Ep 70: TradePMR’s Product Vision for Advisors featuring Jon Patullo

Episode Summary

Jon Patullo of TradePMR joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman on whether custodians are actually delivering the digital-first experience they describe. The hosts open with a structural observation about the largest firms. They were early technology adopters, invested heavily in infrastructure, and now find that stack difficult to extend, because rebuilding an entire experience is a far harder project than adding one more feature. Patullo describes the platform TradePMR built around account management, rebalancing, trading, and billing, along with a transition tool that uses AI to pre-populate and create accounts, compressing a process that took weeks into a couple of days. On compliance he draws a line the hosts find sensible, separating the automation of administrative tasks from anything touching advice itself.

What this episode covers

• Why the largest custodians find it hard to modernize a stack they invested in early
• Compressing an account transition from weeks into days, and what that frees up
• Where compliance currently draws the line on AI, between administration and advice
• Freeing advisor time for client conversations as the highest-value activity
• Acquisitions designed as feeder systems for assets, and how they change organic growth

Episode 70 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (31:56)

Episode 70 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.

Full Transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps in brackets [MM:SS] indicate the position in the original audio.

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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, are custodians really delivering on digital first trends? You mean like the paper onboarding or repapering of your accounts or enabling AI or rebalancing platforms that they all promised? Is that what you mean? All of the above and then some all that in a bag of chips.

I think I know that they’ve been talking about this stuff and they know that it’s in the media and advisors are trying to figure out what the heck to do. Where is this coming from? But is it actually happening? Right. There’s talk and then I just saw him even this the other day. There’s talk of starting a business, people that do that. And there’s people starting a business and the line for people talking about starting a business is a hell of a lot longer. I think it really depends on who you’re talking about. Right. I mean, the bigger companies, the real big ones we know out there.

The Mr. Charles out there. That’s not an easy shift to turn fidelity. And they got a lot of loyalty and a lot of infrastructure put in place. That’s not an easy thing to innovate. It’s not, there’s a challenge there. And I know I’ve mentioned this a couple of times over previous episodes, but Bill Harris and I were talking about this too. And these firms, these big ones, Chuck, some of their technology could be decades old. And what’s funny is that initially they were first early adopters of tech, but then they spent all this money on infrastructure and now like you can only add so many features before the whole thing breaks down and to recode an entire experience, it’s tough.

So I don’t know if I want to talk bad about custodians, but are, are they delivering on what the trends we’ve talked about, what’s going on in the future of financial advice with the world economic report that we just recently saw this year. What consumers want is changing. What advisors want is change. Is it being delivered on is the question. Well, it’s clear that a lot of the larger custodians that we’ve been using for years, you know, they’ve got relationship currency with us. Like our boomer clients have relationship currency with us. And right now it doesn’t matter if you change their fees. We already know 9% are not, are going to move for lower fees.

Everyone else is going to stick it out, you know? And we joked about that. Obviously if you remember the Abby Salome conversation about, you know, people stick with advisors, they don’t even know how they’re performing. Uh, I think sometimes the infrastructure is sticky, but there’s a trend here and it, and I think we should talk about it because we have had interviews in the past from newer companies in this space that are doing things differently. Yeah. Go back and listen to episode 19 with Jason Wang over at Altruist, you know, fully digital custodians doing really amazing things, but they’re not the only one out there.

That’s right. And we had an opportunity at nitrogen’s fearless to interview John Petullo, who has enormous experience on this at trade PMR. Well, yeah. And before that he was early on at, at TD. So, and he’s, he’s been a chief product officer. It’s what he is now. And he has seen some really interesting, but what he’s talking about now and what they’re doing. That’s crystal ball stuff that I would want to be paying attention to if I’m listening to this. Oh, it’s really true. Let, let, let’s share about John’s background. Now you’re right. He was at TD, but he was a TD when there were, I think 12 employees.

