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With Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Wealth.com Rafael Loureiro on why estate planning is shifting from a static legal exercise to an AI-powered, advisor-led planning process. In Summary Estate planning has traditionally operated outside the core advisor workflow—handled through attorneys, revisited infrequently, and often disconnected from the broader client relationship. Louis speaks with Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, about how AI is beginning to change that model. The conversation explores how advisors can use tools like Ester to surface planning gaps, stay ahead of client changes, and deliver a more continuous planning experience. For advisors, the broader implication is strategic: as investment management becomes increasingly commoditized, integrated planning and ongoing coordination may become a far more meaningful differentiator. The Storyline Most advisors already discuss estate planning with clients. The challenge is what happens next. In many cases, the process still moves outside the advisor relationship: clients are referred to an attorney, documents are created, and the estate plan becomes something revisited only after a major life event or liquidity event forces an update. Louis and Rafael explore why that structure is starting to break down. Rafael's own estate planning experience following the sale of Emailage to LexisNexis exposed how fragmented the process could feel, even for highly engaged clients working with sophisticated advisors. That experience ultimately became the foundation for Wealth.com and its AI-powered planning platform, Ester. The discussion focuses less on AI as a headline topic and more on how it changes advisor workflow in practice—from document interpretation and planning summaries to surfacing next actions and helping advisors stay proactively engaged as client circumstances evolve. For advisors thinking about the future of planning, the conversation raises a larger question: if financial planning itself becomes increasingly standardized, where does the next layer of differentiation come from? Topics Covered Continuous estate planning AI-powered advisor workflows com and Ester Advisor-led estate planning Family office-style client service Trust and estate attorney collaboration Estate planning for mass affluent clients AI agents in wealth management Dynasty Financial Partners integration Advisor differentiation beyond investment management > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why did Rafael decide to build Wealth.com? (06:04) Rafael explains how his own estate planning experience after a liquidity event exposed major disconnects between advisors, attorneys, and clients. Why did Wealth.com choose an advisor-led model instead of direct-to-consumer? (14:28) The platform was designed around the belief that advisors (not marketing campaigns) are best positioned to initiate estate planning conversations with clients. What does “continuous estate planning” actually mean? (20:13) Rafael describes a system where client life changes, tax events, and asset activity can trigger proactive advisor engagement rather than periodic document reviews. How does Ester move beyond document summarization? (32:30) The platform now identifies planning opportunities, prepares tasks and reports, and increasingly helps advisors automate portions of the planning workflow. Why are enterprise firms and large banks adopting platforms like Wealth.com? (24:57) Many firms were already producing estate planning summaries manually for ultra-high-net-worth clients. AI allows those capabilities to scale much more efficiently. How should advisors think about the role of trust and estate attorneys going forward? (26:50) Rafael argues that AI enhances – not replaces – the attorney relationship by improving efficiency and reserving more sophisticated matters for specialized legal expertise. What may differentiate advisory firms as planning becomes more commoditized? (38:02) The discussion points toward responsiveness, coordination, personalization, and deeper client integration as the next major competitive layer for advisors. Key Takeaways Rafael believes estate planning is shifting from a one-time legal exercise to a continuous planning process supported by AI and advisor engagement. Wealth.com was intentionally built as an advisor-first platform rather than a direct-to-consumer business. Ester's AI capabilities now extend beyond summarization into identifying planning gaps, surfacing opportunities, and preparing advisor workflows. Many firms are using estate planning as a way to deepen relationships and expand into more family-office-style service models. AI may allow advisors to serve more clients while maintaining a higher level of personalization and responsiveness. Trust and estate attorneys remain critical for complex situations, but AI can improve efficiency and help clients arrive better prepared. Advisors who fail to expand beyond investment management risk competing in an increasingly commoditized landscape. https://youtu.be/BDI6XbEz_4E Quotable Moments “When AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task.” “Investment management is becoming table stakes. Financial planning is becoming table stakes.” “Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, why can we not have continuous estate planning?” “It is the intangibles.” “My goal is to empower the advisor.” Related Resources Human Intelligence in the Age of AI: Why Recruiters Still MatterArtificial intelligence can analyze firms and deals. It can't replace the insight and advocacy that help advisors make the right move. The Future of Prospecting: How AI Is Powering the Next Era of Advisor GrowthFINNY Co-Founder Eden Ovadia shares how AI is transforming advisor prospecting: automating outreach, matching advisors with ideal clients, and freeing time for deeper human connection. A forward-looking conversation on what growth will look like in the next era of wealth management. Rafael LoureiroCo-Founder and CEO Rafael Loureiro is a technology entrepreneur and product-focused executive with more than 20 years of experience across startups, growth-stage companies, and Fortune 500 organizations. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Wealth.com, a leading estate and tax planning platform powered by proprietary AI and purpose-built for financial institutions. Under his leadership, Wealth.com has expanded into a comprehensive planning platform, embedding deterministic AI to deliver precise, auditable outcomes across estate and tax workflows. Prior to founding Wealth.com, Rafael served as Chief Technology Officer at Emailage, a global fraud prevention SaaS company acquired by RELX in 2020. He is a member of the Forbes Finance Council and has been recognized across the industry, including CEO of the Year honors and Forbes' Top AI Founders to Watch. Originally from France and raised in Brazil, Rafael now resides with his family in the Phoenix metro area. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. I’m Louis Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wire house, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned, and each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that there’s a problem that you have that others might have as well, so let’s create a business around solving this problem. It was legitimately at that point, it wasn’t a long burn, we’re going to research, we’re really going to think about this, it was just all of the core team that was fortunate enough to have a big liquidity event were complaining and commiserating about a similar problem on estate planning and then that launched into, let’s build a company, let’s build a platform, a product to solve this problem? Rafael Loureiro: Yes and no. We saw the opportunity. We had just finished selling a company. It takes a lot from you and your family to create a company and to sell a company. Before we started a new company, we said, “Hey, look, we feel like there is something here, but let’s do the proper groundwork, make sure that the market is right, that there is a need that it’s not only us complaining about these.” I’m going to say that we spend a good three month, we have vision document together, doing a market research and then we got excited. Literally my wife who was not super excited in the beginning said, “You guys just sold a company. You’ve been racing 100 miles an hour for the last seven, eight years and you guys going to do this again.” But I love it. It’s part of my DNA. I love the challenge. I love to build and it is a big problem. When you look at the US market, 67% of the population don’t have estate planning. You have to ask yourself, why? Is that because it costs too much money? Is that because people don’t know enough about estate planning that they don’t do it? Is that because people don’t have to think about that? So the opportunity is there. We did the groundwork. We got the team together, at least some of our eight players. We went to Altus Capital, that’s the same venture firm that led the Emailage series B and we said, “Look, we have a vision, we have a team and we believe the market is ready for it. There is no dominant player and it is blue ocean.” And then they gave us the initial funding, them and my chairman, and then we went from having an idea to launching the product in May 2022. Louis Diamond: Wow, that’s amazing. Before we dive into the rapid growth and what the platform looks like, et cetera, can you just give us a quick overview of what Wealth.com looks like today? Who are you serving? Who are you selling to and where does it fit into an advisor’s value proposition or their advice stack, if you will? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. So Wealth.com we empower financial advisors to provide a family office experience to their clients starting with estate planning and tax planning. What I’m trying to solve, Louis, is my situation. I want my financial advisor to be the hub of my needs. So if the need is financial planning, wealth management, insurance, estate planning, tax planning, I need my financial advisor to be aware of all these verticals, right? Because I know if something happens to one of us, my financial advisor is my person. He or she’s going to get my call from my wife and say, “Hey, am I all right?” I want to empower the financial advisor with all the tools to provide that family office experience to their client. So that’s first, we started by providing doc migration. So think of this, you are mass affluent client, between half a million dollars all the way to 10 million dollars. You don’t have your revocable trust, your will, your power of attorney, your advanced healthcare directive, your guardianship documents. We do that. We create those documents. You go to the workflow on the Wealth.com platform if you have an advisor, I need to make that clear, we’re not direct to consumer business. You have to have an advisor. So you go to that workflow and at the end of the workflow, you get the documents. Those are legally optimized, all the documents. The document you get in California is going to be completely different from the document you get in New York, from the document you get in Florida. I just want to make that point clear. What we noticed, Louis, working with these advisors is if you look at the average advisor, if you look at his or her book of business, 80% is mass affluent. So think lawyers, doctors, firemen, 20% high net worth. Usually the high net worth clients, ultra-high network clients, they already have the documents. They already paid $20,000 to have those documents draft and we were not doing anything for them. So in 2022, we had that light bulb moment even before LLMs. OpenAI launched in 2022, we actually used the Bertha model before OpenAI, but I know I’m digressing. Let me get back here. So I was not doing anything for these high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients. So we had this idea, what if we use AI to read their existing plans, all their grants, LATs, all this sophisticated irrevocable trust, connect to all their assets and then provide a summary of everything they have in place? So that was the idea in 2022. Can we do it? And we did it and that became Ester and that became our family office experience. So just to summarize, we help the advisor clients regardless where they fall in the wealthy spectrum. They don’t have the estate planning documents, we create them. If they already have the estate planning documents, we use AI to read this documents, summarize them and provide insight and observations. “Hey, here are ways that you can optimize these documents.” That’s what we do. Louis Diamond: It’s so valuable. I wish I met you a month ago because I went through a very expensive estate planning exercise with an estate planning attorney and my own personal experience is exactly the same that you had. It’s expensive. I have no idea what I was signing. It was a long questionnaire and it wasn’t driven necessarily by my advisor. They gave me the idea to get updated estate plans, but it was a disconnected process. So this makes a ton of sense. I think let’s pull on the thread of being a direct to advisor company rather than trying to pull an end around the advisor and going directly to a consumer. Why was that an important design decision for you? Because I would assume the total adjustable market might be a little bit bigger if you’re going direct to a retail client that may or may not have an advisor versus going directly to a business, an RIA, a wealth management firm, et cetera. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. What we notice working within these spaces, something triggers you to do your estate planning. I’m not going to ask why you decide to do yours now, but usually it’s related to death in the family, a kid going to college, you buy a new house, you have a new baby, you’re getting married, you get a divorce. Direct to consumer, you have to find the client at that moment for them to consider estate planning as an important thing to do. There’s actually surveys. I think Fidelity put a survey out, that says family is the main reason why people do estate planning. And the second reason is the advisor. So if you work with a financial advisor, most likely he or she’s going to make you do your estate planning. So we did not want to be on the direct to consumer place spending millions and millions of dollars in marketing. We’d rather spend millions and millions of dollars in AI and technology and serve the advisor and empower the advisor to have this conversation and go to you and say, “Hey, Louis, how is it possible that you don’t have your estate planning document? Let’s do this now.” And I know this is uncomfortable. There’s another survey that came out recently saying that some of the advisors don’t want to talk about that. It’s still a hard subject to approach, but we have to have this conversation. Louis Diamond: I would say it almost sounds like an advisor not wanting to talk about their fees. Let’s not talk about that because it’s uncomfortable and no one wants to hear about it. Rafael Loureiro: Oh, you have to have it because they saw a huge lack of education. For example, one thing that we come across all the time, and I know it’s minor, is kids going to college. “Oh yeah, my daughter’s going to college. I don’t have to do anything.” Yeah, you do. She needs an advanced healthcare directive because if you don’t have one and something happens to her, you cannot just go to the hospital and ask for information. They won’t give it to you. We need to educate our clients. We need to do a better job. And I think advisors play that role and we want to empower them to talk about estate planning and tax planning. Louis Diamond: It makes sense. It’s a brilliant strategy because instead of advisors selling against Wealth.com as like, “I can do better and I have a estate planning guy I can refer you to,” it’s you’re working alongside them and you rely upon the advisor to provide the education to be the trigger moment. And I know again, from personal experience, if my advisor didn’t suggest that I should update my estate planning documents because I moved states, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like a fun thing to do. It’s an expense, et cetera. So that makes a ton of sense. You’re partnering with the hub or the influencers, if you will, of who’s driving estate planning in this country. It’s a great strategy. Rafael Loureiro: And you said something very important and I want to highlight, the world is very different after COVID. Before COVID, some of these advisors, all their clients were in the same city. I had one estate planning lawyer to help my clients, right? But now with after COVID or during COVID, people moved. “Oh yeah, I’m not living in a farm. Oh, I moved to Montana. Montana is beautiful. I saw Landman or Yellowstone. Now I’m leaving Montana. Landman is in Texas.” How? Now you don’t have estate planning lawyer in Texas. You don’t have estate planning lawyer in Montana. With the right partnership with Wealth.com, now you can serve all your clients regardless where they are in the US because we are present in every jurisdiction and we have lawyers in every jurisdiction. So we empower you to serve clients regardless where they are in the US. Louis Diamond: Very cool. And how about the pricing model? You don’t have to say what it costs, but is it one license that a firm is buying on behalf of their entire client base or is there an incremental cost for each client? And I’m throwing a lot at you. And then third part of the question is, are you seeing advisors charge directly for the Wealth.com estate planning output or are folks wrapping it into their fee as just a value added service as part of their planning and comprehensive wealth management process? Rafael Loureiro: Very good question. My goal, our goal, has always been we want to make estate planning available, democratized estate planning, make it more accessible to the population. So the way we charge is we charge the advisor annual recurring fee. We do not charge per document. I want you to provide estate planning to all your clients. That’s our goal. I don’t want you to think, oh, but that’s going to cost me money. No, all your clients set them all up with estate planning. Are they charging? It depends. So the way I’m going to say this is, I’m going to say that 60% of my advisors are charging not for the documents because they’re not lawyers, they’re charging to help educate you on estate planning. You as a client, you have to go to the process yourself to get the documents. So that’s where an advisor would send an invitation to Wealth.com. You and your wife or your partner, you’re going to go to the workflow and you’re going to get the document at the end. But the advisor is going to set up a call with you, the advisor is going to help you collect the documents. The advisor is going to educate you why estate planning is important. And some of them are charging for this. Some of our advisors, more on the high net worth, alternate high net worth space, you already charge a very good fee to provide your service so they probably provide Ester output, I should say, as a value added service. It depends on the use case. Louis Diamond: Makes sense. So I’ve heard you talk in interviews about a major gap in estate planning between client expectations and what a client is expecting, hoping to get with estate planning, especially when it comes to interacting with their financial advisor and what is actually fundamentally delivered by advisors. So I’m curious, why is there a gap and why do you think that gap has existed for so long? Is it as simple as people don’t like talking about death and it’s expensive or is there a deeper answer? Rafael Loureiro: I think it’s all of the above and your experience is amazing. You pretty much, you are the typical client. You took long to do it. It costs you a lot of money. You’re now like, next time you have to do an update, you’re going to wait five to 10 years to do it because we spend thousands of dollars to get it updated. Why does it have to be like that? And now with AI, and that’s what I think is going to change a lot in the next five years, is why can we not have continuous estate planning? What I mean by that is work with your advisor. I have connection to all your assets. I have connection to CRM. I have connection to your bank account. If you give me access, I don’t need password, but you can actually connect all your assets, I have connection to the portfolio management platform. So as you live your life, as you get married, as you buy a property… You finally decide to buy a property in Tahoe, I get these pings and then I can empower your advisors to say, “Hey, go talk to Louis and say, hey, it’s time to update your estate plan.” Or a rental property outside your home state in California, you need to update your… Or he has just crossed a tax threshold or he just got married or he just had a new beneficiary. My goal is to empower the financial advisor to provide more and more value to this relationship. I’m not trying to replace the financial advisor, but I’m trying to empower him or her to give you more value so him or her becomes more critical for your relationship. Why people haven’t done estate planning I think is a lack of education, is the fear of the cost. “Oh, I have to talk to a lawyer. Oh my gosh, that’s going to cost me $5,000.” I want to make this easier. I want to make this simple. I want to empower the advisor to demystify estate planning and tax planning, make it more accessible, bring the estate planning more to the middle. What I mean by that is why is this estate planning exclusive to the high net worth, ultra-high net worth? Because in that space, 90% of the people have estate planning, 90% of the people. It’s the fear of the cost, I think, and then people don’t want to think about that. Louis Diamond: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. It very much sounds like it’s a win-win. It’s like a next best action type event where you’re giving an advisor on a silver platter a way to add value, which is what I think every advisor wants to do and then it’s a massive value add to the end client. My guess is you don’t have much friction in delivering those sorts of insights to advisors that they can then deliver to their clients. Rafael Loureiro: I would say if you’re not doing it, there is a big risk. You’re going to lose your clients to people that are doing it and they are providing the family office experience. Yeah. Louis Diamond: Yeah. What about the competitive landscape for Wealth.com, whether it’s other FinTechs that are attempting to do something in the space or even just the legacy advisor, the estate planning attorney in town or an advisor’s preferred T&E attorney. How do you think about the competitive landscape in the trust and estate world today? Rafael Loureiro: There are competitors. From day zero when we came in, there were competitors. I don’t see an incumbent. I think now we have became the incumbent. I think there is a segment of the market, just to paint a picture, one third of the advisors are going to retire in the next 10 years. So there is a segment in the market where to your point, they already work with a estate planning lawyer. That’s not a bad thing. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I get leads from this lawyer. My clients are all located in my neighborhood. I don’t need to provide out of state estate planning,” then we’re not going to get there.” But at the same time, if you look at our growth, we’ve been growing and that’s why we just raised a series B, our growth is out there to prove it, we’ve been tripling the company size every year. There’s a need, there’s a demand. Financial advisors are waking up. They are in a very competitive market. They need to provide more to the clients because I feel like investment management, it is becoming table stakes. Financial planning, it is table stakes. So what else can I offer my clients? And that’s why you see some advisory firms offering BillPay. I file your taxes. I’ll get your estate planning done. You got to differentiate yourself. We’re seeing the need. If you look at our penetration, we have now 2,000 firms on the platform and the firms go from independent, a small SMB advisor with one or two advisors in the office, all the way to the top three, three out of the top five banks in the US. We are there, right? Louis Diamond: Wow. It’s interesting. Let’s talk about that. So on the bank side, it’s typically not a segment that is ripe for technological disruption or external tools like this to come in and make a dent. How are banks and very large platforms thinking about Wealth.com? Is it a similar kind of buying journey or decision that an individual RIA or an individual advisor would make or is it a little bit different? Rafael Loureiro: It’s a little bit different. So without mentioning names, these banks, some of these banks that work with high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients, they were providing this summary report that Ester put together, they were, before Esther, but it was taking them 30 to 50 hours. All human labor to put one together, Excel, Visa, PowerPoint, 30 to 50 hours. Even to these very expensive, very wealthy clients, they were only doing once a year. “Hey, here’s your report.” “Oh yeah, but I just sold the house in St. Barts. Can I get a new update?” “No. Next year you’re going to get the update.” I’m not even kidding. It was serious. So they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive. Now with Wealth, a much better output, I should say, it’s take minutes. And instead of only reserving these to the very, very wealthy clients, now they can go downstream and offer this to their mass affluent clients and then high net worth clients. They’re all seeing the need. They’re all waking up because they were doing the work, but it was all labor-intensive, like I said, all manual before and they want to automate. