam here. He’s like the OG on this space because effectively like asset maps was built to be collaborative and in that regard. Very cool. Well, that’s interesting. So, and I appreciate that. What are you seeing differently? Because you have the opportunity to cross over the border, Canada, US, you’re probably even talking in the UK space now.

What are you seeing that’s bridging the gap or where’s that opportunity for advisors to take advantage of some of this new technology? Well, I think honestly, a lot of what you guys have down here is great, robust, but a lot of it’s legacy, quite honestly, right? And a lot of it’s still built towards the advisor, basically, you know, making their lives easier, but the newer tech coming out, a lot of the stuff that’s like not the big full flow of the flow blown financial planning software, but the stuff that’s more specific tends to be more paying attention to how does this actually look on a screen?

How does this look when I share it with someone? How does it look when I blow it up beyond me? I think what’s really going to happen is, is that with the, I mean, you guys have seen the kids this map and how big that thing is, the reality is there’s a lot to choose from. If you’re trying to just be a generalist, this could be hard to figure out what to do, but as we know, and we’ve seen people who are marketing the niches tend to grow at faster rates. So if you figure out your value proposition to one group of clients, right, and you pick your software and the experience around that group of clients, you can truly create a unparalleled experience, start to finish that speaks to that need, start to finish, because there’s so many specialized softwares now that exist that are later than the full bone planning softwares.

Talk to us about artificial intelligence and its entrance into financial advice. Where are we now? Where are we going? We are at the infancy of it. So, um, the big news that came out this year was of course, chat GPT really capturing everyone’s imagination. And today everybody’s just been playing around with it. It’s a novelty, but what you’re going to see in the next couple of years, and I’ve talked to these companies, I’ve seen it happening is you’re going to see some form of chat GPT guide or troubleshooter or just tool for working with the existing softwares that exist. Everybody’s looking at this. So that is going to happen.

I mean, windows just announced today that they’ve basically launched a co-pilot within windows. So now you can utilize chat GPT with it. It was before it was in, it was an office. Now what’s happening with, I know it’s coming. Well, conquest planning has been mentioned many times in this, in this conference and they are the first to throw artificial intelligence pre-chat GPT into financial planning software. I’ve been user, I’ve been advising these guys since the, the alpha and frankly, it is going to cause some real damage down here. It’s already in full production in Canada and the amount of time it takes to produce better plans that any human being could do and amplify the plan that I was doing is substantial.

It’s incredible. So that gets down here. You’re going to see the old benchmark kids to study of 10 hours and do a financial plan. That number is going to start to shrink substantially freeing up time for what deeper engagement, more value. Absolutely. Now, when we start getting to the chat GPT instances, we’re early innings of what’s going to happen with that. Besides the support mechanisms for different softwares, there’s really, I just started working with a company at the UK called CFO, the name may change. We’ll see. But one of the things we’re talking about is can this be a bridge across all the different silos that exist instead of trying to batch all the data in one place, which has proven impossible in the last 20 years.

What if I just tie into these pieces and use the chat bot as the tool for how I extract data from these different things and combine it? What does it mean for advisors though? What does it mean? It means that frankly, like whether it be the ability to use chat GPT to reply to emails and draft emails or to create blog posts or whatever else it is, the efficiencies that we’re already, anyone who’s on the early edge of this is already gaining from using this. I’m already replying to emails with this stuff. I’m already creating content with this. The amount of time being spent is a lot faster.

The best quote I heard about chat GPT is that it’s effectively like the calculator for words, right? It’s not going to replace the ability of the human being to draft something truly deep and meaningful, but it’s a lot easier to create a first draft on it and then start editing. The calculator for words, but that was pretty cool. That is pretty cool. And I can totally see that and I’ve, I’ve used it. You’ve used it and it does work. Oh yeah. Uh, you know, something that kind of came to mind as he was talking about this AI stuff is that I relate it back to medicine and our health.

