Ep 62: Financial Advice in the convenience economy featuring Jamie Hopkins

Episode 62 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (37:58)

Episode 62 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

Jamie Hopkins joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to argue that the experience economy advisors spent years building for has been replaced by a convenience economy. Holt is candid about his own investment in the old model, describing an office built around a conference room with a barista, designed to impress clients who then had to travel in order to reach it. The pandemic ended that arrangement, and what clients pay for now is friction removal rather than atmosphere. Hopkins names the three services clients increasingly want bundled together, which are tax planning, estate planning with trust services, and banking. The most revealing exchange concerns why advisors do not ask about things like property and casualty coverage or digital assets, and the answer is uncomfortable. They were never trained on them and cannot monetize them.

What this episode covers

• The shift from an experience economy to a convenience economy, and what ended the first
• What clients pay for once atmosphere stops being part of the transaction
• Tax planning, estate planning with trusts, and banking as the bundle clients want
• Why advisors skip whole categories of planning they were never trained to monetize
• Digital assets as a question almost no client has ever been asked

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 convenience economy and why should advisors care? Convenience economy. So this is an interesting idea that came up in a conversation that we had with Jamie Hopkins. And what I always remembered about the experience economy because I have a whole series that I’ve done speaking recently about this topic is about the expectations of our customers, probably even ourselves, that when we pay for something, we’re looking to the experience we actually have as being pleasurable or pain reducing.

And ideally it’s pain reducing because that’s well more motivating. But the reason why it’s very clear is companies like Starbucks and Disney and the airline companies have been very intentional about the experience that they create for their customers that becomes coveted. But what did we have? We had a pandemic, it destroyed our in-person experiences and now all of a sudden we started moving into this convenience economy more than anything. So that’s really what I think describes this concept of a convenience economy. What has been your experience during that? As an advisor, as an advisor. Yeah, I mean, as an advisor especially that has invested in tech to use with my clients, let me get stuff done.

Give me a great experience that solves my problem quickly so I can get back to the things that I wanna do outside of that. Make it easy for me. Give me a great convenience factor to get stuff done. And I did the whole experience thing, man. I bought a big office building, big conference table, coffee maker, all this stuff, right? A coffee maker, that’s good. Yeah, you know, what else? A good coffee maker. You mean not just the Keurig with the cake cups? No, no, we had a barista right there. We had a barista. Very cool. Well, you know, like that was the thing we all did.

And you had your people come into your office and you showed them around and you introduced them to your staff because it was a great experience. It was not convenient for them at all. Not really. Even for the advisor, not really that convenient because it’s expensive. It’s a lot of work to put that together and so forth. So I’m a big fan of convenience. I mean, you and I both went remote over a decade ago and there’s been a lot of conveniences from that as well. I still pay for my office space just in the one off chance that somebody wants to come in. But you’re right, I think the experience economy, what’s important about that is that I know for the two of us, we invested in digital experiences.

So when the pandemic hit, we were already ready for that kind of experience and our clients were already acclimated to doing almost everything over remote screen share. And of course our presentations got really thin because we didn’t have the capacity to print out 80 pages to put in front of them. And so we learned how to actually do this. But I think what’s interesting about this is that the demands of the financial advisor are clearly expanding and clients want more from this value proposition which actually talks to how fast can you get it done and how easy is it for me to get it done in a single place.

So we’re seeing a lot of consolidation and when Jamie had the opportunity to talk about this, I think this was eyeopening and I would look forward to sharing what Jamie said here. Who is Jamie? Tell us who Jamie is for those of you who don’t know this dude. Well, you can certainly find him on LinkedIn. He’s got a great profile there, an enormous number of followers. He’s got Alphabet Soup behind his name. He’s an attorney, a tax attorney, a CFP, CHFC, CLU of course, and an RICP. He was actually one of the original founders of the RICP program at American College where he was a professor there.

He was recently at Carson Wealth and he just moved over as the CEO of Bryn Mawr Capital Management which is an RIA effectively tied to a bank. That’s here in Philadelphia. It’s really, really wealthy bank with high net worth individuals. We met with him and had him on the podcast briefly from Wealth Stack last year. He had started the FinServe Foundation which was an attempt to provide mentorship removing barriers to getting individuals that don’t normally get into our business into the profession. And of course, besides being an avid runner and athlete, he was one of our inaugural Necker Island participants for Rebel Dads. So we had the opportunity to talk about some of this stuff and said, hey, we got to get you on the podcast.