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. I definitely want to spend some time talking about Ester. You mentioned it a few times, but before that, I’d say two very real strategic areas that a firm might take on when it comes to estate planning. The first one is a lot of very successful advisors, they cultivate amazing COI referral relationships with attorneys and usually the attorneys are T&E attorneys for obvious reasons. Have you gotten pushback or have you seen that because of Wealth.com, these advisors now are referring less business to these high-powered trust and estates attorneys and then they’re not able to grow their business as much in return. That’s one question if you can weigh in. Rafael Loureiro: I have not heard that. And just to clarify, I think with Wealth, having Wealth as part of your tool framework, you’re going to be able to serve more clients and still leverage your trust estate attorney. And I’ll explain how. For example, we know how to stay our lane. So let’s say you go into the workflow and as part of the workflow, you say, “Hey, I have a special needs child.” At that moment we say, “Stop. Let me put you in touch with a lawyer.” You can decide to use your own lawyer or you can use one of in our network. We have lawyers in every jurisdiction, but it’s up to you. We focus on the revocable trusts and the wealth. If your client requires something more sophisticated, you can still use Wealth.com to map out the client’s situation using Ester. You’re going to be able to see everything they have in place at that moment and then use your relationship, your trust and estate lawyer to make the document update. So I think what we are doing is reserving the most complex case for the trust and estate lawyer if a document needs update, but I don’t think you are breaking that relationship. That relationship will stay there and you’re still going to have that lead exchange, but I don’t have any numbers to answer your question. Louis Diamond: I think that makes sense. It’s not like with Wealth.com, at least not yet. It’s not like there isn’t a role for a T&E attorney and especially for more complex esoteric type situations, an advisor could still refer some of their relationships to a T&E attorney, but they’ll come armed with better information. And also with more clients getting involved with estate planning, there’s also conceivably more opportunities that they can refer out to an estate planning attorney in turn. Rafael Loureiro: Can I use that? You did a much better job than I did. Exactly. Exactly what you said. The difference is now your advisor, your clients are going to be much better informed, that they know exactly what they need from the lawyer. So yeah, 100%. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And then the other one, which is I’d say less commonplace, but it’s a trend. The trend, and you hit on it, that as investments are becoming commoditized or not as differentiated, advisors are being called on to offer more and more services, whether it’s tax preparation in-house or bill pay or picking up clients’ dry cleaning, et cetera. But I think a big area that I’ve seen firms invest in is an in -house trust and estate attorney. Do you think Wealth.com is taking some of the sizzle out of that in-house service or is it just different? Is it two different use cases? Rafael Loureiro: It’s two different uses cases and we actually sell to that use case where if you have your trust estate attorneys in-house, we actually leverage them and they become users on the platform. Going back to my previous answer, now with Wealth.com, you’re going to be able to serve more clients with estate planning. You can actually route some of the use cases back to your trust estate team through Wealth.com. They do whatever they have to do and then you’re able to serve more clients. An example, trust and estate lawyers, they had to read the documents before Wealth.com. They would spend countless hours reading a hundred-page documents. Now with Esther, we do the summarization. We show your trust estate team where all the information was extracted. So instead of reading one document per hour, you’re going to be able to read three documents per hour and visualize the client estate plan and be able to optimize it because we’ve provided insights and suggestions and then the trust and estate lawyer can provide their own and say, “Hey, no, I agree with this one,” or “I think we should also do this.” I think you’re going to optimize the use of your trust estate team. You’re not going to get rid of them. No. Louis Diamond: It’s more so you’re automating the high value differentiated work. It also kind of sounds like, I don’t know when eMoney or MoneyGuidePro came into the mainstream, but it’s almost a difference between a paraplanner for a firm, manually creating pie charts in Excel and PowerPoint and analyzing a bunch of stuff and then eMoney and MoneyGuidePro and NaviPlan and all these companies come about and all of a sudden a lot of the work is automated. And it’s not like a paraplanner is out of work. They just become the experts, the users of the platform and they can allocate their attention to higher value, more bespoke work rather than we’ll say more of the factory kind of below the line things that was taking up a lot of their time. Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. I like to use the analogy of the shoemaker. In the past, the shoemaker would make one shoe. It would be a beautiful shoe, but he would make one shoe a week or every two days. Now you have specialized agents. All that agent does is read estate planning documents. All that agent does is enriching the documents with insight and observations and looking to all the legal law changes that happened recently. So now you’re able to still make the same high quality shoe, but just at a higher volume. And you have a lot of dedicated workers doing one thing and doing one thing extremely well. So my goal is to empower the shoemaker. My goal is to empower the advisor and with a thousand analysts, a thousand paraplanners. So just making my job more efficient. Louis Diamond: I love it. You fit in Ester a good bit. It seems fairly clear what Ester’s doing. Sounds like an amazing value add. Just given the pace of AI innovation and I don’t think anyone knows where it’s going, but what are you most excited about Ester being able to do either now or in the future and what’s the vision if you can project out a year, which seems like an eternity in AI time, what’s on the dream board for what Ester’s going to be able to do for your Wealth.com clients? Rafael Loureiro: As a technologist, I love this question. I see AI in three distinct phases. You had the first phase of Ester in 2022, 2023 when we launched, which was summaries. It was amazing summarizing data. Some of these clients, Louis, think about this, some of these clients, they have 13 documents in place. They had every type of irrevocable trust you can imagine plus a revocable trust in place. They had very complicated assets, very complex assets. So Ester was amazing in summarizing. That was phase number one. Phase number two is now being able to augment. You read the data, you see an opportunity and you create a task that’s right there in front of the advisor saying, “Hey, I think you should reach out to this client and include this report with some of these observations. Click this button if you agree.” You still involve the advisor, the human is still in the loop. And that’s what we are with Ester right now. We do that. We assess the data, we see the opportunity, we involve the advisor, advisor get involved and say, “Yes, let’s do this,” and click a button, an email is triggered, our report is attached. Here we go. The third phase and that’s coming next and very soon is now you have an agent acting on the behalf of the advisor. I still want to make sure, and I want to make this very clear, I don’t want to get myself in trouble, the devices always evolve, but you have all these specific agents, that’s tax planning agent, that’s the estate planning agent, work independently, connected to the world, extremely well-trained with thousands and thousands of documents that we’ve seen over the years, finding opportunities, creating the tasks, creating the emails, creating the report, having everything ready to go, just waiting for the advisor to say, “Do it.” And we do this enough to the point where the advisor is going to say, “All right, you don’t need my permission anymore to do this specific task. Go.” You connect to the IRS, you download the text transcript, you crunch to this data, you create a report and it’s ready to go. The other thing too is I want to be able, my goal in the next year, a year and a half, is I want to continue estate planning. Up to this point, estate planning has been exactly like you described. You go to a lawyer, you pay thousands and thousands of dollars and those documents start collecting dust in a shelf somewhere while you live your life. And being from this space, that’s not how it works. There is new legislation being passed OBBA became like you crossed tax threshold, you have liquidated events, you get married, you get divorced, you buy real estate property, so on and so forth and that document is already stale. Why does it have to be that way? Now with AI, now with the technology we have in place, it won’t be. I promise you. Louis Diamond: Very cool. That’s exciting. That sounds like the perfect evolution of AI from summary, just here’s something you can read quickly to suggesting action, to then taking action. It does seem like the flow that it’s been and I’m sure there’s 15 other flows from here that we don’t even know yet. Or you probably do because you’re in this, but for me, I can’t even imagine what phase four and five are going to look like for you. Rafael Loureiro: Yes, it’s exciting. Louis Diamond: Definitely is. I saw, when I was doing some research for this that Wealth.com announced a fairly major strategic partnership with Dynasty Financial Partners, embedding Ester into their Dynasty desktop. What do you think this partnership says about where the business is going and how do you expect advisors to really take advantage of this in practice? Rafael Loureiro: It was a new development. We’re super excited about the Dynasty Financial Partnership. Before, if you look at before this partnership, we would have to empower advisor one by one with a Wealth.com license. With this partnership with Dynasty, every advisor in the Dynasty family or using the Dynasty desktop is going to be able to use Ester. So they’re going to be furnished with an AI intelligence that they can ask any estate planning questions, they can get tax planning questions answered. They’re going to be able to upload their clients’ estate planning documents and get a summary with opportunities, with everything that they can do for those estate planning documents. I think it fits perfectly well for enterprise IRAs, wire houses, this solution. Instead of doing one by one, you can actually have AI for all your advisors at once answering their most basic questions and taking action. That’s literally like the agents I was trying to describe. So that’s just the first step in that direction and we’re super excited about this. Louis Diamond: Very cool. Let me ask you another one. So you said earlier that as investment management becomes more commoditized that advisors not only have to offer more services and provide more value, but they also have to differentiate from the advisor or the firm across the street to provide more family office services, if you will. But let’s say, and this will be great for you, Wealth.com becomes like air that everyone’s breathing. It almost becomes like financial planning tool, e-Money. It’s commonplace. Now it’s commoditized across the space, it’s not a differentiator anymore to offer financial planning. As Wealth.com expands more firms work with the platform, what do you think is the next layer or next level of differentiation that your clients then can point to if it’s no longer maybe a couple of years from now that we use Wealth.com that we help with estate planning? Rafael Loureiro: Wow, that’s an interesting one, and approach my wife and bring ideas and suggestions. For me, if I can make that happen where the financial advisor is helping with my taxes, so when it’s tax time, we just have to have a one-hour meeting and we’re ready to click a button and have everything done, that can help me with BillPay. And think about like high net worth and ultra-high net worth people where it becomes extremely complicated to do BillPay properly because you have to pay from the right account, from the right trust. If they can take this off my plate so I can focus 100% in my business and my family, it’s mission accomplished. If that means that they’re going to walk my dog to make this happen, I know I’m exaggerating here, but pick up my laundry like the example you use, I think you’re going to have to do this. That in my mind is how these financial advisors survive the AI revolution. It is that personal relationship. It’s knowing me well. It’s spending more time with me than once a quarter. And with AI, with the right AI, and I know AI, there’s a lot of smoke in this space and very little fire, but with the right agents, with the right workflows, one advisor is going to be able to serve more than a hundred clients. Because right now the ratio is a hundred clients per advisor, maybe you’re going to be able to serve like 200, 250 well. Serve them well, knowing them well, knowing them personally. I think that’s going to happen in the next couple of years. Louis Diamond: I think that’s right. It’s more so like the intangibles that an advisor has. Their secret sauce isn’t going to be necessarily we offer these seven things. It’s going to be, I really get you. I understand you. It’s the advisor’s personal relationship and empathy with that client and all the years that they’ve known them. And then it’s just using all these different tools to aid that relationship. It kind of sounds like that’s what you’re saying. It’s all the other stuff that advisors do that might be different today, over time, people catch up and that becomes commoditized similar to we offer financial planning and that’s a differentiator. Now it’s, if they don’t offer financial planning, it’s a problem. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, 100%. You got it. Yes, it is the intangibles. That’s perfect. Louis Diamond: Okay. I got two more questions for you. What’s one thing you wish more advisors understood about estate planning that they still miss today? Rafael Loureiro: I think there is an education component. Just deploying Wealth.com and expecting is going to work with your clients. It’s not like that. You need to be willing to have the conversation like your advisor did it with you. You need to have the tough call and say, “Hey, are you ready? Do you have estate planning in place? Why not?” And then having that conversation. Louis Diamond: And I would imagine too, it’s also cool, I got all these documents so instead of it getting locked in the safe or locked in the drawer, it’s also incumbent on the advisor to explain the documents. “Hey, these are a bunch of stuff in here that whatever, we don’t have to get into, but here’s the four key things about this document that you should understand. The power of attorney we’ve nominated is your father-in-law. Your proceeds are going to get distributed one-third to your son, a quarter to your daughter,” et cetera. It’s going to be those things and translating the documents into real words that clients are going to understand. Rafael Loureiro: 100%. That is critical because I’m a software engineer, I’m not equipped to be reading a hundred pages document and trying to understand everything that’s there without … Now with AI, you can actually ask Claude to summarize and Gemini to summarize it, but that was not the case three years ago. So that education component is critical. And some of my advisors are actually very successful, I should say. A smaller firm in this case, I’m not going to say the names, I don’t have that permission to say their name, but they are actually doing these estate planning webinars as a lead generation. Because clients are curious about this. Sometimes if you don’t ask them, you’re never going to know, but they’re probably very curious about estate planning. They’re probably very concerned they don’t have the documents in place. Even the ones that have the documents, they’re probably concerned that they need an update and they haven’t done it. So by doing this webinar, they feel more comfortable just going to the event. They know they’re not going to be the center of attention and then asking a question or hear people asking questions. Some of my most successful clients are actually using webinar as a lead generation to explain state planning. Louis Diamond: It’s a great idea. It’s like you’re empowering the advisor to talk more about estate planning. It’s no longer this bugaboo that was too complex or not in their swim lane. It’s empowering them to lead with, it sounds like. Rafael Loureiro: 100% Louis Diamond: Amazing. And last question, if you were an ambitious advisor building a new firm from scratch today, what would you tell them to focus on to create a more durable, harder to replicate future-proof business? Rafael Loureiro: That’s a great question because the factory floor of a hundred years ago, is no longer work. If you have a chance to start from the beginning, it’s a new world. It’s a new world for companies like ours. Even for companies like ours that are in the bleeding edge of technology, everything is changing with AI. How I organize my teams is changing with AI. So I would say select Wealth.com. No, that’s … I’m kidding. I’m kidding, but yes, I’ll say select the right tools, use AI properly, it’s no longer a headcount game. I’m not saying you’re not going to need help, you’re going to need help, but make sure the tools are talking to each other because it is a new age. It’s an agent about speed, about being able to offer more service quicker, about increasing the relationship, the intangibles, to your point. It’s no longer once a quarter call to your clients. So if I had the chance to do everything again, if I had a chance even to start Wealth.com again, it’s different how you organize your team in this age of AI. AI is going to be bigger than the industrial revolution. Trust me, the shockwave is huge. To your point earlier in this call, we’re getting a big jump every month. It’s no longer every year, every month there is something new coming from AI. So if you start your firm again, select the right partners, select the right tools and then hit the ground running. Louis Diamond: Perfect. That’s amazing. Rafael, this has been so fun. I learned a ton from you. You just have a way of storytelling and I absolutely love the why behind Wealth.com, the personal experience that probably a lot of listeners have had as the light bulb moment. And instead of just complaining about it, you actually took action and now are creating the future of estate planning, empowering advisors to offer estate planning to their clients, getting more folks in this country set up with trust and estates and wills, et cetera. So I think it’s amazing what you’re doing and I’m very excited to continue to watch your success. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunities and just to do a final plug, estate planning, tax planning, stay tuned. There is more coming. Louis Diamond: There we go. Thanks so much. Rafael Loureiro: Thank you. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind it’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com A conversation with Louis Diamond and Rafael Loureiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com. It’s a conversation with Rafael Loureiro, the firm’s Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer. I’m Louis Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wire house, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned, and each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: In the wealth management world, estate planning has largely lived in a separate lane. It’s a topic advisors may raise with clients then hand off to an attorney and eventually a set of documents come back, filed away, rarely revisited, and often disconnected from the rest of the planning process. That structure has been in place for a long time and for the most part, it’s gotten unquestioned, but when you step back, it creates a gap between what do clients expect from their advisor and what actually gets delivered when it comes to estate planning. Rafael Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Wealth.com, ran straight into the gap after a planning event of his own which should have been a coordinated process, felt fragmented, manual, and surprisingly opaque. And likewise, I recall the same type of disjointed experience in my own estate planning process. It’s experiences like these that became the starting point for building Wealth.com. What makes this story interesting isn’t just that they’re using AI but how they’re using it inside the estate planning process, and it’s how AI allows the model itself to change from a one-time legal event to something that evolves alongside the client, from static documents to a system that can actually interpret, update, and surface what matters, from a disconnected handoff to something the advisor can actively lead. In my conversation with Rafael, we get into how that plays out in practice, how tools like Ester move from summarizing estate documents to identifying gaps, to prompting next steps, and eventually preparing action on behalf of the advisor, because when AI moves from simply organizing information to helping drive decisions, estate planning stops being a periodic task and starts to look more like a continuous part of the advice process. So let’s dive in. Rafael, thank you for coming on our show today. Rafael Loureiro: My pleasure, Louis. Thank you for having me here. Louis Diamond: Of course. Let’s jump in and in researching you and speaking to you in the past, I got to admit, you had a very different path into the wealth management industry probably than anyone I’ve ever interviewed. So can you walk us through your background briefly and early professional endeavors? Rafael Loureiro: Absolutely. The accent that you hear is Brazilian. So I’ve been in the US for 25 years. I’m a software engineer by trade, came here as a HMB, been involved with different companies over the years and then most recently before Wealth.com. I was a chief technology officer with a fraud prevention company, nothing to do with wealth management, but by selling that company, it’s how the Wealth.com story started. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And I was referring to also some of your early career endeavors even before founding your last company, if you’re comfortable sharing that. Rafael Loureiro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been involved with four different startups in different spaces. One of them was in, if you remember all the way back to 2008, the real estate prices, the first startup with foreclosures. So when houses went into foreclosures, me and my partner, we created a system to index that. I also had work on a photo album company. It became a lifetime business. It’s still running. I was the CTO and I did my share of consulting. I used to work for Accenture, Avanade, and then a home builder Fortune 500 companies. So I have a ton of experience in the technology space before Wealth.com. Louis Diamond: Perfect. And you mentioned the last business that you started that I believe sold to LexisNexis. Can you walk through what that business was? Rafael Loureiro: Yeah. So I did not start the business. I joined the business before Series A. The person that started the business, Rei Carvalho, he’s actually Wealth.com chairman. So the team is still together. The US, San Francisco, New York, offices in Sydney, Singapore, London. We serve clients like Coinbase, grew very fast and then got acquired by LexisNexis in 2020 during peak COVID. Think about, we literally signed the documents, popped the champagne on March 2020. No vaccine. Louis Diamond: Oh, my God. Rafael Loureiro: We literally popped the champagne and we all went back home to work from home because that was the guy that’s from LexisNexis. Through that experience, selling a company, one thing you usually do, it’s a big liquidity event and estate planning is always related to big moments. You get married, someone in your family die, you have a new kid, you have a liquidated event. So I work with a financial advisor. They’re amazing. They helped me with financial planning, wealth management, saved me a lot of money insurance. But when it was time to do the estate planning, Louis, my experience was, “Hey, Rafael, we always work with this lawyer, go talk to the lawyer.” And then it was a completely broken process. First, because it was COVID and I had to go see the lawyer face-to-face. That was weird right there. Second, because I was expecting the lawyer to know everything about me because my advisor knows everything about me, know about my life situation, know about liquid event, know about my kids, rental houses, everything and then the engineer. I know what I told the lawyer, but do I know for sure that everything I told the lawyer end up in the document? No, I don’t. Long story short, otherwise it is a long story, we’re having a virtual coffee. I don’t know if you remember everyone, big beard, long hair, everyone working from home, and then somehow all the Emailage C-level team and founders, the co-founders, we start complaining about state plan. Even another example, my chairman, the Wealth.com chairman, Emailage CEO, Rei Carvalho, he was like, “Hey, Rafael, I’m done with the summer heat in Arizona. I’m moving to Denver. I’m going for cooler weathers.” Literally the moment he moved to Denver, he gets a call from his estate planning lawyer, welcome him to Denver and saying, “Hey, we need to update your documents. “But I just spent thousands of dollars creating my documents.” “Yeah, but you live in a new state, you have to optimize your documents.” At that moment, Louis, we’re like, “Where there’s a problem, there is an opportunity,” and the company was born. Louis Diamond: I find the best company origin stories, it’s you have that, you have a personal experience or a moment where you have a realization that t