There’s web MD. I can go look at research, learn a ton, but ultimately, and you’ve mentioned this a number of times when the pain of failure is high, I still want a human being who’s an expert to help me execute. All right. Check out what, what AI told me to do. Is it right? Should we make any adjustments and please help me execute it. It’s the same thing with the doctor. If I like my doctor, I can do all the research in the world. They’ll help be that filter for me and then say, well, we should, we tried this way instead of that way and so forth.

So I think there’s, there’s some similarities there. Um, fascinating perspective. What were your thoughts? What he had to say? No, I just realized what you just said. You know why that is by the way, because trust, trust is a feeling of certainty and feelings are based on emotions, not logic. And the point is, is that when humans need to make a decision, they go with their common rubric of how they get to a trusted decision. And that’s usually a feeling they get with confidence from credible people. So it’s interesting until we get to a place where people trust that the AI bots no more or can make a better decision than the humans, given the massive amount of information they have, which is inevitable by the way, I think it’s inevitable.

The population will start trusting this technology greater. We will start using this technology because it will just accelerate. No system is perfect. There’s always going to be some little failures, but the time savings alone will be just so massive that we’ll have time to fix the stuff that it messed up. And I think the interesting thing about what he said too, it’s fun to let Jason just riff because he’s got so much information in his head and thinking about this stuff is that he also brought up experience. So in addition to AI, he brought up a digital experience and how woefully lacking a lot of advisory firms are.

They’re not really using their technology to its greatest capability. I know we spend a lot of time. We actually talked to Dennis also, he has spoken at several conferences I’ve been to, and he just does a great job too, Dennis Mosley Williams. And I think, I think it’s really important for us to all pay attention to what is the digital customer experience that we are creating. As FinTech CEOs right now, we’re both in the throes of designing our tech and we have advisors and consumers that are our customers. How does that experience feel? It’s really quite interesting when you get into the design aspects and he’s spot on, you got to pay attention to that client experience.

It’s arguably the most important. No question. All right. Well, let’s jump to our number seven interview. Kellan Brown, Senior Vice President of Growth and Strategic Partnerships at Finance of America. Now, Kellan, if you don’t know her, she is a force for good. If you ever get an opportunity to meet her, she’s got such a great personality and we’re excited to interview her on this podcast. Let’s hear from her. One of the things I’ve been trying to do since I got into the industry was talk to advisors and their firms about how you can implement strategic mentorship programs within their space. And the reason why this is so important to me is that we have a lack of women, people of color, LBGTQ, and it’s not just about getting into the space, but it’s actually about getting to the executive level once they get into the firm.

How are you doing that? OK, so there’s two ways to do it. Problems? What’s your solution? When I joined Finance of America reverse and we’re a reverse lending company, we are the leader in the space and have been for the last 15 years. We just acquired our largest competitor, so that includes wholesale and retail. But what’s beautiful about our company is that our culture is so driven behind bringing up the next generation. And so when I came into the company, I said, let’s create a strategic, intentional mentorship program. So we went out and found a tech company. We used MentorClick, which gives us the opportunity to match mentees and mentors and then measure the success of that relationship.

And the reason why this was so important to me was that it gives us the return on investment. And what I mean by that, it shows when we actually have people that stick around longer, get promotions faster, hit goals and ultimately impact the bottom line. So how I typically land this is last year, Finance of America saved over $2 million because of their mentorship program. So what’s the biggest challenge that you see in the whole space? I mean, there’s a lot of people here at WealthStack. They’re all here to get some best practices and learn. What do you think? Is that the thing that’s standing out?

So I just came out of the DEI think tank with Suzanne Syracuse. I’ve been in that three years in a row now. It’s been fantastic because we’re actually seeing the change that’s coming out. So the advisors that are sitting in that space, we’re all creating something new to make a difference. So, for example, the FinServe Foundation. So I sit on the advisory board there. And what we do is bring in the next generation of financial planning students from the university on how to get into the program. Now, today I learned that Hannah Moore has created an externship for those students. So we’re going to team up.