So that’s who Jamie is, just an unbelievable spirit. And I think you’ll appreciate his energy here. Definitely, he’s a great guy. I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say. Let’s jump into it. Jamie, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Given your history and experience, what is your unique perspective of the financial advice market? Yeah, thanks for having me on, Derek, Adam. Good to see you, my friend. And yeah, one of the things I’ve been really kind of kicking around lately about the industry is just how much of a strategic convergence we’ve had. And this is going to sound a little dismissive of all the firms that think they’re unique but I think firms look more alike today than they ever have since I’ve been in this business.

The tech stacks have gotten more similar. The marketing websites pretty much all look the same even though a lot of the boats have come off of them. They look the same. I don’t see a lot of differentiation in the services. I mean, it comes down to the individuals connecting with clients today. But when you’re looking at the firms, they look more alike than they ever have in this industry, even some of the silos between insurance and investment management, broker dealers, independent RIAs. It’s really hard for me to tell the difference anymore on where somebody sits. I think that’s one of the biggest changes. But what happens to industry when they all converge to one spot?

People find ways to get away from that. So that’s what I see is coming next or who’s going to differentiate out of this just strategic convergence. That’s interesting. Cause I think we’re seeing that as well. Everybody’s trying to adopt the tech. They’re all using the same kind of technology. It’s really hard to differentiate. And we’re glad to see that there’s been a big initiative towards the human role in advice delivery these days. So what do you think is the missing opportunity then that advisors are just not addressing? Well, I think the missing opportunity is people aren’t unique from the person sitting next to them. That you look out here, I’m in Philadelphia area too, like you, Adam, and you drive down the main line, which is this road that runs outside of Philadelphia.

You’ll pass 50 wealth firms and they all say they basically do the same thing, investments and advice. And they probably are using one of two to three technology platforms that the other three are using. They don’t have very many differentiated services. Now, you have the human advice aspect. I think that can be differentiated service. I also think, while more firms are doing this, tax planning is one. If you look at one of the biggest gaps between what clients are saying they want and what they’re receiving is that ability to file taxes and do tax planning. The other two, actually the single biggest gap, Samantha Russell shares that chart a lot on the biggest gaps.

If you actually look, the two biggest gaps are estate planning with trust services and banking services. That’s because everybody broke away from all these more historic institutions that used to serve in that capacity. RIAs, somebody told me 6% of RIAs have access to banking services today. So 94% of them can’t compete in that market. Well, that’s a big gap for clients. So do you steer into that? Where I am today, it’s trustee services. And what I realized when I talked to advisors, most advisors don’t understand trust very well anymore. If you think about CFP world, they don’t teach a lot of trust. I mean, you get a very cursory overview.

You don’t know how to use delegated versus directed trust. I think there’s a huge opportunity to say, what are those pieces I wanna add to my firm when I look at what clients are looking for? Is it tax filing? Is it trust services? Is it creating a relationship on the banking side? You saw Apple try to do that this past year. They tried to get it in that market. And I think that’s a disruptive space moving forward. Interesting how you talk about how all these firms look the same and we’ve had this convergence and now there’s opportunities for sure. If I’m an advisor listening to this conversation right now, what are two, three things that maybe I can do to address this opportunity that’s right in front of us?

Yeah, don’t start with the client. It’s figure out what your clients want, what they need. I think a lot of advisors assume wrongfully so that they’re taking full care of their clients. I remember meeting with one of the large custodians back in the day and their gauge was that most advisors working with them had somewhere between 20 to 30% of the client’s wallet share. And they had a very good view of the client’s total assets. And they said, we get advisors that walk in here and tell us, oh, we have 100% of our clients wallet shares. They’re looking on the backend saying, well, I could show to you that we’re holding 30% more than you offer and that you just don’t have that.

So there’s a lot of assumption that you’re working with the client, you’re doing planning, you’ve captured everything. It’s just not the case. I mean, it’s one of the things that asset map has been able to show over the years too, right? There’s these other things out there you probably do not have yet. And then figure out what services do they want? Some clients are gonna want that one-stop shop where, hey, look, do my tax filing for me. My CPA retired, I don’t have another option anymore. I also think we’re entering in the convenience economy. You’ve heard a lot of people probably talk about that in the last two years.

