Ep 59: Insights from the former CEO of TurboTax, PayPal, and Personal Capital featuring Bill Harris

Episode 59 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (43:16)

Episode 59 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

Bill Harris joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman having run TurboTax, PayPal, and Personal Capital, which gives him an unusually wide view of where consumer financial technology went and where advice did not follow. His assessment is blunt: the advice industry is still using manual methods that ignore twenty years of progress in consumer-facing technology. The number that makes his case concrete comes from Personal Capital, where the target was ten substantive client conversations per advisor per working day. He explains how that was achievable, which was by running fully remote with no offices and no travel, centralizing scheduling so the flow could be controlled, and using technology to remove the administrative work advisors otherwise absorb. The hosts translate it directly: automating the back office is what buys the time to actually listen in the front.

What this episode covers

• What tax software, payments, and consumer planning have in common as businesses
• The claim that advice ignored two decades of consumer technology progress
• Ten substantive client conversations a day, and the operating model behind it
• Removing back-office work as the route to more front-office time
• Pre-scheduling review points to keep clients accountable and intentional

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, what does TurboTax, PayPal, and personal capital have in common? Oh, man. That’s pretty big question, given how much they have touched hundreds of millions of wives. It’s pretty big question, man. What do they have in common? Yeah, it’s not a dad joke.

Darn it, darn it. I was hoping you would come up with something that was gonna turn into a dad joke. You know, I’m terrible with dad jokes when put on the spot. I’ll come back to you on that. Okay. What do they have all in common? Well, they have money. Money they have in common. They also have the end consumer and they also all use technology. That’s true. One of those is tax. One is money movement and the other is financial planning. Yeah. And what’s interesting about all three of these is that they were all household names, if not known by everybody. And have, as you said, impacted millions and billions.

But there is a theme here and we had the opportunity to actually interview the CEO, if not founding CEO of all three of these companies in our rethink tank this week, Bill Harris, who is really quite an amazing gentleman. And he started sharing some themes, Derek, didn’t he? That we can all pay attention to. Yeah, I think this is gonna be a really fun conversation. I mean, think about it. His work, products, teams have touched probably billions at this point over the last couple of decades. Think about what they have learned and that perspective and insights. How can we apply it to the work we’re doing in our space?

Absolutely. Well, we actually had the benefit of knowing what he said. So with no further ado, let’s jump right into this with Bill Harris, CEO. Bill, thank you very much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. What is your unique perspective of the financial advice market industry? Well, hopefully pretty clear to most people, the industry stuck in the past. It is using old techniques and it is using manual methods that ignore everything that’s been done in consumer facing technology for the past 20 years. Yeah, certainly we agree with that. We’re talking to a lot of people here that they know it needs to change, Bill, but you’ve had such an amazing history of really impacting the technology of so many financial decisions for consumers and advisors alike.

We’re really curious, what do you think is the missing opportunity that advisors don’t see coming? I think there’s not one opportunity. The opportunity is to revolutionize the entire business and how it’s done. And with technology, you can make it better every step of the way for the business itself, for your practice, for the customer and even for the product. And so what do I mean on the business side? Oh man, we spend as advisors, we spend so much time on the back office rather than the front office, rather than dealing with the clients. And what is our job? Our job is to talk to the clients, understand them, reassure them.

And I think most people spend less than half of their time doing that. That’s for the business, for the customer. If we use technology, we can not only spend more time, but we can also give them more information, real-time information, and information that is there when they want it to make the strategic decisions that come about just as a matter of living. And then finally on the product side, and this is something that financial advisors really don’t think about very much, it is time to use technology to bring the next generation of product to the marketplace. I would say a lot of our listeners would agree with what you just said.