Amazing. And when you think about obviously their acquisition by Charles Schwab a couple of years ago, and then the full integration of that a year or so later, um, I think it’s really interesting to see for so many of us that were in the FinTech world, TD was such an open architecture shop. There was enormous loyalty for their willingness to innovate and be open and put their APIs out there. And it was, it was a great place to work. And there was a lot of loyalty to that. And I think as that has changed in transition, advisors have been looking for newer, more modern outlets.

And it’s interesting and ironic that we actually interviewed John just probably two weeks before the Robin hood announcement to purchase trade PMR, which just, I think is an amazing thing. And I look forward to hearing both what John said, but also what Derek and I had an opportunity to rethink about post learning of that acquisition. Cause I think it’s setting an interesting statement, Derek, for what’s happening in the market. No question about it. Let’s jump in and hear what John has to say. You got it, John. It’s great to see you here. The place that we hold near and dear and Derek action. I met several years ago and actually what inspired this podcast.

So it’s, it’s always fun to talk to people who are doing something interesting and different in the business. So, uh, give us a flavor for what’s your unique perspective, given all the history you’ve had in the past with TD on the business today. Yeah. So it’s been in the space for a long time, right? It really does seem like, you know, there’s it’s such a huge opportunity, very exciting time for advisors, right? When you think of this whole generational wealth transfer that happening, you know, all the different technologies that are out there today. You know, it’s huge opportunity for advisors to increase scale, efficiency, drive a better client experience.

You know, leveraging a lot of these newer technologies out there. And, you know, it’s like, I can’t imagine a more exciting time at this point. No, that’s true. Well, you’ve seen a lot and obviously helping to build TD from early stage. Yeah. Uh, and, and hearing some about that, that I’m missing that, you know, obviously we have so much history in this space. Uh, gosh, how many years have you been in the business now? Do we want to talk about it myself too much decades? That’s amazing. You’ve seen it from a technology perspective, you’ve seen it grow from almost no technology, right? To what you see the kids this map today.

It’s great. You have a magnifying glass to find anything. Yeah, I think, you know, we did a lot early on to really bring a lot of the vendor community together. You know, integration was a huge struggle for advisors, you know, back in the day and we had the opportunity to really pull in a lot of the industry leading software providers, you know, we didn’t do it all ourselves and we were able to collaborate with a lot of vendors in the space, right? To make sure we’re delivering the right solutions for, you know, for our, for our mutual clients, all in our advisors. And, you know, that’s where we really came up with the idea to open up our APIs and, you know, we started having, you know, 180 vendors innovating on behalf of us, providing great tools to, you know, our mutual clients.

Well, you definitely set the stage with Veo, no question about it. Oh yeah, that was a game changer for sure. So are you kind of the same mindset now at Trade PMR? Is this, is this a, you’re, you’re doubling down on technology and I guess what would you do differently now? Yeah, I mean, it’s a super exciting time and moving over to Trade PMR, I went from, you know, award winning platforms at TD, the award winning platform in that they do a strive on service and technology. Their platform has been rated highest in client satisfaction, the most recent T3 survey. So, you know, really stepping into a great situation and looking to, you know, really bring the platform forward and continue to grow the business.

You know, just knowing, I think there’s such an opportunity in this space for advisors that are looking for a better solution. And we were talking with a number of people just at this conference and service and keeps coming back like, well, how are you differentiating? How are you having those deeper relationships and so forth? That sounds like, I mean, you, you share some statistic about phone call returns, like how long does it take? So our average answer time for phone calls is 13 seconds, which is sort of unheard of in our industry. But, you know, the, you know, Trade PMR really strives on providing that white glove service, making sure our service folks know who, you know, know who the, uh, by, by the business, how they operate, what they like, and, uh, you know, in addition to that, you know, the great technology, they do have, Fusion has a great rebalancing system.