Alicia shares her detailed observations from the floor at the Intuit Connect conference, focusing on upcoming QuickBooks Online features and improvements. From customizable dashboards and enhanced payroll capabilities to streamlined sales tax filing and improved bank feed experiences, she breaks down the major changes coming to the platform. Her thorough exploration of the exhibition floor reveals Intuit's focus on automation, AI integration, and improved workflow management tools that will impact how accounting professionals work with QBO in the coming months.SponsorsZoho Expense - https://uqb.promo/zohoexpenseCoefficient - https://uqb.promo/coefficientRoboDebit - https://uqb.promo/robodebit(00:00) - Welcome to the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast (00:52) - Exploring Intuit Connect (02:20) - Innovations in Dashboards (05:00) - Payroll Enhancements (16:11) - Sales and Income Tax Updates (26:18) - New Features in QuickBooks Online for Accountants (29:17) - Bank Feeds and Transactions (33:45) - MailChimp Integration (37:31) - BillPay and AP Automation (47:28) - Conclusion and Upcoming Events Send your Questions/Comments (we could read/answer them on air) ask@uqapodcast.comLinks/Apps Mentioned in this episode:Alicia's Dec 17 Bootcamp: QuickBooks Online: From Setup to Tax Time - http://royl.ws/QBO-Fundamentals-Course?affiliate=5393907Lean more about Alicia's QuickBooks Training http://learn.royalwise.comHector's App - RightTool www.righttool.appReframe 2025 Conference https://reframe2025.com/Sign up to Earmark to earn free CPE for listening to this podcasthttps://www.earmark.app/onboarding