Can you go a little bit deeper given your experiences? I’d be specifically curious about your time at Intuit. And obviously seeing such a revolution of how the tax compliance process was really disintermediated or disrupted from TurboTax. What do you think advisors can take away from that tax mindfulness that they’re just ignoring today? Two things. So I was a decade at TurboTax, and what we learned is a couple of things. First of all, you don’t need the kind of manual intervention and the huge amount of hours that are put against preparing taxes. And this was one of the earliest and best examples of using technology, not just in the financial sphere, but using technology to combine not only interactivity, but also information.

There is a huge amount of information in the forms and the calcs and everything like that in something like TurboTax. And what it does is allows the tax preparer to do the grunt work quickly so that then they can really spend the time with the client. That’s number one. Number two, what we found out is that consumers will do what they have to do, but not what they should do. What do I mean? Everybody bought tax preparation software. How come? They had to file their taxes. But every year after April 15th, I would say, gosh, maybe we saved them a couple of hundred dollars because we’ve found something in the tax.

But if they had thought about it strategically, do tax planning rather than tax preparation, wow, we could save them thousands of dollars. And so not once, but twice, I built a tax planner, tax planning software, and it was good software. And the number of people who used it was approximately zero. How come? Every survey we did, people said, oh yeah, that would be great. I would do that. And no one did. Why? They didn’t have to. And so really what that told me is you have to put things like that back into the hands of the financial advisor because they, if they’re good, they actually will do it and for the benefit of their clients.

And my gosh, if they do, if they really focus on that after-tax money that’s in the pocket of their customers, that is a huge benefit for the customer and a differentiator so that you can keep the customer and satisfy the customer. If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying that an advisor should use tech and that if they’re really good at what they’re doing, they’re gonna be able to help the client that doesn’t have to do something, but should do something. They’re gonna be able to facilitate that now with using the right tech, especially with things like tax management, for example, with their investments, their overall planning situation.

And so if I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like the sweet spots when you’ve got a great advisor leveraging great tech to help the consumer. Well, absolutely. That’s the point. I mean, technology can’t do the human-to-human interface. Technology can’t really understand what the needs and more importantly, what the desires of the customer is. That’s up to you as the advisor. But what technology can do far better than any individual is all of the math, all of the grant work, all of the logic and procedures in terms of whether it’s financial planning, tax planning, tax preparation, running a portfolio. And so the important thing is to have great technology for all of those things so that you as an advisor can focus on the time you spend with the customer and most importantly, understanding the customer and having them feel that you understand them, that you have listened.

You know, this brings up some really interesting thoughts for me. Many people don’t know or don’t remember perhaps that you were the founding CEO of PayPal. And with respect to how prolific that tool has become, many of us have it on our phones today and use it on the monthly, if not daily. What do you think advisors can learn from your experience there? And seeing actually what consumers do with respect to banking and money management in real time. Sure, here’s the thing about PayPal. Here’s what you can learn from PayPal. This was, I’m gonna remind you, the year 2000. So that was 23 years ago.

And we were just at the beginning of consumer technology. But what we found, we brought this thing out and within six months, we had a million customers, a million active customers. And let me remind you, this was 23 years ago when a million was a million. And so what happened? Why did that just take off like that? What we did was we gave people real time access, not only to their information, but also to the ability to get something done. And that’s the secret to technology. Put the information into the hands of the customer so they don’t have to call somebody, they don’t have to look at their statements, they don’t have to wait to get the information.

I mean, goodness gracious, in the financial services world, many people are still operating on this quarterly report basis. No consumer wants to wait till the end of the quarter to understand what they’re doing. And by the way, at the end of the quarter is not probably when they have the question. So give them the information in real time and let them do with it what they want. Of course, I’m super curious here. A lot of advisors have run into personal capital, of course, which you have great roots with as well. What do you think they might learn from that experience, either competitively or defensively, or how they need to move their technology attitude to get more interactivity with the client?