We very briefly, I don’t know how short of a time period it feels like it was now, went into the experience economy and everything was gonna be an experience. And really COVID kind of shut down experience economy like overnight. It was like, best of luck, don’t come in my office. I don’t care what the wall looked like anymore. People were thinking about the stuff they put on their shelves and giving cookies out and then nobody comes in anymore and that went away. And so they’re not paying for that experience. They’re paying for something else. And I really do believe that when I think about my money, I wanna be able to move it seamlessly within one organization or out of that organization if I need to.

And so if I’m thinking about my experience, I wanna be able to sit there in one year, be like, you know what? I do want you to file my taxes and hit a button and then you start generating my tax return for me. So I think that’s, when I look at opportunity, how do you steer into the convenience economy, understand your clients, what they’re looking for. I don’t think RIAs and advisors should try to solve all those problems. So I think you need to, as you talk about in any world, do you buy it, do you build it, do you partner? So you have to figure those out.

Some of those might just be referrals, like estate planning attorneys. You’re not gonna go hire an estate planning attorney, set up a law firm, start writing documents, most situations. You find your network, you refer out. Banking services, trust services, those are probably the same conversations. You’re probably not starting a bank and probably not getting a trust charter unless you’re a national aggregator, very large firm. And even in those cases, you look at some of the largest ones out there, they don’t, maybe they got a national trust charter or they get a South Dakota. They’re unlikely to have all the solutions out there. Some states have gotten really hard.

Delaware just doesn’t really give out trust charters anymore, they really locked it down. So those became really difficult to get. There’s only a handful of national players still left in that market, but it’s still the best state for trust for a high net worth client. And so you have to find partners there. I think technology, there was a brief period of time where advisors were saying, we’re gonna build tech, it’s gonna be differentiated. I think that’s tampered down a lot. My experience at Carson was at first we were gonna be a builder of tech, now we’re an integrator of tech, right? And especially my role here at Bryn Mawr, I’m like, we shouldn’t try to build tech.

We have to integrate tech and find good tech partners and maybe they integrate it, but that’s what we’re doing now. We’re getting out of the building of tech space. And I think most advisors spend wasted energy if they’re trying to build new tech solutions for the most part. Now some hit it big, but most, I think it’s wasted effort. You shared a lot of perspectives on this. And obviously we know you’re very prolific in terms of the social media strategy and really love to see a lot of the snippets that you put up on a screen, really authentic. And I think a great example of how advisors can also connect with their audiences.

I hope people get a chance to watch you there and connect with you or follow you on this. We’re curious, we often offer our guests to share something that really needs to be rethought of in the industry. Is there anything you think this whole industry needs to be debating or hear about? Yeah, I mean, I probably could go on for days on this one, but I’ll do one that I just covered recently. And it’s, I think it’s kind of resurfaced for me. And I’ve talked about digital estate planning and I just did a video on this, think advisor just covered it. But I wrote about this back in, I think 2010 was my first article on digital estate planning.

And it was just coming into fruition. There actually weren’t state laws on this yet, but one of the interesting things that happened back then is there was the Uniform Law Commission passed something called RFATA. Then, well, yeah, that’s the second one, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Asset Act. We have a version of that. I know it rolls right off the tongue, Adam. You’re like, man, that’s a good one. And we have a version of that here in Pennsylvania, but I think maybe two states didn’t adopt it or a version of it, but pretty much everywhere has it. And what that says is all this digital asset stuff.

So your social media, I joke about your dating profile, right? So your online dating profile, your Tinder account, whatever it is. All those things are these digital assets, your blogs, now technology. There’s a lot of value, your photos, your videos, your websites. And if you read the terms of service of most of those agreements, they say you actually don’t own that asset, you have a lifetime lease to it. Now, the challenge for that is you might’ve set it up improperly when you started, you put it in a personal account even though you’re running a business, you die. Your business has no right to that asset.

That’s a shock to some people. It could even just be like your bank account. You set that up personally, you die. Your business does not have legal access to that bank account. They might have illegal rights to the underlying assets, but they don’t actually own the account. And so that creates a lot of hurdles out there in the estate planning world. The reality is I talked a lot about that. I went out and did the speaking circuit on that back in like 2010 to 2013. I kind of shifted what I found on the last year. com, came over here to Bryn Mawr Trust. I’m looking at trust documents, wills.