The trading is better than I’ve seen, even in my TD days. So rough, great tick trading technology, billing. It actually allows advisors to do calculations, your average daily balance. So provides a lot of features to help advisors more efficiently run their business. Today, we actually launched, uh, Fusion Sync. So Fusion’s our core account management platform. So Fusion Sync is actually a tool that allows, uh, advisors to transition business to Trade PMR, leveraging AI. So it’s actually leveraging Fusion Sync. The advisor can drop files in or pre-populating, creating all the accounts. It really takes that process for weeks down to a couple of days. Obviously clients need to sign the application, et cetera, but really trying to start leveraging AI to help drive a better overall experience for our advisors.

That’s huge to be able to speed that up. Cause I mean, the, the thought of switching burn advisors really daunting, right? Especially if they, it’s going to be months of paperwork. Oh, and what’s this experience for a client’s going to be and so forth. Okay. So given what you guys are doing there, what is the, I’m missing an opportunity for companies like Trade PMR, right? Or, or a challenge that, that you may think that’s coming. They don’t see you and like how, how should they deal with it? Maybe don’t give away all your secret sauce, right? But you know, you’ve got a unique perspective. It’d be interesting to know.

Yeah. I mean, it works. I read obviously advisors are looking to scale, create efficiencies. Yeah. We do have tools like Apollo, which is a tool we launched in our conference in May, which gives it, it’s a behavioral science tool that helps advisors learn more about, right? The spouse, you know, the clients in the relationship and sort of brings the family together. Cause a lot of times advisors may not focus, you know, they might focus on just one person in the household. You know, we’ve heard all the sats around kids firing their advisor, you know, spouse firing it, uh, the advisor too. So, you know, this actually allows them to leverage some AI to create content, but gives advisors good content to, you know, make sure they understand, you know, how the, you know, the other spouse, right.

Might feel about money and, you know, a lot of times they might be more conservative and like what’s going on. So this allows the advisor to bring everything together to really help grow the business. So we see it as a huge growth engine for us to help bring on new clients, right? You can survey, learn about your clients, how they feel to make sure you’re putting them in the right portfolios, et cetera. It’s interesting. So as a, as a chief product officer, which is not a very common term we hear for certainly a custodian. If I can call you a custodian, it sounds to me like you’re focusing the technology on removing barriers, moving friction for advisors to seamlessly move over their business and get business done, right?

Efficiency. It seems to be like a big, big piece. I’m curious. A lot of our advisors tend to think, well, what can they, what can they do? What kind of action steps can I learn from John to go implement in my practice right now? What would be the recommendations you’d make to advisors to some action steps? I mean, the big thing I see in this space right now is obviously AI is huge. We’re still early stages is probably where the internet was with dial up. So, you know, it’s something that grow exponentially and it really helped automate a lot of non-business generating activities for advisors, right?

So that they can go out and focus on growing their business. It’s a tremendous opportunity and it feels like advisors are still kicking the tires. I mean, it’s at a conference, you know, conference specifically for AI last week, advise AI. And it was a great, it was good, good crowd, lot of advisor interests, but, you know, there’s just, I think more and more advisors need to start kicking the tires. Cause this is really going to change the game for them. Well, it doesn’t want to be able to do things more efficiently. Right. I think from chat bots to, you know, helping with client meetings, but the amount of people in an advisor’s office, they need today.

Relationships always going to be there, right? So they’re not going away, but they’re still going to need to continue to automate as much as possible with less folks, right? So adding a lot of scale for them. When you say that advisors who don’t kick the tires with AI are probably the ones that are going to get taken over by AI, it’s not that AI is replacing human beings, but if you aren’t using the technology and others are, you’re going to just get pushed to the side, right? Yeah. I think you’re going to be, you know, not making as much revenue, right? It’s going to be harder to do business, right?