What trends are you seeing there that are continuing? Let me talk about the key principle that we built personal capital around. Our mission statement was only seven words. It was better financial lives through technology and people. And so the magic, I think, of personal capital and the reason that it grew from zero to $25 billion of assets is that combination. Now, at the same time, you had the robos come up and I was often confused with or lumped in with the robos. Why? Because I was doing investments and I was doing it digitally. But the robos are completely different. They have no people, it’s all algorithms.

And by the way, the product’s not very sophisticated either, it’s just a mix of ETFs. So what we did is we said, no, let’s use technology, but let’s not cut out the person. The person is probably the most important part. The technology is enabling the relationship between the advisor and the client. And so that’s what we did. But by using technology, we were able to allow the client to have access to their information all the time, 24 hours a day. And that’s not so unusual today, but 13 years ago when we started Personal Capital, so it was a real differentiator. More importantly, we made the advisor more efficient and got rid of all the back office stuff.

And at Personal Capital, the target was 10 substantive conversations with a client each working day. The only way we were able to do that is first of all, it was remote, we don’t have offices, we don’t schedule people to come in and see us or go out and see them. It’s all done from a central location so we can control the flow, set up schedules, make it efficient. And then secondly, because we use technology to get rid of all of the busy work that financial advisors otherwise have to do. You know, this really resonates so much, Bill, to hear you say all this, especially its validation, no question from the consumer side about what they’re looking for.

And clearly it worked given your experience with these different companies. If I’m an advisor listening to this conversation right now, I might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed. There’s so many different technology solutions out there. Which one do I pick? How do I know? If Bill Harris is a financial advisor for a few minutes, what’s your filter? What are your top three things that an advisor could do to be like, okay, I should go do this to find the right tech to make sure I am going towards the future with what the consumer wants and so forth? Well, it really depends. It depends whether you’re independent or you’re working with a significant firm.

And if it’s a significant firm, you don’t have direct control over that. But all you can do is really try to advocate within the firm to make those tools available. Oh, by the way, the other thing is many firms do make tools available and financial advisors, particularly those who’ve been doing this for decades, they don’t adopt them. So make sure that you are using whatever tools are available if you’re in a big firm. If you’re independent, well, it’s a little tougher because it’s on your own. And there’s no way if you’re an independent that you’re gonna build your own technology. So find someone, whether it’s a technology provider or a TAMP, find somebody who really has efficiency producing and information accessing technology that you can then build into your own practice.

Those are great points. And we know we constantly talk about the adoption curve here on technology and why it’s been so latent, I think, with respect to advisors having, like you said in the beginning, they’re still using yellow pads in many cases, right? And so the classic back of the napkin is still so works, I guess, to some degree, but clearly for the future. Well, let me just butt in there because when you say it works, yes, in a way, but here’s what it does. It works for people of my generation, boomers and older, right? Because we didn’t grow up, we’re not digital natives. We’re certainly accepting of and utilizing technology in our lives in so many ways, but we didn’t grow up with it.

It’s not part of our DNA. And so, yes, my generation, we’re used to face-to-face meetings. We’re used to scribbling on pieces of paper. We’re used to paper statements and all of that. But today’s generation, the next generation, the place you’re gonna get your clients from, and let’s call that the exenials, the combination of Gen X and the millennials, they operate in a different way. And they wanna have everything on their phone. And they don’t wanna come into the office and meet anybody in person. And they want access to their information at all times so that they can do what they want when they want to do it.

And if you really have that kind of technological infrastructure, you can also change the pace of your practice. And rather than sitting down once a quarter and preparing a big report, which no one will read past page three anyway, you can respond to the customer because the customer’s financial questions don’t happen on a quarterly basis. They happen when something happens in their life. And so don’t schedule your customer. Allow the customer to schedule you. Love that. Bill, we’re curious. You obviously have some great opinions. We’ve noticed recently you’ve had some commentary around tax and I think the missing opportunities there. What’s your thoughts about big ideas that advisors need to start talking about?