And I’m shocked by how few of them have been updated. Advisors don’t talk about that much with their clients at all and that they’re not very well-informed on it. I don’t have data points to say how ill-formed advisors are, but I interact with a lot of advisors and I can tell you, I don’t think, but a handful could tell me what RUFADA stands for. And it’s directing your businesses, that’s your estate planning. So all that stuff is out of date and you really do need better people to be reviewing your trust, your will, all those documents. And I think that’s a liability issue for a lot of people out there today because as advisors, I’ve become more that quarterback of the relationships.

When these things are wrong, when they’re looking at wills and dissecting them and talking about that, which CFP says get involved with the estate planning process. And these documents are inaccurate now because state law dictates now how you should put language into those documents. Anything past like 2015 that hasn’t been updated isn’t complying really with any of the current state legal standards. So that’s a huge issue and it’s not being talked much about today. And I always take that perspective if I’m an attorney suing advisors, that’s one I feel like I could start going after people here in the next couple of years because we are gonna see people die with significant digital assets of value where the estate plan was inadequate.

What a great, great way to kind of end that conversation with like this almost massive problem that no one’s talking about. Was this on your radar, that last thing especially that he mentioned before talking or hearing what he had to say? The digital assets came up a couple of years ago when another one of our partners really brought this up and said the universal approach to this state by state is really, really fragmented and that there’s not clear understanding when we just flip through the two terms of use when we sign up for any account, like I’m sure we all read those 18 pages of terms of use before we hit accept.

And it says basically what he’s saying in many cases and there’s very difficult access especially with multi-factor authentication, MFA, everybody’s enabling, which means you have to have physical possession of your phone or some kind of code to get in. How is our family or our successive business managers when we’re incapacitated actually going to get into all of these assets that they rely upon and have significant value in? I think that’s a really big problem, Derek. Really big problem, especially for, I mean, there’s been all this talk, you have to have a website, you have to have social media, you have to have a blog, email, newsletters.

There’s been this massive push of creating digital reputations, I guess, digital footprints to market yourself. Totally. But we forgot to protect it as an asset, kind of important. Well, it’s funny, there’s so many people using LastPass and other types of password management systems, but I think also those could get locked if there’s any discrepancy at all around the estate. So I know that many people have shared logins to different types of tools. They signed up with their personal junk email account because they didn’t want to get spammed, and now they’re using that in their company and now you’ve got real company assets on there. So it begs the question for financial advisors who might be doing this personally, right?

They might actually be doing this themselves or their staff. Is what about the clients? Are we bringing up this as a potential calamity that can be avoided in the financial planning process? I would guess not. It’s probably not happening a lot in conversations, but what a cool way, we’ll get into this here now, but Jamie talks about how do you differentiate? What are your value add services? Do you really know what your clients want and need? And sometimes we all know as a good advisor does is that we have to help our clients crystallize what they want and need, right? They haven’t maybe articulated it necessarily.

As a part of that process is asking the question, what have you done with your digital assets? I’m guessing most clients will be like, what do you mean? It’s a great point. I mean, most of our clients don’t, they tend to come to a financial advisor because they wanna make sure they can retire and not run out of money, right? That is 90% of the motivation. They get to a point where there’s a high cost of being wrong and they don’t wanna mess it up, but they don’t know the questions to ask, right? They’re the basics, legal, tax, insurance, investment, but I think most advisors haven’t had the outlet so they don’t talk about it.

It’s the same thing I tend to see in our communities. We enabled property and casualty and asset map. 99% of the advisors don’t even ask the question about property and casualty. Do you know why that is? Because they were never trained on it and they don’t monetize it. They don’t make money selling it. So it’s one of those things that hasn’t hit the radar of the quote unquote holistic financial planner for the most part because they don’t actually do that business. Now I think if advisors did have a way to solve the problem associated with tax or with legal or with these insurances that get ignored or maybe banking, as Jamie said, if we had those outlets formalized, we might be more inclined on a confidence basis to bring them up.

I think so. I think we would because there’s so many things that we have to remember to talk about and dive into with our clients. You know, though, if a client comes to you with the retirement question or college planning or whatever it is, obviously you’re gonna help them with that, but they’re not gonna maybe necessarily remember you owing and awing them by answering the question they came to you with. But if you say as part of that conversation, oh, by the way, what have you done about your digital assets? Now you are providing value. Now you are differentiating and probably not talking about what the other potential advisors that are interviewing are bringing up.