FinServe Foundation will help support the networking, the introductions. We’ll do obviously the mentorship program. And then if they want to, we’ll provide the funding to send them off to the externship so that they’ll be prepared to move into that next. Why is it critical that advisors not just watch this happen from the audience, but actually get involved and do something about it? Why is it critical? So we’re seeing a huge gap when it comes to women, people of color, LGBTQ. We want a more diverse group. And why do we want that? Because it opens it up to the rest of the world. We’re not growing in this industry right now.

So when you talk about like a Dana Wilson or a Jack Campbell, someone that’s building a women only financial advisory firm in Detroit, she’s trying to find education and teach people how to plan financially successfully. And I think that’s the difference, right? We’re not raising awareness about what we’re doing at an early of enough age. And then once you get into the industry, the problem here is that either you don’t make it to the next level or, and I hate to put it like this, but that white male syndrome where you’re just bringing up the same person, that’s a problem. There you go. Yet another great perspective.

What do you think, Dar? Yeah, it just adds to the whole diverse group that we have about so many different angles and challenges to look at. What I heard her say is. If you have this mentorship mindset and you do it correctly and you’re really thoughtful about it, you have now this path to success, regardless of that person’s background all the way up into the executive level. So it’s more fulfilling. There’s more opportunity. And she even gave an example. It’s leading to a better bottom line. So it sounds like a pretty cool way to deal with the challenge that she sees. Obviously they’re making it work.

And it even goes back a little bit to what Jamie is doing over at Carson with their college internship type of thing or they’re recruiting them. So very cool on how they’re tackling it. What about you? Well, it’s funny. I noticed that as well, and I didn’t realize this when we scheduled it, that they’re both part of Fincer Foundation, that we had also made a benefactor of the Advice Tech Live 2022 program where we were giving charitable contributions to support next gen. So it was cool to see them all kind of come together and realize the connections are also the Hannah Moore comment about creating an externship program for all those students that are leaving the industry or education, financial planning and don’t have a place to land.

So I know that AssetMap has participated in that program as well. I didn’t realize that Kellen was part of it. So that was really cool. And I think the real key here is that there are things that we as advisors can do here. We can bring in the next generation. Now we tend to bring into our own internships. I hired my clients kids. That was one thing that I did because why I would tell my clients I’m hiring or they would call me up and say, hey, Adam, you have any internships for my kid? And guess what we would do? That’s how we filled the spot.

It all happened in network and never got published. But I think it’s an interesting opportunity for us to actually expand our horizons and offer to bring in people that are not in our normal community because the reality is the future of our business probably won’t look like the present of it. And that means we need to be mindful of how it’s evolving and how do we actually create different opportunities to grow, make people feel welcome. So that’s an important aspect here. I think she brought up. Boom. All right. Awesome. All right. You ready for Marwa? Who’s Marwa Zakria? So she is the CEO of AssetBook not AssetMap.

Oh, thank you. That’s you. I think you have that in common. You’re still doing that over at AssetMap. I think so. Once in a while. Let’s show up in a while. But yeah, let’s jump in and see what she has to say today. I would say the underlying challenge that we continue to hear is that they either don’t know or don’t have access to their data. It’s one of the gleaming realities that they face when they’re exploring, changing portfolio management solutions, or other or kicking off the idea and realizing, oh, well, I might have to pay X amount or I’m not going to get it at all or it’s going to be very skewed data that is not that isn’t really useful to them or to another solution.

What are you guys doing about it? Do you have a solution in mind? The short term, we are proactively we’ve been providing. This has been going on for a little over six months now. We provide backups of the entire data for our clients on either a monthly or quarterly basis. It’s their option to choose. Some don’t want it on a monthly basis. It becomes cumbersome, but they have access to it and we don’t just say it as lip service. They actually have it on hand and it’s great for doing proactive audits and just having your data so you know what it looks like. And if anyone needs to go, they’re going to go anyway.