Well, if there’s one big idea that advisors and firms and the entire industry is ignoring and oftentimes intentionally ignoring, it’s tax. Because everybody talks about pre-tax results. The single greatest factor in your investment performance is not what stocks you pay. It is tax. Because depending upon the assets and where you hold them and all of the factors that go into a proper tax strategy, somebody who’s a high earner in New York City, they can pay more than 50% of their gain in tax. And yet if you pick the right assets and handle them in the right way, you can reduce the tax to zero. And so where can you get that kind of impact on the actual prosperity of your clients?

Nowhere. And yet nobody is thinking about or talking about or most importantly, delivering great tax management. Now, clearly this is top of mind because we know that you’re working on a project, on a book, so help us get some insight into that as well. When is that coming out? So the book is called Investment Tax Guide. And it really builds on things I’ve been doing for 30 years. I mean, I ran TurboTax for 10 years. And so really got into the notion of how you would use technology on the tax question. But now technology has advanced to the point where we can take high-end tax strategies, things that you’d only get in an ultra high net worth situation where they’ve got tax attorneys and all of that.

We can use technology to make that available to many people. All right, so what am I doing in the book? The book is not a complex, not a long tax tone. It’s short and to the point. And what it does is tell somebody who is not a professional, okay, first of all, how did taxes work? What’s the difference between ordinary income and long-term capital gain? And not just that, but then getting into, all right, what are the situations that impact that and how can you impact that? And so after this introduction to all of the important concepts in taxation of investments, then we go into the top 10 tax strategies that you, the consumer, should implement.

And by the way, some of these things are things that are difficult for the consumer to implement. And so what do you need? You need a financial advisor who is tax aware and can operate on your account in your benefit to put a tax strategy in place. Once again, tax is the single most important driver to actual investment performance. And by that, I mean how many after-tax dollars goes into your client’s pocket. And you know what I tell my clients? It’s not what you earn, it’s what you keep that counts. So Adam, I think before we dig into what Bill had to say, isn’t it amazing that we just talked to the guy that was involved with PayPal, Personal Capital, TurboTax, and a slew of other well-known financial companies over the last two decades?

I feel humbled. It’s surreal, but definitely humbling and just so cool that to be able to talk to someone and get some insights from someone who’s seen a little bit more than we’ve seen. It’s true. What’s amazing to me, Derek, is how much he just repeats our content in his own conversation. Sounds like he’s been listening to our podcast. Yeah, maybe he has. I hope so. He actually said that in an outtake, actually. Do you remember that? He says we were one of the best sources of financial information. I think he was joking with us, but it was a great pleasure to talk to him.

So there was a lot in there, Derek. Let’s start with what we can debate from the tank. Boy, there was a lot there. I think the stems of the first thing he said, which I think can be a trickle-down effect, is that he also believes that the industry at large is stuck in the past. It’s using outdated technology, outdated processes, experiences, and so forth. That pretty much leads to everything else we’re gonna talk about, but wouldn’t you agree that I’m on the same page with him when he says that? Yeah, look, it’s created the opportunity that we have used to jump into the fintech space and try to rethink the entire business and see what we can do better or double down on what is working.

But boy, we do talk a lot about how technology is scraping the margins away from typically ineffective processes, and I think it’s gonna continue to explode. Advisors need to really pay attention to this and stop sitting on their laurels. Not just advisors, the companies they represent, the executive teams. We talked about this one of our prior episodes is trying to have a deeper understanding of what are the folks at home office thinking and doing and how are they making decisions. Man, I’m telling you, if I’m listening to this right now when I work in one of those home offices, I would take what Bill had to say to heart.

Don’t listen to me, don’t listen to Adam, but listen to Bill, okay? It’s true, right? Well, he knows, he built it, he did it. I mean, it is true. I mean, when you think about the impact of TurboTax, the impact of PayPal. Oh my gosh, yeah. The leading experience of personal capital, probably putting robo advice and kind of combo mash-up human and tech advisor to its first real test, all with massive exits. So we know that he’s seen a lot. That’s just the stuff we talked about. He’s done 10 other projects at least that some of you know. But either way, the point is there was some themes I think that were really interesting here.