And people are always looking for what comes with this relationship. Like, I know I’m gonna get retirement planning, but what else are you gonna do for me? How are you gonna sweeten this? How are you gonna, you know, are you bringing bread to the table before I have my steak? You know, are you gonna give me the little extras that I’m looking for that are gonna make this a memorable experience? Yeah. Sorry, you bring up an interesting point because being thoughtful to what people’s needs are before they even express those needs is a classic move of empathy that we know advisors are usually generally aware of.

But I think it’s interesting. You just brought up a challenge, which is I know on the asset map, we don’t generally tend to put digital assets as an asset, so it doesn’t get brought up. What if we were to start that on our calendars, on our agendas, on our financial planning platforms and saying, by the way, what’s the plan with the digital asset? Is there an exit plan here that makes sense, is documented, and it’s not gonna cause a total mess? And what is the fallout to an advisor who doesn’t bring that up and now the beneficiaries are saying, wait a minute, you didn’t protect dad’s Bitcoin account?

You didn’t mention that he needs to have a wallet that has some kind of backend security that can get to it so the beneficiaries can get to it? I mean, there’s a lot of people that have lost true digital assets, NFTs, cryptocurrencies. Oh yeah, because yeah, it’s a job. Does the advisor know what to do with it? No, he doesn’t bring it up because he doesn’t typically do those things. But he doesn’t need to as long as it’s there. I mean, think about it, if I’m looking at my asset map in this example, and now there’s a section that has, whether it’s crypto or it could be social media accounts or like, there’s a lot of people who are using Substack.

I have clients that make quite a bit of money every year off of Substack subscriptions. That’s a neutral asset. Why would, it’s like a paid email newsletter. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, so why is that not like, shouldn’t that be listed? It’s an asset, right? It’s true, it should be. And it should be on there because if something happens to you and now we don’t know it’s an asset or we don’t know how to access it. So there’s- Interesting. Yeah, so there’s, I think that would be pretty cool to see on an asset map type of thing and talk about a value add conversation and getting truly comprehensive.

And as Jamie says, really getting to know your clients. That’s huge. I’ve got this LinkedIn thing that I’m doing and I’m starting to wonder like, that’s worth something, but like, where is that listed? How does someone get access to it? So true, so true. Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things that I thought he brought up, which were really, really important. And I thought the point about differentiation is becoming clearer and clearer. I think advisors have been, I don’t want to say ignorant to this stuff, but basically, I guess ignoring is the same thing. What’s a nicer word for that? Right, what’s a nicer word for ignorance?

Well, what I’m trying to get at Derek is that I think most advisors are really, we’ll call it resting on their laurels that they’ve been delivering enough value and relationship and performance in some regard or good enough performance with some level of transparency and the client really basically puts a lot of the weight on the relationship currency that they have with the advisor and doesn’t necessarily question the values and services that have been provided because they have a relationship. It goes way beyond delivery of service. The big reckoning, of course, we all know about is about to happen in this wealth transfer, not only between generation one to two, but really generation one to spouse who’s not been involved and doesn’t have the relationship currency and their kids have relationship with a direct robo or some kind of outlet that’s going to deliver more value per cost.

So I think we’re really seeing the need to deliver these kinds of services so that we create stickiness. No question, it makes me think of a client I had an analogy here. So I had a client years ago who owned the old school video rental store. You walked in, you rented your VHS or your DVD and for years they were killing it, but they went out of business because of the Netflix type of situations. People still wanted to watch movies, but how they interacted and no matter how close those relationships were with this business owner, people like convenience. And Jamie talks about the convenience economy that we have now.

And so you can still have the great relationship, but maybe you should add some convenience and update your entire way of doing business. Otherwise you might be one of those is left to history because of this convergence that he’s talking about. It’s true. And many advisors, I don’t think really care so much because they’re going to retire and they’re going to either monetize or sell their business and they’re going to move on. But the reality is we need to start thinking if we’re going to actually pretend to do 20 year plans for our clients and what their burn down is going to look like and where the money is going to come from and hey, that’s financial planning today is that massive retirement analysis.

What’s your role? When do you exit that plan? Are you exiting at their age 74? Are you going to be still involved when they’re 82? And if this is really going to be a cohesive plan, you got to seriously think about who is the succession of their tour guide when you decide to retire. That should be a conversation we should be having with our clients because there’s a risk that there’s a driverless bus at the time that they’re 85 and now they got to go find another relationship. Is that really looking out for their best interests on the entire journey? I don’t think so. No.