So I’ve had other solutions say, well, you’re just putting it on a silver platter. Yeah, that’s what they pay us for. And if we’re not the right solution any longer, then let them go. Don’t hold people hostage. Now that’s an interesting third rail statement because one of the reasons that a lot of advisors don’t or cannot move from one provider to another is because they’re so tied to the data at their broker dealer, platform company and just unwinding that is just such a headache. You know what they do? They just put up with the pain. So I think it was interesting. Assetbook is a platform performance aggregator for advisors and does a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably ignorant to, but on its face, that’s an interesting statement, Derek.

Yeah, it resonates. I mean, I went independent a year and a half ago now. And when you start, you don’t really think about it too much when you’re in the middle of stuff, but then all of a sudden you’re like, yeah, maybe I go independent. Maybe I’m gonna switch firms. All of a sudden it becomes super important and you’re like, oh crap, I do not have the access I thought, or I don’t know how to get it, or it doesn’t fit into anything else that I’m trying to go over too. And it can actually get scary very quickly. So really cool that they’re solving that problem.

They’re laser focused on it, no question about it. I like their silver platter approach. Why not? You know, do it, make it easy for them. It ultimately helps the clients. So why is it a problem? It’s true. If you believe that the relationship is really the advisor and not the firm with the advisor, then the data has got to be transportable. And it’s one of the things that I’ve been really hearkening on here at AssetMap is how do we create a way to really truly empower the person whose data it is to contain, retain and have possession of that without them feeling hostage. I mean, you know, years ago, we used to sell mutual funds.

Do you remember what it used to have? A back end sales charge. And you know what that would wind up doing? It basically kept people captive, right? Okay, you’re making a five, six year decision until they burn to A shares. Let’s be honest, that’s a retention strategy. And why? To earn back the compensation that was paid in the first year. And so what did we do as an industry? We said, oh, we’re gonna really be open architecture. You wanna leave us, you can take your assets with you. There’s no exit fee. We charge a 1% AUM fee. And that made sense, right? It was in the best interest of the client and it served us as advisors, right?

Because we felt like we were aligned with the clients and they felt that and that transparency built trust. Remember that word? Why are we doing the same thing with data now? But you can’t leave, your data is here, sorry. You gotta use this antiquated tool. So I think it’s really cool that they’re actually leading with that and they’re bringing up the challenge even though nobody else is talking about it. Love it. All right, introduce us to Payman. Payman? Hardus, he is our friend from Canada as well. Another guy from the North, eh? Sorry. I had that. I used to almost live in Canada. So my cell phone would jump.

My cell phone would literally jump to Canadian cell towers during that time of the day. I was that close to the border. Sounds expensive. Yes, it was. Talk about roaming, but he’s the head of wealth management consulting at Deloitte in charge of North America. Really cool dude. Was an advisor first. So has that experience and now is looking at things from international perspective. So let’s jump in and see what he has to say. So it’s interesting. Throughout the past few days, you would have heard about personalization. You would have heard about engagement. You would have heard about a whole bevy of different items, right? The platforms, the technology, all that stuff.

I think the one thing that people don’t really talk about, excuse me, I’m gonna get a little bit consulting lingo on, is real-time wealth management. And what I mean by real-time wealth management, this is a little bit of consulting, but it’s a lot of transformative forces that are all converging all within the same time horizon. So if I give you a few examples, whether it’s open banking or real-time rails, which is like instantaneous wage disbursement, et cetera. If I think about some of the regulatory changes like T plus one, there’s all this, or even just the accelerated path towards digital. All of this is causing a real-time wealth management need.

So it’s not about the personalization. It’s not about the engagement. It’s actually how you’re supporting your client on a real-time basis. When now they’re getting their biweekly paychecks are coming in instantaneously and they have inquiries to you, how are you supporting them? How are you supporting them as it pertains to market events that are happening and how’s your support team able to actually scale? It requires a whole different shift in the business model, whether you’re a financial professional and a broker dealer or you’re an RIA, it’s gonna cause a significant impact to your business that I don’t think people are really considering. That’s different. Different, thought-provoking for sure.