I’m curious what you thought about his comment around front office and back office. I thought those were really some great reminders again, that the advisor should really spend a lot more time on the front office and be using tech for everything behind the scenes. No question about it. It actually ties into something he said a little bit later on in the conversation about how technology cannot understand the needs and desires of a client. And so when we think about that in the context of front office, back office, well, what does that mean? Well, back office is all the stuff that you as an advisor and your team have to do to run your business, do illustrations, run portfolios, allocation changes, beneficiary updates, crunching the math, doing the numbers, whatever it is, technology can be used there heavily to automate those things, speed them up and so forth.

What does that do then? It gives us more time as advisors to focus on the front office, meeting with clients, listening, truly listening to them in a way that we can now be that human advisor that actually they do desire. So it definitely makes a ton of sense. And I remember my early days, like I was struggling to balance the two because like, well, I got to fill out this paper application and I got to go photocopy and put it in my filing cabinet over here, but I also got to make cold calls. And it was just, it got to be really challenging and there’s no question about it.

Those are old tactics. And man, if we leverage technology, it’s amazing how much more we can do in the front office. And I didn’t sign up to be an advisor to work in the back office, I’ll tell you that. No, it’s true. But then that’s where the analytical aspects, the technical aspects, especially we see this in the CPA community that’s gotten into wealth management, really strong with being a technical advisor, but not necessarily used to spending a lot of time with the client in the front end, because you had to be in the back there with your calculator or your computer or your models and so forth, thinking about tactics and executing documents and all this other stuff.

There’s a theme though that I picked up in some of this. And I realize that we’re seeing this a bit in this space where firms that have done a lot of tech that have basically taken a lot of time and giving it back to the advisor, I’m actually seeing that the advisors that have implemented a really strong tech stack are taking that time and putting it into work-life balance. They’re taking the time and they’re putting it into golf. And there is an actual nuance there that I wanna pay attention to, because I think that we’re supposed to be taking some of that time back to give more human time back to our clients.

So I think we run a potential trap is that we create a lot of efficiency in our practices through the technology and through delegating. And then all of a sudden, we don’t take the time we got back to give it back to the clients that have more human interaction. And I think that might be a mistake because the clients are feeling less connected because we are techifying stuff, you still have to make intentional effort and time to be more human. That can’t just be, I’m available, they didn’t call, let’s go golf. That’s a really good point. That could be very easy to fall into, especially if you’re used to working 70 hours a week as an advisor.

You’re like, oh, wait a minute, I’ve got all this extra time now. Yeah, I’m gonna go hang out with my kids or play golf or whatever. And now if there’s anything wrong with that, trying to find that balance is important for a number of reasons, but don’t go so far in on tech that you forget to actually talk to your clients. Yeah, well, that’s the scale. Be intentional. Yeah, agreed. I only mentioned that as an aside because it started me thinking about it. We could actually take this to the nth degree. Can we automate and animate and workflow everything to the point where we don’t even have to do anything.

We just collect our money. Eventually that’s not gonna work because the clients recognize that if you just use tech to differentiate, you’re gonna be replaced by that technology eventually. And so the real key is to still find a way to get that hourly rate up and deliver a lot of humanity. And that might just be actually spending time with your clients, right? Actually going golfing with them or really, really making sure that you’re connected, calling them for no reason and having intentional time to really just be human. So let’s not forget to do that. What else did you think was a really an effective debate here?

You know, he made some points about how to advocate for tech if you’re part of a larger firm. And there are the independent spaces certainly growing like wildfire, but there are a lot of us that still are in the broker dealer, wire house type of realm. And I was guilty of this and I also saw it too is that you sometimes don’t realize what solutions, tech solutions you have in front of you and or you don’t adopt them because I like my yellow pad, right? Change is bad. Yeah, time to go to Staples and buy another yellow pad. Yeah, buy the 10 pack. And the pens that nobody can find anymore because nobody has pens.