But it’s going to, it’s going to impact everybody. And I think the folks that are adopting early are going to start getting some benefits, you know, obviously, but it is still early stages, but advisors should realize just seeing, you know, what could that, what that can do with client meetings, right? During and post meeting, it could save them a couple hours on each meeting. Right. You know, it helps generate content. It helps take the notes, put the notes in the CRM. You know, it’s really amazing. Some of the tools out there that I got it. Have you gone to open architecture? Are you dictating what the tech stack needs to be for, for PMR?

You’re not lagging. We’re obviously, you know, at conferences like this, working closely with firms like nitrogen. So we’re open architecture want to really, we believe in the vendor community and sort of did that at TD Ameritrade, I was able to sort of get a lot of vendors to innovate on behalf of our advisors. Right. So it just brings that model. Yeah. So it brings more capabilities to advisors to, again, help them scale and run a more efficient practice. So as a chief financial officer, one of your responsibilities is let’s see what the tech out there is, what makes sense for trade PMR and how it can help advisors, right?

You’re assessing that all the time. I’m guessing, right? Yeah, so exactly. So a lot of it’s right. Talking to our clients, we have a variety of ways we meet with our clients. You know, we have a client experience panel, right? Core users of our technology to gather feedback on things they may need. Yeah. I’ve done panels like that historically too. Yeah. We’ve done it with the vendor community too, which helps make sure you’re building the right solutions that advisors are looking for. And, uh, you know, everything from, you know, we talked a little bit about the answer time with phone calls and, you know, just being able to provide that high level service, even, you know, from a service perspective and technology for advisors.

You’re picking some pretty big boxes there for both, right? I remember being on hold for 45 minutes just to try to place a trade sometimes or other nonsense stuff. In fact, my old broker dealer data has changed. I’ve talked to some advisor staff. They would call, you know, by the time that somebody would answer, they’d have a problem. Whoops. I had that personally. You know, we always give everybody an opportunity. You know, here we are in nitrogen. We’re in Nashville. You’re in lots of music. Right in the background right now. If something happens here in Nashville, stay in Nashville. Is there anything you think that the, that the industry is not talking about they really should be?

I mean, I would say, you know, just, I think AI is going to accelerate quickly, right? So I mean, I think there’s a lot of good conversation. There’s vendors here, which is fantastic, right? Advisors are continuing to learn more. I think the pace of acceleration is going to happen quicker than folks think, right? It’s going to move fast. And, you know, we don’t want advisors to be left behind, right? We want them to be able to leverage that to automate a lot of things. And they’re, you know, a lot of those non-business generating activities, you know, you want to sort of help, you know, for us and, you know, give you that time to spend with your clients.

How does your compliance department feel about AI? So it’s a good question. So, you know, we, we’ve got, you know, see what the, the FCC has said about AI, right? So obviously for invest, I think for certain things, right. Automating tasks, you know, people pushing buttons. It’s, it’s good, right. So it’s still, yeah, it still needs to be, you know, flushed out a little bit, right around the vice and those types of things. So, you know, for us to use cases really about automating some of those, you know, it’s nice to hear that. I mean, that makes sense. Cause now you can empower the advisor to be the advisor that they should be.

Right. Instead of more time with the clients. Absolutely. Yeah. That is the highest revenue producing activity. Yep. Let’s get them there. That’s a very cool. Thanks, Sean. We appreciate your being here. Yeah. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. That was a fun conversation. I don’t know if anyone listened here or even you, Adam, and you tend to tune me out most of the time, but how many times did he talk about AI? I think it was 17 times. At least I don’t even know that he was talking about artificial intelligence though. Advisor intelligence. I think that’s always what it’s about. No, I think that, that this is the first time I think we’ve heard somebody say more than just, I think AI is going to change the business, but is rather saying I’m using AI to change the business.

Ooh, that’s good. They are using, and I had no idea when we took on this interview, I really wasn’t clear what trade PMR was doing that was earning them such accolade, right? So they did just win best user experience at T3. Pretty awesome. I’m thinking to myself, okay, you know, what did I miss? And it’s not until you use these platforms that you start to realize. And it was interesting because John came from TD as we talked about, and TD had such a great reputation and loyalty with the independent space for those that were real truest. So I want to use any open architecture platform.