So that’s, we have to contemplate that one too. Well, here’s the question and this actually goes back to a post that in some interaction I had with Samantha Russell and some interesting data that she put out there on LinkedIn and you mentioned this just now if advisors are resting on their laurels and we keep saying, oh, this great wealth transfer over the next 20 years. If I’m in my mid forties or older as an advisor, do I really care? Because by the time this wealth transfer really gets underway and everything’s happening, I’m really about ready to retire anyways. So do I care? I don’t know.

Do I have a fiduciary duty to care? I don’t know. And maybe I just want to keep playing golf and not make changes because I like my laurels. But maybe the opportunity is, is at least bring in a younger advisor so there’s some kind of succession or continuity plan that you can help your clients with. I don’t know. That’s a tough one though, Adam, because I’m 50 years old and I’m out in the next 10, 15 years. Yeah, but isn’t the argument that most advisors make that we’re thinking about the best interests of our clients? Well, they do. They do all day long, but then show me your actions.

And if the average age of an advisor is in the 50s and we’re not doing all the things we’re talking about, what did you say at one of our other ones? Show me where your money goes and I’ll tell you what’s important to you. Yeah. Show me your balance sheet. I’ll tell you what’s important to you. Or your budget or your income statement or your calendar actually, I’ll tell you. That’s what Richard said. So I think that where you’re spending your time money is clearly indicative of what you’re investing in, what you care about actively or passively. And I think that that’s an interesting question to ask ourselves.

What are some of the things that you picked up from Jamie’s talk before we get to takeaways? Well, I liked that he was talking about the top three things that clients are looking for today. And part of that is this convenience over experience economy, but specifically he mentioned about tax planning, which is interesting because we just had Bill Harrison a couple months ago talk all about that. And then estate planning with trust services and banking services. And this is stuff that Samantha Russell actually, who’s also been on our podcast has published about. So it’s interesting that people are looking for almost what appears to be a more bundled approach, which maybe that goes back to convenience.

I don’t know. I mean, would you subscribe to if there was, I’m just guessing like if there was a fix Netflix slash popcorn subscription, would you do that? You mean just to get popcorn? Yeah, right. Like I can bundle it. Like I want both. If I can get it in one place instead of two. That would be pretty interesting. You mean like watch when you hit it Netflix, it says, would you like popcorn by the intermission and somebody from Grubhub just delivers it? Think about it, right? Yeah. Kind of an interesting idea. We should probably copyright that or something. I don’t think that’s gonna work.

I think I’m gonna hit the pause button. I’m gonna go to my pantry and put this in the microwave and I’m gonna have the popcorn I want. Maybe that’s a bad example. But you understand, I thought that was really interesting that people are looking for these things that are tangential to the work that we tend to do. We don’t talk a lot about though. I think I’m pretty much convinced myself listening to this conversation that advisors won’t talk about it until they can monetize it. And when they monetize it and they know there’s a reason for them to talk about it from a business standpoint, then they will start talking about it all day long with Verber, right?

And all of a sudden now gonna be like a, you know, all on it. And it may not actually be monetized from the form of referrals. Let’s say if I refer to a bank or refer or take a rev share back from some other professional, maybe it’s just by charging a fee and say in the fee, we are going to talk about these eight things that I don’t typically let’s say monetize the business. Increase your financial planning charge. But show the other things you’re gonna do that no one else is talking about. Exactly. And I know with several advisors that have moved to this and have been doing it for years and charge that tends to be in the higher net worth market that tends to afford it.

And I’ll spend another five to 10,000 a year to have a financial coach consultant actually ask me these questions and expose where I can hit the ball better. And I think that even when I’m a great player, I wanna know exactly I can make one small little change to my stance in sports or otherwise that can just affect my game with a huge magnitude. And I think that we’re seeing, I would think we’d see even more interest in this on the financial planning side. And so it’s an opportunity for advisors to actually sell these services or sell the awareness or coaching. While providing all that extra value people are looking for at the same time.

Yeah. Anything else that Jamie mentioned that struck you as interesting? I thought it was interesting. He made the comment, now that he’s part of a bank and he has a relationship with a bank as a CEO of their RAA, it is true a lot of financial advisors have no relationship to a bank unless you’re part of a wire house that has a connectivity to a bank. And what that basically means is that you don’t have lending services typically unless there’s some outlet for it. You can’t securitize portfolios easily unless you have some connection to a bank. Mortgages is always a question. So it’s true. There’s a huge financial pillar that is part of our institutions, legal, tax, insurance, investment and banking.