Vikram Anreddy is the head of product, financial services at Shopify, where he helps entrepreneurs effectively manage their money. His team builds banking solutions like Shopify Capital, Balance, Credit and BillPay for our merchants and the Billing platform that powers the monetization of all Shopify products. Top 3 Value Bombs 1. Being unafraid to fail is an underrated driver of success especially when you are building something new. Don't be afraid to fail. 2. Money is the life blood of commerce business and managing cash flows is very important to run a business. 3. To reduce the burden in managing their money , Shopify used automation, simplified the work flow and build flexibility for their merchants. Go to Shopify website to see more of their offerings - Shopify Finance Sponsors HubSpot: Get ready for growth, without the growing pains! Visit HubSpot.com/spotlight to see the dozens of major product updates that'll make impossible growth feel impossibly easy ThriveTime Show Attend the world's highest rated and most reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at ThriveTimeShow.com/eofire

Vikram Anreddy is the head of product, financial services at Shopify, where he helps entrepreneurs effectively manage their money. His team builds banking solutions like Shopify Capital, Balance, Credit and BillPay for our merchants and the Billing platform that powers the monetization of all Shopify products. Top 3 Value Bombs 1. Being unafraid to fail is an underrated driver of success especially when you are building something new. Don't be afraid to fail. 2. Money is the life blood of commerce business and managing cash flows is very important to run a business. 3. To reduce the burden in managing their money , Shopify used automation, simplified the work flow and build flexibility for their merchants. Go to Shopify website to see more of their offerings - Shopify Finance Sponsors HubSpot: Get ready for growth, without the growing pains! Visit HubSpot.com/spotlight to see the dozens of major product updates that'll make impossible growth feel impossibly easy ThriveTime Show Attend the world's highest rated and most reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at ThriveTimeShow.com/eofire  