Right. So I found that interesting and I agree that you should try to use what you have. But I also think there’s sometimes a challenge and we have talked about this before in that when you are part of that community of a broker dealer or whatever, it’s sometimes there’s a major disconnect. We talked about this one of our other episodes and that home office may not be actually listening to what the field wants or suggesting. I mean, even myself as an example, I ended up leaving my broker dealer and I was talking to someone who used to be at that company recently. And they said, they’re like, this is what frustrates me is because you are the type of people we should be listening to because that’s where great ideas can come from and we can look at better tech to solve things that all of our field force is struggling with.

So it’s tough because yes, you wanna use the tech and you have to adopt it. But what if it’s not the best tech for you? There should be some type of communication channel there, I think. Yeah, well, you have to bang the drum, right? So an adoption is the key. So if you’re adopting something and you’re using it, that’s the biggest indication to a home office to tell them that, hey, this thing is real. So a lot of people buy stuff and let it sit on the shelf. The real key is to adopt it. I thought there was really something interesting about TurboTax that I learned.

There was a recurring theme between all these different projects that he created. Technology that touches the consumer, okay, but allows them to get access to information in real time when they want it, but also allows them to get something done. So not strictly a portal of, hey, here’s some information when you want it. No, that’s good enough. But I can actually do something. PayPal ability to move money same day, real time money management was really novel at the time. And yet it’s still applicable today. I used it twice this week already. Myself and TurboTax allowed you to solve a critical pain, not something you would wanna do, but something you have to do.

And that’s a real interesting insight as to why so many people actually don’t do financial planning even though they should do it. It’s because they don’t have to do it and they’ve got such a huge time horizon. I’ll do it next week or next month or next year or never. And that’s really interesting why we need a human catalyst to help them do the planning of what they should do. That’s a really good point. And I just think about even things I use day to day, portals that are static and don’t let me do anything as a consumer, eh. m. on Sunday morning as I’m sipping my coffee.

Valuable. Super valuable, right? And so I think that’s a great point. If you’re looking at your tech stack, maybe that’s one of those filters as I asked him about is, does your tech give your consumer at least some control or power to get something done without you in it? Awesome. All right, well, let’s talk about what advisors can actually do in their process. We’ve written down a couple of notes for all of you. Here’s what you can actually put into action. The first thing I came up with is his statement clearly, own the front office, delegate the back office to tech and to team, get out of the weeds, use tech for what it’s intended to, but own the front office.

Don’t just ignore it, like we said. What else do you got? Yeah, I like that. I would add one thing is show your clients, we talked about this before, show them that you have all this tech and why you’re using it. Don’t have to show them how the sausage is made, but show them that you are making the sausage. There you go. You have sausage hanging across your entire back office next to your trophies and your awards. It better be really cold in your office. So it doesn’t spoil you, man. I can’t imagine that graphic of all the sausages hanging like you’re in the Bruno Brothers in South Philadelphia.

Oh, someone needs to do it. Cheese and meat shop. You want charcuterie with your mutual fund? That’s pretty funny. That sounds good. Yeah, all right. You’ve been getting something done. I like that. Well, as we talked about, the secret is get the information in the hands of the consumer so they can do something. We talked about that. Tech without people, we don’t want tech without people because I think what do I take away from this? We want tech with people. The sweet spot is when you have the two together, the front back office analogy, however you want to think about it. One thing that you wrote here that I’m gonna steal from you that I like, don’t schedule your customer.