And a lot of financial advisors don’t actually have a formal relationship. So I thought that was interesting because we obviously a lot of banks get into the greater wealth management space more and more. Begs the question, why doesn’t every financial advisor have a relationship with a bank? Because they’re not getting monetized. That’s probably right. It goes back to your point, right? Yeah. That’s right. They’re thinking they’re competing. That could be an interesting issue. They’re competing, but I believe this is what Jamie and they’re doing over Bryn Mawr Trust is that they have open architecture. They’ll do the trustee services over there without actually having to manage the assets.

That’s right. And that’s pretty cool. So that would be something to consider. Anyways, we can keep jamming on this all day long. We know that this all comes back to monetization. It’s a business, right? It’s a business. We show up because we’re employed. So what are the takeaways that you took from this experience today? Definitely don’t ignore your digital assets. That one probably resonated with me the most. It is a major estate planning consideration that people are not talking about. Even the little things like, did you buy that website URL in your name or a business name? Good one. I mean, I’ve used GoDaddy for a lot of this stuff.

GoDaddy will send me emails saying, hey, the URL blah, blah, blah that you own could be worth this, right? And that’s because people do buy and sell those and cyber squat and all that kind of stuff. So there is some value there. So how do you own that asset? So I think that was a really big one that definitely resonated with me. And then the other one was, is advisors can’t do everything when it comes to differentiating. You don’t need to build your own technologies inside. I would argue that this could be the same for enterprises. For any of you folks that work at a larger institution at the home office, pay attention.

You don’t need to build it yourself. You can do some of the things yourself, but there’s nothing wrong with buying a third party integration or outsourcing your solution entirely. I really thought that was an interesting, and advisors can do the exact same thing. Absolutely. I mean, to that point, for what it’s worth, institutions, enterprises that are buying software and try to build it themselves, they forget that the whole point of having an enterprise level software is you need to continuously invest in it and innovate and come up with new concepts. And most of these institutions fund the project like it’s a one-time project. And then they’re surprised that they’re gonna put in millions of dollars every year and year to try to innovate or just keep it going.

And it becomes the legacy technology that the next executive team is pissed off with. It is so true. We see it all the time. Let’s just be careful with that one. Yeah, we can build that. Yes. Do what you’re great at. And the same thing is true for advisors, as you’ve already said, right? That doesn’t mean everyone needs to go out and get a property casualty license, a banking charter, a trust services. No. Buy a tax preparation company. But we do know some RIAs that are doing that. They are literally going out and they’re buying law firms. They’re buying tax practices and they’re integrating this in their services because they wanna compete at a whole nother level.

But I think the real thing goes back to one of our earlier podcasts about building a dream team, a fantasy football team. Who are the people and the firms that you want on your referral network that you have actually either formal or informal business sharing capabilities so you can usher someone and you trust to the relationship who’s gonna help clients get it done. I would say one of the bigger challenges, we can tell our clients to go get a tax attorney or do their trust and will documents and they just don’t do it. And unless we basically dog it on it and basically make sure they get it done, sometimes the most important role we can play is just, hey, can we GSD?

Can we get stuff done? We’re almost playing the role of like a convenience facilitator. That’s what Jamie said, we’re looking for convenience anyways. If as an advisor, I can help you get the things that I can’t personally do, but I can make it really easy for you to get them. Ooh, that’s cool. That’s valuable. I like that. Oh, that’s cool. So you can say like I have a financial convenience store. Sure. I don’t know what you would call it. You need a snazzier name than that. We probably do. Awesome. Thank you so much to Jamie for being part of this podcast, an original Rebel Dads attendee.

So that was really cool to see him again. And also for all the insight he’s done at American college and all the different places he’s invested in our community, really appreciate what he’s doing. Definitely want to check out all of his community stuff that he’s putting out there on LinkedIn, really good educational stuff. Yeah, great conversation. And it’s opened up like a bigger topic all around just estate planning for the masses. So Jamie, thanks to Tom, really appreciate it. Remember, you heard something today, put it into motion, think about it, talk to your team about it, get it done. Please share this episode with anybody that would appreciate it, get some value out of it.

Follow us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, all the good stuff. We appreciate all of you and look forward to getting in front of you then in the next episode. Thanks, Derek. We appreciate your time as always. Adios. 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.