Jacob von Ingelheim ist Chief Risk and Transformation Officer (CRTO) bei Unzer, einem Fintech für Zahlungs- und Softwarelösungen. Mit seiner umfangreichen Erfahrung gestaltet er maßgeblich die laufenden Integrations- und Transformationsprozesse, nachdem Unzer binnen weniger Jahre mehrere Unternehmen gekauft hat. Zudem verantwortet er das Risikomanagement. Vor Unzer war Jacob in Führungspositionen bei BillPay, Sofort und Klarna tätig, wo er wertvolle Einblicke in die Zahlungsindustrie gewann. **LinkedIn Jacob:** [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-ingelheim-0219104/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-ingelheim-0219104/) Das Unternehmen [Unzer](http://www.unzer.com/) liefert ein umfassendes Ökosystem an integrierten Zahlungs- und Softwarelösungen, das alle Aspekte des Handels abdeckt. Von Online-Einkäufen über mobile Kassensysteme in Filialen bis hin den notwendigen Geschäfts- und Managementprozessen vernetzt und vereinfacht Unzer zentrale Abläufe im Einzelhandel. Dieser ganzheitliche Ansatz hilft unseren Händlern, ihre Geschäftsmodelle zu digitalisieren, während ihre Kunden von einem nahtlosen, flexiblen und einheitlichen Einkaufserlebnis profitieren. Über 85.000 Händler aus ganz Europa nutzen die Produkte und Dienstleistungen von Unzer. Das Unternehmen beschäftigt über 700 Mitarbeiter in acht Niederlassungen in Deutschland, Österreich, Dänemark und Luxemburg. Mehr Infos zu unseren Gästen und alle Links zu dieser und allen anderen Folgen auf unserer Podcast-Seite: [https://become-better.org/podcast/](https://become-better.org/podcast/) Hier kannst Du Dein Buch-Exemplar von Christina Grubendorfer und Christina Ackermann bestellen: [The Real Book Of Work](https://www.amazon.de/Real-Book-Work-Organisationen-umdenken/dp/3800671549) Regelmäßig Neues von LEA erfahren?! Einfach unseren Newsletter abonnieren: [https://tinyurl.com/lea-newsletter](https://tinyurl.com/lea-newsletter) oder uns auf LinkedIn folgen: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3925422 Christina freut sich über deine Kontaktanfrage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-grubendorfer/ Wenn dir der LEA Podcast gefällt, unterstütze ihn gerne: Hinterlasse eine 5-Sterne-Bewertung (z.B auf [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/organisationen-entwickeln-der-lea-podcast-f%C3%BCr-zukunftsf%C3%A4hige/)) sowie eine Rezension und abonniere ihn.