But he’s right. Real-time. I don’t know if he coined it. Did he coin the term real-time or? I have heard it from someone else. Do you know who else I heard it from? Who? Bill Harris. Ah, okay. I think there’s a mindset that’s coming. But it’s true, whether it’s our phones or computers or whatever, we are getting pretty much instant access to at least some parts of our financial lives. So why not be able to get that access to my retirement account, my investment account, my insurance, my taxes? That seems like it’s pretty important. If I can’t get it from you, but I can get it over here, well, I want it in the palm of my hand, right?

As a consumer. I was on a committee four or five years ago at Larger Broker Dealer, and we surveyed what clients wanted. And they said, can we actually manage our portfolio through a Venmo-style immediacy? And I didn’t really take it seriously because why do you need to have that immediacy? But I think what’s happened is that the consumers are also so, like you said, indoctrinated with on-demand speed that people are gonna say, well, why not? Why do I have to wait three days? So alternatives that provide speed is the same as providing me time, and time is money. So theoretically, speed is gonna be really, really, really valuable to people who don’t have attention span.

Well, that’s true. Or patience, maybe. Patience, attention span, the thing about whether you’re looking to make a change to your allocation, or maybe you wanna buy a house and you have to make an offer on a house. Yeah, that’s true. These are pressing real-world situations sometimes, and you need access to your own information. You need real-time wealth management. And if you can’t get it, you’re gonna be frustrated. You may miss out on something that’s gonna cause problems, friction, things you don’t want. You’ll go elsewhere to fix that problem. Well, crypto, as an example, does give you real-time currency movement, right? You can move money incredibly fast.

Wiring still takes 24 hours in most cases. Yep. Yet Venmo’s instant in ACH is two days, and, oh, a check, hey, you need a certified check to buy that house, a week, right? So it’s an interesting aspect. I think it’s definitely the early stages of it, but I can see this becoming bigger down the line. All right, are you ready for number 10? Number 10, let’s go. Now, interesting. I don’t know if you’d be surprised, but it’s different than all the other prior ones. ly if you know her, and she’s a co-founder as well, along with Kelly Waltrich. And I think that they’re talking all about marketing for advisors, so guess what we’re gonna hear about?

Marketing for advisors. Probably. One of the biggest challenges that, let’s hear. Megan Richter. So for what I’m seeing day in and out, whether we’re working with tech firms or financial advisors in this space, it comes down to differentiation, which is not probably something novel you might hear in some of your conversations, but I think it really is the root at a lot of the challenges firms are facing when it comes to growing their business. And if you don’t do it effectively, it has ripple effects into every single thing that you do. So when we work with advisors and fintech firms alike, we like to really dig in and ask them a couple key questions.

We want them to get really specific about who they’re serving. So it can’t just be people in my certain region or what it was going through, divorce. We need to get more specific about who you’re really trying to get after and make a connection with. We really push them to make sure that they’ve understood the competitive landscape. Okay, you’re gonna be in this space. What are others out there saying? And then we really push them to make sure that their story about why, why did they set out to do what they wanna do? Why did they set out to create what they wanna create? Really drove their business, and they think between understanding really specifically about their audience needs, why they created their business or their model to begin with, and then how other people are speaking.

We can pull together a formula that really works to help them come up with a very differentiated message. Well, there you have it. Number 10, what do you think about Megan’s comments? I think it’s accurate. I think it is a challenge. I think a lot of advisors really struggle with differentiation. We’ve talked about this. Tech used to be a differentiator. Now it’s table stakes. We’ve had Angie Herbers on. There’s another one on there but talking about referrals. Libby Gryway, talking about referrals and niching or not niching and differentiation at the end of the day is a challenge. When there are so many different advisors out there, all or arguably all using a very similar tech stack, how are you different?

It’s a good question. I was literally talking to a firm this morning also about differentiation and it was challenging to get them to say, yes, we fit in a specific niche. And because they have business that’s associated with multiple niches and they don’t wanna decide. And they say, can I be all things to all people? And that’s a really challenging one, I think, especially with what’s coming in the great indexing of all of our businesses and commoditization and what I think is gonna be marginalization of the compensation that we’re paid. It’s the reason why I think we’re seeing a lot of advisors, although I didn’t think it would honestly take.