Let them schedule you. Oh, yeah. I like that. Again, that’s kind of the getting things done. For my firm, we have on our website a form that you can use to contact us, but also a Calendly link. You can book a time right off the bat. Same in the email signature. So now I feel like- Boy, that is getting something done. Good, I got something done. Maybe I’m not meeting my advisor tomorrow morning, but I know it’s on the books now for the next week. I feel good. I’m making progress towards something I gotta get taken care of. Absolutely. I was trying to figure out how to create more deadlines and maybe the fact that typically financial planners schedule, let’s say, an ongoing half-year, full-year, quarterly year meeting actually creates the expectation that you’re gonna meet.

But I think it’s true. Most of the people have adopted tools like Schedule Ones, Calendly, HubSpot to try to facilitate getting on the calendar and getting together. We really need to be mindful of that. So definitely pre-scheduling all your inspection moments in the financial planning world keeps people accountable and intentional on their time, but also allow people to episodically get involved and do something. If you’re gonna provide technology, allow them to actually do something with it. I think that’s important. And look, and it was really cool all this culmination of a lot of his experiences is coming together in a book that’s coming out actually right about now.

So you can go check that out. His book, we’ll put the show notes, some links to it as soon as it is available. I think that’ll be a great practice management. Remember, a lot of advisors are providing these books to their clients. Those clients are reading them. If you haven’t read them, you might be actually out of the loop. So make sure you check these things out and make sure you’re knowledgeable about tax management, both the simple and the obscure stuff so that when the client asks, you look credible. Well, what I also like about, we haven’t read his book yet, but it seems that it’s not like so crazy technically where you have to be a CPA to read it because we’re all gonna put that book down or at least most of it as well.

Just like our 80 page financial plan. Exactly, right? You’re gonna read that? No. No. The advisor is gonna read the 80 page plan. The compliance team reads it. That’s who reads it. That’s probably the only one. That’s why it’s 80 pages. That’s why it’s 80 pages. Well, that was just really great having him on. Fascinating pasts accomplished quite a bit and just really great having his insights and guidance almost, if you will, about what people should be thinking about now. Pretty cool stuff, man. Yeah, thanks, Bill. That was great. Cool. So we have a community question and this came in because of something I’ve actually been dealing with in the last couple of weeks.

And I think this is probably gonna, I don’t know, am I ruffling your feathers? Or at least it’s something you are an expert on. But I’ll keep this anonymous. Let’s put it this way. But I am working with an advisor who is asking about different planning tools, engagement tools they can use with their customers, clients. And they were asking about how many different tools should I use and so forth. And it begged a bigger conversation. Well, what are you trying to do? Well, this same thing does this over here really well, but it doesn’t do all the things I need where this other one has this one extra thing.

And what really occurred to me and it made me flash back to my early days selling life insurance was I asked the advisor, I’m like, are you trying to get all these different tech things or this new tech thing to replace this old one because you need the tech to sell your advice and solution or is there something else? Because back in my earlier life insurance days, there was a lot of agents that would bring this 40 page illustration and expect the illustration to close the deal. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. You, the advisor, are what closes the deal. You are the advisor that brings the value, the engagement, the advice, the deep listening and all of that.

So you’re almost trying to replace yourself with this other tech thing you want to buy that you don’t actually need. So I guess what I’m asking Adam is, do you see that with asset map users? Do you see sometimes this thing happening because there’s no secret about it. I love asset map. I’ve been using it for years. I don’t need anything else. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on this because you’re much deeper into this than I am. Okay. So I didn’t expect this question, but it’s interesting how Bill just spent 20 minutes talking about how we should use technology to facilitate greater human involvement so that the humans spend their time doing the most valuable work.

And I think the history you just talked about was we all grew up in a world of sales enablement. We used financial planning and those large illustrations of technical prowess to prove that the conclusion we made, which was that we should manage the money, we should manage the premium, we should manage the annuity flow, whatever it was that we were monetizing, we should manage that because look how smart we are. And I’m not saying that our analysis was nonsense. Analysis was actually some of the best stuff and it’s really impacted the entire industry to move towards a financial planning mindset. But I gotta say that in many ways, we knew the client is not gonna read this.