This week we are joined by MD of Major's Accounts, Eriona Bajrakurtaj, who talks about her entrepreneurial journey from very humble beginnings to being one of the most enterprising female entrepreneurs in the accountancy industry. If you're looking at how to shake up your Practice and press a hard reset, give this a listen to see if Eriona's playbook could work for you. Also we're joined by Vipul Sheth, the CEO of AdvanceTrack Outsourcing, who talks about the value of his tech stack and data. Outsourcing is not for every firm but at a time where finding good talent is not easy, AdvanceTrack are leading the way on remote management of resources with a tech first approach. Finally in this week's app news: Pento acquired by HiBob - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonasboegh_glad-youre-here-welcoming-pento-to-the-activity-7163092169174589440-cVuS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android QBO – advanced forecasts - https://insightfulaccountant.com/accounting-tech/general-ledger/quickbooks-online-advanced-financial-forecasts/ QBO standard payroll replaced by Core  QBO Bureau payroll launches  Revolut to release Billpay later 2024 - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marcelvanoost_banking-digitalbanking-businessbanking-activity-7165618394849882113-ovG9?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios KPMG launches AI tax tool with Blue J - https://www.accountancyage.com/2024/02/22/kpmgand-blue-j-launch-ai-tax-tool/ Chaser releases auto-call - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/soniadorais_automation-chaser-accountsreceivables-activity-7165753014652223489-4KcQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios FreeAgent Dext Prepare integration - https://www.freeagent.com/blog/dext-prepare/ FreeAgent extends Amazon integration - https://www.freeagent.com/blog/extending-amazon-integration-reach/ Mayday intra entity recharging  End of the road for TAS Books - https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/tech/accounting-software/tasbooks-heads-for-the-exit-door Capium releases Time & Fees - https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/community/industry-insights/introducing-capiums-new-time-fees-software-for-the-accounting-and Companies House fee increases, plus digital only - https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/business/financial-reporting/companies-house-fees-set-to-rise