In fact, we integrated with them super early on at AssetMap because they were so easy to work with and to learn that they’re taking that same attitude to another level is cool. It’s, it’s also telling about what’s going on and it’s refreshing. Actually, he’s bringing an open architecture mindset to growing the business and looking into the future, which I really find interesting. I mean, what did he say? They had 180 API, like vendors that their APIs were into. What I really liked, which I thought was cool. I think we’re starting to see this a little bit more. And actually my chat recently with Bill Harris, he said the same thing.

What happened at TD when they opened up their API is that they had all these vendors, all these technology vendors innovating on their behalf. That’s right. Talk about scale and moving. And so now the same thing can happen at all different levels for different, whether you’re an insurance or wealth management company or a small RIA. Well, if you want to be a platform that everybody uses, you allow everybody to store their luggage in your foyer, right? Connect their stuff to your world, right? Put them on your apps, on your phone. iPhone is a platform, right? Isn’t iOS, isn’t Google Android a platform, right? So it makes perfect sense in today’s world.

If you want to basically bring everybody together, you make it easy to come to the party. And I think it’s really interesting given the recent Robin Hood acquisition of trade PMR, which happened just a couple of weeks after we had done this interview. It’s a real interesting statement. And it can’t go unnoticed that that Robin Hood of all very innovative, different way of doing share class, no commissions. Has has gone into the advisory space and we can’t ignore it. So what do you think’s going on there? Well, a couple of things come to mind. One is I love it because it shows the value of human advice.

You’re, you have a massive tech company with where they have 24 million customers, all digital experience, all of it, right? Beautiful digital experience. And what are they doing? They’re doubling down on human advice. Interesting. That’s pretty awesome. Why? Well, at the, at the end of the day, and you’ve said this 101 times. Oh, I know the answer. I just want to know that you know. Well, I’m going to hopefully get it right here. We’ll see. Well, the price of being wrong is great is high. I want to run something by a human. That’s right. I want my advisor intelligence and that’s what’s happening. So I, yes, the average account size at Robin Hood is relatively small.

They do have 140 billion or so assets, which is nuts. It’s crazy. Yeah. But the folks we talked about this at nitrogen, we’ve talked about this on different webinars. The folks that have those smaller account balances today are the same ones that will be inheriting this generational wealth transfer, the same ones that are going to start earning more and saving more, and they’re going to need human advice. So talk about like preparing to skate where the puck is headed. Really cool situation. There’s a couple of things that come up to mind here. Hey, you’re right. 140 billion of assets under management with an average account size.

What did you say? It was like, it’s less than 10,000 a user. It’s less than 6,000 ish. That’s a rough number, but right, right. It’s not hot. Okay. So entirely digital aspect. When they first came out, we thought of them as a robo advisor, right? We thought of them that easy access, low access. We always talked about how the human advisor firms should just buy and utilize the robo advisor and integrate that easy technology for small accounts, easy accounts, low margin accounts, and also next gen engagement. Right. Should, should go out and buy that. And instead here, you have a robo advisor come out and buy an advisory firm.

Pretty awesome. So I think they’re taking that recommendation, recognizing a couple of things. Number one, you know, trade PMR brings $40 billion in assets under management and somewhat three to 400 financial advisors that are well, well mature. Right. So they, they know the business. They know that they bring that advisor intelligence to the table. It’s very clear that a lot of the people who have small accounts with Robinhood play accounts probably have more money elsewhere and probably will like that user experience and say, but I now need advice. So they just basically had got a plug and play, well-established independent community of financial advisors they can now just pitch to.