They were looking for evidence that we had done the work to justify the recommendation, even though they didn’t inspect it in many cases. And so we got used to this idea that we needed to do a massive analysis to justify the action. When the reality is that that analysis, Derek, is there to build our confidence that our recommendation actually serves the client. And that technology, that analysis should remain in the back office with the analysts that made it. It was never intended to be a front-facing client engagement and literacy tool. And it didn’t work that way. We all know that, because the clients never read the 80 page report.

I mean, maybe one of them did, right? And then they found something wrong on page 40 and you were like, well, I never even got that far either. We’ll rerun it for you. It was easy to forgive it because it was like handing in a book report with spelling errors and nobody knew. I’m not saying people delivered bad work. What I’m saying is that the intention has changed, Derek. The higher the net worth client you deal with, the more sophisticated client you deal with that understands money. They do not want to see that report. It is insulting that you put an 80 page report in front of them.

What they need is clarity and simplicity. And in today’s age, one of the things that has become pretty consistent in this attention deficit world, is that very few of us have the time, energy, and patience to really focus on anything complicated. We want and expect our trusted professionals to make it easier for us to make a decision. And that is why AssetMap has been so effective. The irony behind it and why you’re effective with it is because you have the confidence, not the tool has the confidence. Exactly, exactly. That’s what I was trying to say. You just said it a hell of a lot. I just said it in a longer sentence to say the very mic drop, which is that.

You used a hundred words where two would have done. That’s right, why not? I actually asked ChatGBT to turn my two words into a hundred words. And then I had to use my own voice to say that to you. I wish that would be pretty scary. That would be kind of scary. Actually, we can do that, which is pretty scary. But I think the funny thing here is this. As AssetMap, just to talk a little bit about what we’re focusing on, we know that our advisors want more robust analysis and we’re building it. We’re building it because the key though is everyone listening right now has to think this.

What is more important, that I engage with my human advice and empathy and then show them I can support any technical analysis I have in the back office? Sure, we can do that work. Or is it more important for me to show them all the technical analysis and then leave a little time for human empathy? I think the where we’re going, Derek, and I know you agree with me in a sense, is that the human element and engagement is what matters and what they’re paying for. I don’t need you to show me all the details, leave the MRI at home, bring the X-ray and show me where we’re gonna make the cuts.

And that’s gonna be, I think, really the key. And I think that’s where a lot of financial planning tools are missing the boat and still selling the same old sauce we’ve used for 20 years for a problem that has evolved past them. You know, that’s it, that’s the mic drop. The problem has evolved and that’s exactly right. And so you need a technology solution that understands that. And I mean, this isn’t a long commercial here for AssetMap. You understand this space extremely well, given what you guys do there. But let’s face it, Bill just spent 20 minutes talking about it. Almost every guest we’ve had on in the last two plus years has talked about the human element and empathy and all of these things.

So it’s not just us, there is something here that people need to be paying attention to. So I appreciate that. Thank you for kind of digging in and explaining that. Hopefully the advisor that I was having this discussion with will listen, I’m gonna make him listen. And then we’ll get some insight from him. Awesome, all right. Well, that was fun. I really appreciate everything that Bill had to say there. It was really a great honor to be able to interview him. And I know he’s made such a big impact in our space. So thank you for all you’ve done that’s impacted millions of people, if not hundreds of millions of people.

And certainly billions of dollars, if not trillions, which is just amazing to have an individual who’s making that kind of impact across tax, investment and planning. That’s pretty amazing. And banking, don’t forget that. That’s really impactful. So thanks for everything he’s doing. With that, Derek, as always, a pleasure spending time with you. Likewise, my friend, good seeing you. To all our listeners, thank you very much. We appreciate as always, make sure to share this episode, subscribe, five-star reviews. We are still accepting those, I think, right? I think we’re only those, that’s right. And go be with the ones that you love and we’ll see you on the next one.

That’s right, happy holidays, everybody. Yeah, buddy. 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.