This week's full broadcast of Computer Talk Radio includes: - 00:00 - News of nerd fascination - Social media, Elon Musk, Robots, Optimus, crypto, and more - 11:00 - The Seven Deadly Sins - Benjamin brings spooky early with tech and 7 deadly sins - 22:00 - EU vs Apple Lighting Connector - Keith opines on the EU decision to require common connectors - 31:00 - Marty Winston's Wisdom - Marty shares that dealing with China is definitely not cheaper - 39:00 - Scam Series - Driver updates - Benjamin says that you shouldn't pay for any driver updates - 44:00 - Keske on televisions - Steve tells Benjamin of his various opinions on the modern TV - 56:00 - Can a hacker really kill you? - Benjamin thinks that hackers killing people, is a stretch today - 1:07:00 - Auto billpay has matured - Benjamin revisits and updates his thoughts on auto billpay - 1:16:00 - IT Pro Series 194 - Benjamin covers news of redefining contractors/employeers - 1:24:00 - Listener Q&A - found drive - Walter asks if it's worth fixing a 4 year old Chromebook

"I never lose... I either win or learn!" Steven and Kate had the pleasure of interviewing Christine Kiefer, Co-Founder of Ride Capital on Digital Dump. Christine studied Computer Sciences and Economics. She was part of a small minority of women at the time, but had a great deal of support from her family. CK worked in Software(TMobile), Consulting (Bain) and Banking (Goldman), after trying all 3 it was time for Fintech! In order to make the transition easier, Christine began with a finance related fintech, Billpay. In 2018, she founded Ride Capital. This is a fintech, looking to serve the space between HIGH net worth and retail... in other words the HENRYs = High Earners Not Rich Yet! She and her colleagues found that there was / is a real void in knowledge re e.g., tax law or trading opportunities. How is regulation shaping and driving fintechs? Is collaboration really key? AND will Christine's next move be to go into politics? Tune in and find the answers to these questions and so much more! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/steven-batiste/support

In dieser Episode übergeben wir das Mikrofon Marlis Jahnke und Heidrun Twesten vom Equalizer-Podcast. Sie sind beide erfahrene Entrepreneurs und wollen mit ihrem Podcast Frauen motivieren, den Schritt ins Unternehmer:innentum zu wagen. Ihre Gesprächspartnerin ist diesmal Christine Kiefer, COO und Gründerin von Ride Capital. Kiefer hat Informatik und BWL studiert, es folgten Jobs bei der Investment Bank Goldman Sachs in London und der Klarna-Tochter Billpay in Berlin. Aus ihrem Job in der Geschäftsführung bei Billpay entstand der Wunsch, selbst zu gründen.

On this channel we've talked about crypto adoption; receiving and buying crypto, even getting paid in crypto; then using it in everyday life. Today, we're talking bills dreaded second only to taxes: utilities, car payments, insurance, the robux your kids “accidentally” bought on your credit card… that's right those bills. This is one of the biggest questions about adoption: how do we use crypto easily in everyday life? Let's explore some groundbreaking payment systems and tech that make crypto assets even more useful.

Christine Kiefer prägt seit Jahren sie die Finanz-Branche, denn sie war bereits in unterschiedlichen Funktionen am Aufbau mehrerer Fintechs beteiligt, darunter Pair Finance und BillPay. Sie war auch eine der ersten Frauen, die sich seinerzeit für die Sichtbarkeit von Frauen in der Branche eingesetzt hat. Bereits vor Jahren gründete sie die Fintech Ladies, ein Netzwerk für Frauen, die sich mit Digitalisierung und Innovation im Finanzbereich beschäftigen. Aus einem losen Netzwerk wurde über die Zeit eine feste Institution mit regelmäßigen Treffen in mittlerweile sechs Städten in der Region DACH. Langweilig ist ihr jedenfalls nie und auch die Ideen gehen der ehemaligen Goldman Sachs Mitarbeiterin nicht aus. Mit RIDE Capital dringt sie seit der Gründung in eine männerdominierte Branche vor und will mit ihrem Blockchain-Startup Immobilieninvestments für Privatanleger zugänglich machen. Im letzten Jahr bedeutete das für sie, nicht nur harte Bretter zu bohren, sondern sich auch von den Widrigkeiten der aktuellen Situation nicht unterkriegen zu lassen. Denn Corona hat auch ihre Pläne ganz schön durcheinandergewirbelt. Statt über Millionen in Berlin mit Investoren zu verhandeln, saß sie auf einem Segelboot fest und schipperte einmal quer über den Atlantik. Mittlerweile ist die Powerfrau zurück in Berlin in ihrem Büro. Hinter ihr im Regal stehen einige dicke Bänder der Donald Duck-Comics, denn „von Dagobert Duck kann man viel über die Finanzbranche lernen“, sagt sie. Welche Bücher sie neben Comics aus Entenhausen noch mag, warum sie eigentlich einen Hochsee-Segelschein besitzt und wie man aus der Not immer noch eine Tugend machen kann, darüber sprechen wir in der kommenden Stunde.

Christine Kiefer prägt seit Jahren sie die Finanz-Branche, denn sie war bereits in unterschiedlichen Funktionen am Aufbau mehrerer Fintechs beteiligt, darunter Pair Finance und BillPay. Sie war auch eine der ersten Frauen, die sich seinerzeit für die Sichtbarkeit von Frauen in der Branche eingesetzt hat. Bereits vor Jahren gründete sie die Fintech Ladies, ein Netzwerk für Frauen, die sich mit Digitalisierung und Innovation im Finanzbereich beschäftigen. Aus einem losen Netzwerk wurde über die Zeit eine feste Institution mit regelmäßigen Treffen in mittlerweile sechs Städten in der Region DACH. Langweilig ist ihr jedenfalls nie und auch die Ideen gehen der ehemaligen Goldman Sachs Mitarbeiterin nicht aus. Mit RIDE Capital dringt sie seit der Gründung in eine männerdominierte Branche vor und will mit ihrem Blockchain-Startup Immobilieninvestments für Privatanleger zugänglich machen. Im letzten Jahr bedeutete das für sie, nicht nur harte Bretter zu bohren, sondern sich auch von den Widrigkeiten der aktuellen Situation nicht unterkriegen zu lassen. Denn Corona hat auch ihre Pläne ganz schön durcheinandergewirbelt. Statt über Millionen in Berlin mit Investoren zu verhandeln, saß sie auf einem Segelboot fest und schipperte einmal quer über den Atlantik. Mittlerweile ist die Powerfrau zurück in Berlin in ihrem Büro. Hinter ihr im Regal stehen einige dicke Bänder der Donald Duck-Comics, denn „von Dagobert Duck kann man viel über die Finanzbranche lernen“, sagt sie. Welche Bücher sie neben Comics aus Entenhausen noch mag, warum sie eigentlich einen Hochsee-Segelschein besitzt und wie man aus der Not immer noch eine Tugend machen kann, darüber sprechen wir in der kommenden Stunde.

Er begann seine Karriere bei Rocket Internet, bevor es ihn vor drei Jahren zum Payment-Pionier Klarna verschlug. Jetzt übernimmt Thomas Vagner die Geschäftsleitung für den wichtigen deutschsprachigen Raum, wo Klarna vor Jahren die Fintechs Sofort und Billpay gekauft hat. Gleichzeitig launcht das Unternehmen hierzulande ein Girokonto, die Kunden können nun nicht mehr nur über die App shoppen und bezahlen, sondern auch ihr Geld in Festgeld stecken. Was hat Klarna sonst noch vor? Darüber haben wir mit Vagner im Podcast gesprochen.