And there’s probably more than $140 billion in that 23 million people. Well, yeah, that’s the irony behind it. The average wealth could be as high as two 50, 500, a million dollars of net worth. There’s over a trillion in that 24 million people. There’s over a trillion of assets sitting there. Totally. Well, how much do they need to capture to double their AUM? Not a lot. 10%. 10%. That’s what I’m saying. I, this is interesting that you brought up Bill Harris, because in a sense Robinhood is going the way of personal capital. Yes, it is. Yes. We can create a digital engagement experience that is demanded by X gen and millennial, and now we can engage.

We can start them with the, with easy onboarding and then expand. And I think that’s really interesting because in this generational wealth transfer or great wealth transfer, those parents are going to give the money to the kids who have a $10,000 account at Robinhood. And they’re going to be like, Oh my God, what do I do? I’m not going to call mom and dad’s advisor. I’m going to call my Robinhood expanded advisor. They’re not even going to call them. They’re going to open up their app and click on a button to say master an advisor or transfer. They’re just going to search my Robinhood account.

Yeah, done. Simple. That’s it’s that easy. So that’s what’s happening. So really, and so what, you know, John’s talking about, especially with his product background about using AI, which they’re already doing. And we’ve talked about this other guests recently too, about increasing operational efficiencies and all of that. I mean, think about it. You just got access to trade PMR to over 20 million potential customers. Talk about drinking from a fire hose. We better have great tech that can increase our efficiency so we can deal with this new inflow. This is, this is going to be amazing. Look, we saw, we saw Morgan Stanley do this with E-Trade and they crushed it with this, just like Fidelity decided to go after the qualified accounts, 401ks why?

So that they could earn all the rollovers when people had to retire. Did that work for them? It worked. Did it work for Vanguard? Yes. Did it work for Morgan Stanley? Do you know that Morgan Stanley is destroying everybody on organic growth right now? What did they get when they bought E-Trade? When they, when the E-Trade was the largest stockholder transaction service on the planet. So everyone who gets stock options and they get mega wealth, guess what they bought? They bought a feeder system from effectively a low cost, near robo environment and Morgan Stanley absorbed them and got the stock option and stock shareholder administration.

Where do you go? You go to your default provider. There’s a real interesting move here. And I think it’s going to start showing that we need to match up tech. And I think if trade PMR was not as tech forward as they are, I don’t know that they could pull this off because we have to integrate deeply. Probably not. And also the other key point that I really liked him talking about. So there’s all this talk about service to the client, which is extremely important, but they’re also doubling down on service to the advisor. Talk about this. Also, like make my life easier as an advisor and I’m going to be loyal.

I’m going to give you my business. I’m going to be able to grow more. Everyone wins. And what do you say their average response time was? It was like seconds. Seconds. Seconds. That’s great. It’s like a football. I mean, that’s amazing. Yeah, it’s not like my other service, Comcast is like after 30 minutes of being on hold, they’re like, we’ll call you back. I’m like, you couldn’t have done that earlier. Yeah, right. 13 seconds. That’s amazing. I think so. So what else did we take from this? This was besides the service, besides the AI, besides the tech forward. Now, you know, I, he did close with AI and I’m curious what you think advisors should be taken from this.

You know, he kind of threw a line in the sand. Don’t get left behind. Yeah, he’s right. AI specifically is growing exponentially. Applications, what it can do exponentially. Well, yeah. How it was only been a couple of years since Chad GPT even came out and look at what’s happening already. And so is it a little scary? Yeah. Do you have questions from compliance department? Probably. But push, investigate, educate, learn about what’s out there. As he says, kick the tires because if you don’t, you will be left behind. I wrote down a list of some of the stuff he said. He said AI supported repapering of accounts.

Love it. Intelligent rebalance, tax harvesting, client meeting notes. Okay. That’s an obvious one, right? Content building and managing the vendor community. That’s just what I wrote down. I’ll add to that one thing. He said something about pre during and post meeting. You can use AI to help with getting ready during the meeting, after the meeting, which they’re doing. Look, operational efficiency. com. Some people made a lot of money. Some people lost a lot of money. The question on this one is, is, is this a table steak thing? You can’t not do this. I know both you and I are using AI to support this podcast.