I’ll be honest about that. I didn’t think that fee-based financial planning was really gonna start taking any market share from assets under management. And I think I’m wrong. We are starting to see a real insurgence of advisors that are charging a flat fee. Well, there’s a demographic that it fits, right? It works, it really works. That’s true. I think if I’m listening to this as an advisor or a fintech firm, this is a really big question on differentiation. I too, I had a meeting this morning with the venture capital firm for Coupler. And they asked me, so who’s your competition? How are you different? And if you can’t articulate that as an advisor or a fintech person or whatever, if you can’t articulate that on your website, your conversations, your process, all of that type of stuff, you’re gonna struggle.

That’s right. You gotta stand out in a crowd. I said to this to someone the other day, I said, memorable is better than better. Being memorable. I mean, memorable means you gotta be different, right? Everybody’s trying to be better than the other guy. I mean, so the question is, how are you gonna be memorable? Because that’s what people will come to. Being top of mind is really the key when people need to make decisions. Do they call your firm? Do they call you as an advisor? Or do they look it up on Google and get whatever they ever get? And I think that’s the key.

I know you and I have talked a lot about digital presence and building preeminence around this, especially for what you’re good at. Are you a subject matter expert so that when people need help, they call you. So anyway, really, really strong here. Let’s do the wrap up here and see how many of the 10 were the same with respect to challenges in our space. I would argue there might be one or two that are share some similarities, but they’re probably all different. I think they’re all different. Two people said basically next gen, which is talent, maybe mentorship. That’s 20% of the group. Yeah, and they had different takes on it too.

They had different takes on it. So it wasn’t the same challenge or solution necessarily, but similarities for sure. Now, for all of you listening, now we would like you to think about this. So we’re gonna summarize all 10 of them. We’re gonna read them off like the list of the 10 commandments here. So, or the 10 plagues or whatever you wanna follow in your religion. The 10 plagues. These are the 10 plagues of wealth management by Derek and Adam. By Derek and Adam, okay. You’re right, read me the first five there, Moses. I’ve got enough white hair to look like Moses, I’ll tell you. Anyways, talent, alternatives, holistic planning that includes estate planning, distribution planning versus accumulation, financial literacy and education.

I mean, those five right there, boom. I mean, that’s money. That’s how we fix money. That is how you fix money. I know that’s a big agenda for you, fixing money. It is, it is. Talent, alternatives, estate. That’s great. All right, and the following six are digital experience and artificial intelligence. What are you gonna do about it? Mentorship, next gen and DEI. How are you gonna participate? How are you gonna make a difference here? Data access, is it portable? Do you own it? Real-time wealth management, that’s on-demand, money and all things around it. And lastly, differentiation. How do you stand out in a crowd? Real interesting challenges.

What’s gonna be your strategy? Of course, we don’t know the answer either, but we’re happy to debate it if you listen to us on Rethink. Derek, I wanna congratulate you on getting to 50. You look great for 50. You look the same basically as two years ago. This has been a fun journey. Is that a backhanded compliment? I don’t even know. Well, I’m the one closer to 50. So I guess I’m happy to say it so. Anyway. Well, right on brother. 50 episodes, man. That is pretty awesome. Let’s go for another 50 and see what happens. We’ll see if I can get to age 100.

You got it. We’re gonna shoot for 100. Well, thank you to everybody who’s participated and we know this was a longer podcast, but obviously we had a lot to cover and we hope you found it valuable. Again, we’d ask you to continue to support us by participating in the conversation on LinkedIn by direct messaging us as so many other people have. Certainly like us, share this with their friends that need to hear this story. And of course, make sure you subscribe and give us a rating. Hopefully a good one. If not, you can give it to somebody else. Yeah, give us five and go somewhere else.

Give the remainder to somebody else. All right, my friend. Great to spend time with you again. What a great project this was. Likewise brother, loving it. We’ll see you on the next one. All right, you got it. 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. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.