Alright, what's exciting (or funny...) about electronic bill pay, you ask?! Well...get yourself an electronic bill pay account and you will save 25% of your time that you can spend on something like finding an amazing podcast producer!!...actually, no, that will take no time because Colleen Lotz is right here! Not the point, this episode is all about the benefits of having electronic bill pay! When host, Ashley Altum, discovered this feat, her entire year was MADE. Give it a listen and see how you've been missing out! Show Notes: https://www.profitmatters.co/blog/life-changing-electronic-bill-pay/ Need a the best CPA in the biz...contact Ashley Altum at https://www.profitmatters.co/ Looking for a podcast producer...email colleenryan7@gmail.com  

Die Fintech-Gründerin Christine Kiefer baute in den vergangenen Jahren die Startups Billpay und Pair Finance mit auf. Dann wurde es erst einmal ruhig um sie. Nach eineinhalb Jahren Entwicklunszeit startet sie nun mit Ride. Ihr neues Startup soll mithilfe von Finanzcoaches bei der Geldanlage helfen. Wie diese Plattform genau funktioniert – und warum sie gerade auf einem Segelschiff arbeitet, das erzählt Kiefer im Podcast. Die Teilnahmebedingungen für das Angebot unseres heutigen Werbepartners Clark findet ihr unter: clark.de/financeforward

Wir freuen uns, dass wir heute die Akquisition von CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION durch Capco verkünden können. Das internationale Technologie- und Managementberatungsunternehmen mit über 5.000 Consultants in allen Financial Hubs weltweit hat seit 1998 Banken und Versicherungen fit für die Zukunft gemacht. Kombiniert mit unserer Erfahrung in der Entwicklung von Digitalstrategien, nutzerzentrierten Innovationen und der digitalen Transformation von Unternehmen freuen wir uns darauf, künftig gemeinsam kreativer Impulsgeber in einer Branche zu sein, die erst ganz am Anfang eines tiefgreifenden Wandels mit riesigem Potenzial steht. Zum Hintergrund: https://www.creativeconstruction.de/blog/wir-werden-teil-von-capco/ Dies haben wir zum Anlass genommen, Fintechs und die Finanzbranche in dieser Sonderfolge gemeinsam mit dem erfolgreichen Fintech-Gründer Nelson Holzner unter die Lupe zu nehmen. Kommende Woche machen wir im gewohnten Format weiter: stets die wichtigsten Entwicklungen im technologischen Umfeld, auch über die Finanzbranche hinaus. Many thanks for the music by Lee Rosevere https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/Music_For_Podcasts_5/Lee_Rosevere_-_Music_For_Podcasts_5_-_05_Start_the_Day

Schon kurz nach dem Start wollte Paypal sein Startup Billpay übernehmen. Doch Nelson Holzner wurde enttäuscht – ohne Vorwarnung kaufte es einen Wettbewerber. Der Gründer berappelte sich mit seinem Fintech, das Rechnungs- und Ratenkauf für Online-Händler anbietet. Jahre später verkaufte er Billpay dann gleich zweimal – zuletzt für etwa 70 Millionen Euro an das Payment-Unicorn Klarna. Wie er diese turbulente Zeit wahrgenommen hat – und was er mit seinem neuen Unternehmen Modifi vorhat, verrät er im Podcast.

***I apologize for audio quality*** Fight or Flight. Manual vs. Automatic.  When you automate behavior, you're putting yourself in a great position for success. You won't fall victim to forgetting, or emotion, which can really damage a financial plan.  Quick episode this week, and a few action items to get you on your way to your goals!   Questions? Email me: mpolicar@hightoweradvisors.com  

Some lucrative promos and heightened offers this week… 0:33 [Widely Targeted, check email associated with existing account] Plastiq 1% Mastercard CC Payments on Plastiq Schedule up to 3 x $2,000 payments By May 31, 2019 1% fee (rather than 2.5%) 1:52 BofA Alaska Personal 40,000 + $100 Statement Credit Direct link Source $75 annual fee […]

In this episode of City Life, Beverly B. Thompson sits down with our Water Management and Finance Departments to talk about your new options to pay your water bill. In the second half of CityLife, Durham Parks and Recreation shares the ways they have made it easier for youth and teens to play more this summer.

In this episode of City Life, Beverly B. Thompson sits down with our Water Management and Finance Departments to talk about your new options to pay your water bill. In the second half of CityLife, Durham Parks and Recreation shares the ways they have made it easier for youth and teens to play more this summer.

Apple genomför sitt tionde Iphone-släpp – de vinner och förlorar. Dessutom pratar Sven, Jonas och Mimi om de sju bolagen som pitchar på Startup Tour i Stockholm och om Visas roll när Klarna köpte Billpay. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this episode we discuss the following topics: – The acquisitions of Momondo, Comptel, BillPay and Taxibeat – Atomico’s latest, $765 million fund (but also Frontline’s new €60 million fund) – The EU agreeing to ‘portability’ of online subscriptions across borders – European Parliament calls for robot law, rejects robot tax – An interview with Jevgenijs Kazanins, CEO of Latvian fintech company TWINO – Funding for Bloomon, Soundtrack Your Brand and ID Finance. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

I veckans Digitalpodden avslöjar Jonas vilka svenska techbolag som börsnoteras i år. Josefin tittar närmare på Klarnas förvärv av tyska Billpay och duon reder ut varför i hela friden Electrolux köpt ett Kickstarterprojekt för en miljard svenska kronor. Digitalpodden pratar även om Flowminder, som använder sig av mobildata för att mäta fattigdom. Och Di Digitals Silicon Valley-korrespondent Miriam Olsson Jeffery fortsätter att syna techvärldens motvilja mot president Trump. Hur många stolar kan Elon Musk sitta på egentligen? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

#22: One giant choice we can make to get control of our money is to stop using credit cards. It may seem impossible but the steps I've laid out in this 4 part series gives anyone some time to work the process and even start back over again if they mess up.  Step 1 - Take the cards out of your wallet, put cash in your wallet Step 2 - Delete credit card numbers from all online accounts, use your bank's BillPay for online payments, Debit for purchases. Start saving the money you haven't been over-spending. Step 3 - Freeze your accounts to any further charges. By now you will start to see how much you've haven't been spending and how much more you can be saving. Step 4 - Realize you haven't been using the cards and you don't need them. Use your Debit card just like you used your credit card, there is no difference and they have the same protections when you don't use your PIN number.  For more information, visit the show notes at  

#20: Living Without Credit Cards takes more than just a pair of scissors and going cold turkey. This episode walks us through Step #3 to wean us off our dependency on plastic. Here is a recap of the steps so far: Step 1 - Take your cards out of your wallet and put cash in your wallet instead. Step 2 - Delete credit card numbers from your online accounts and use BillPay for online payments. Step 3 - Freeze your credit card accounts from any further charges and use the money you have been saving to build up your emergency fund. For more information, visit the show notes at   

#19: We can't really live or give at our full potential unless we stop borrowing more money and eliminate debt. One of the first things we have to do to pay off debt is to stop borrowing more money. That means weening our dependency away from credit cards and using cash or debit. This episode covers Step #2: Delete your credit card numbers from all online accounts. Some cool side effects of this exercise: You may find some accounts you no longer need (magazine subscriptions) or you may re-visit some contracts (revise your cell-phone plan or cable subscriptions). Substitution or Solution: Use your bank's free online BillPay to pay for online purchases. Also, attempt to purchase things locally for at least 1 month instead of online, only using Debit when absolutely necessary. Holla From The Impala: Investing in the market - ya can't lose! For more information, visit the show notes at