We’re using it where we can to save ourselves time so we can focus on more intelligent effort, right? Higher revenue producing activity. And I think it’s probably creating a better quality outcome. So at the end of the day, I think that this is enabling us to be more authentic, more ourselves, better advisors, give more time with clients. Even Abby Salome said it on the prior. She says, you got to find ways to create more revenue producing effort if you want to create organic growth. And you’ve got, look, you’ve got coupler AI, right? You’ve got your own platform. That’s literally just making human connections. Let’s not be afraid of this thing.

And I think John is right. He says, we have to start not just, just not dabbling. We have to start investing. And I think that that’s a, that’s an important aspect of this. Definitely. We’ll get left behind us. I think that takes us to like some of the things that you can do. And yes, get comfortable with AI. And maybe a good starting point is maybe just get a note taker or get something that has nothing to do with client facing anything. So you don’t have a compliance headache initially and just start playing with it. Try it. See what happens. Like even like Gemini is free or get the free chat GPT and just do something with it, try it, right?

And get comfortable. And all of a sudden like, Oh, wow. I see the power of what this can do. Yeah. Ask yourself, how could this, how could you help this use this to help you leverage? Ask AI, what should I do with it? What should I do with you? Bad idea, right? I mean, gosh, it’s all about the power of questions. I think one thing I have learned, Derek, from the AI is literally the prompts, as they’re called, basically, what’s the question you’re asking the AI bot is the most important part, guess what the most important part in fact finding and advice delivery is questions, the questions, the quality of your questions dictates the quality of the answers, which dictates the quality of your life.

I’m talking about it. Even the questions you ask yourself in the morning. Oh, why did you do that? Why are you such an idiot? Versus, huh, how can I do that better? Two completely different questions. And I think if we get better at asking questions, we’ll be better users of AI and also of being better advisors. And I think that’s the real key to this. I hope you see that and that the irony behind that. I do. It’s interesting. I want something else that came to mind was asking questions is extremely important. Human questions. Yeah. It’s the human asking the question. AI isn’t asking us a question.

AI doesn’t like knock on you. Hey, Adam, I want to ask you a question. It’s the other way around. That’s right. Yeah. That’s true. Funny. Cause we don’t have the answers. We just have the questions, right? That’s it. I have it. That’s why we’re advisors. That’s right. Knowing which question to ask at what point in time. That’s really the key. Uh, that’s really interesting. So this has been great. So I appreciate, uh, John taking the time to go on this. I know you’ve had further conversations with them and you’ve been really impressed with what you’ve seen there. Uh, I think it’s been really curious, Derek, what, what’s going to happen with this new announced merger, assuming it goes through.

Uh, I think it could be really exciting times. Exciting times. It’ll be cool to see, but just, you know, it’s refreshing. I think that if I’m an executive at an insurance and wealth management company, or even just an advisor, pay attention, look at people are doing. And this is a wonderful example of technology and human advice mashing together and making something awesome happen. Yeah. So, yeah, super awesome to talk to John learned a lot, really appreciate it. And, um, definitely check them out on social. We’ll see what they’re doing. Pay attention. Yes, definitely pay attention with that. Let’s thank all of our listeners and of course, remind you to subscribe, share this with a friend and of course, interact with us.

You know, we’re on LinkedIn, ask us a question. You have some idea or topic you want to talk about. Let us know what that is. We will try to fit it in. We are back and we are, uh, we are raring to go. So we appreciate your patience over the summer. Uh, again, Derek, thank you, my friend for taking all the time to do this stuff. That’s always a fun conversation. I’ll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Mike West, brother, take care. Thank you for listening to rethink the financial advisor podcast with Holt and not me. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation.

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