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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

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In today's episode, Ana Trujillo Limon talks with Mary Kate Gulick, CMO at Carson Group, Abby Salameh, CMO at CAIS, and Anthony Stich, COO at NaviPlan, about how they found their passion for marketing, how to create an effective marketing plan, and powerful insights for independent advisors and firms alike. You can find show notes and other information at CarsonGroup.com/Framework.

What is the “real value” that financial advisors deliver and that clients are willing to pay for? The value delivered by financial advisors has morphed over time. Decades ago, it was picking stocks and facilitating transactions. Then asset allocation and money management came into vogue. In the past 15 years, financial planning has become popular in parallel with the rise of financial planning software such as MoneyGuidePro, eMoney, and NaviPlan. Underlying this has been the accelerating pace of technology change as smartphones make the non-behavioral aspects of saving and managing money as simple as a few screen taps. Today, average financial advisors who remain wedded to the way they've been doing business will soon find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists. They'll be chased out of business by prospects who never became clients, by clients who left to work with advisors better-suited to their evolving needs. Just like smartphones replaced laptops, and laptops replaced desktops, the value delivered by financial advisors is shifting from being “all about the money” to a focus on helping clients align their money behavior with their life satisfaction. In this world, money is simply a tool. And the advisor's role is to smartly manage the money and collaboratively guide the client's behavior so they can live their best life possible with the money they have. In this world, advisors who remain focused on the “mechanics” of money will be replaced by advisors who focus on the “alignment” of money.

Tony Stich, COO of NaviPlan by InvestCloud sat down with Aaron Hasler and Mike Langford to explore how RIAs and independent financial advisors can dramatically increase the value of their business by adding financial planning services. The value increase is magnified in M&A situations where the RIA or advisor has acquired another business that had yet to offer financial planning services to clients. As Tony Stich explains, financial planning is one of the last bastions of revenue security for financial advisors. It also allows advisors to discover new assets and new opportunities to serve their clients.

Host, Jason Pereira, talks to panelists gathered at the WP Wealthtech Summit. The topic of discussion was “How the wealth industry is adapting to technology and revolutionizing the future of advice.” Episode Highlights: 1.18: Kendra Thompson is associated as a partner in Deloitte consulting practice. She leads the business called future of advice in investing, which focuses on what Canadian families care about as related to their investments? What are they willing to pay for? and How the industry is transforming to deliver that at a scale of profit?1.55: Joseph Lo, Vice President for Wealth Product Innovation for Broadridge. It is a global fintech company focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make the wealth management lifecycle better.2.05: Robert Smuk, President & CEO, Agora Dealer Services Corp. It is a B2B trading dealer created to help advisors and dealerships provide advice to all of their clients.2.33: Tom Burmeister, Vice President of Financial Planning with Naviplan and now happy to be a part of the InvestCloud family. 2.55: Jason's first question is, “As per your experience in the fintech world, what is the most troubling trend you see happening and what are risks and opportunities coming from that?”3.25: Tom talks about e-based models that are getting more focus. The risk with that is – it is a massive change.4.13: Robert says the trend he sees right now is the client's desire to have everything at their fingertips. “The financial services industry has been behind other industries, and our clients are now expecting what they get from other industries to be from this industry, and it is a real risk if we don't move further.”5.12: Joseph says we need to be more open and have more APIs that enable prime ecosystems to provide choice for advisors and can use to provide the service need for clients.5.35: Kendra says she sees an acceleration in the pace of modernization and feels out differently whether you are sitting with regulators and the challenges they are going to have to deal with innovation and simplification.7.25: Jason says that the focus of fintech is often on the investment side. He inquires, “How do you see technology is used to support other areas of financial planning?”7.48: Kendra says we focus a considerable amount of our energy on the front end of value change, and that's where a lot of noise and energy around fintech is heard.09.05: Joseph says the definition of advice is so much beyond investments now whether the advice is helping clients landing their insurance. 9.50: Robert says if we think about the expectations and if we think about the advisor's ability to provide that meaningful advice, then, in that case, pieces of advice are much broader scope than it was in the past. You need to spend more time with the client and understand them.11.14: Jason says if you want to maintain margin, you don't do that on the volume; you maintain base margin with volume. If you want to maintain margin, you have to be deep in that offering.12.04: Tom says we expect technology to come and transform. We need to work with stats, partners, and everybody else to make sure that when onboarding a client, we should personalize to what that client needs so that they can scale across the rest of your client base efficiently.12.20: Jason asks “How fintech influences vital space in traditional channels called banker and independent channels?”13.44: Robert says technology is at a point where the challenge in human nature is resistance to change. As people are willing to make several changes and we need to modernize our business, and so the role of fintech continues to guide us.14.16: Joseph agrees with Robert that advisors need to have a blueprint for what technology they introduce. He says fintech influence for independence is hunger for aggregation.15.45: Kendra says the most significant shift she sees, should benefit the independence is essentially recontamination of neighbor's end from the outside.17.36: Kendra says for bank's big challenge will be, they have a month of a merger of everything, and so for that, it must be like an internal merger about their platform and bringing all that to a single platform.18.48: Jason asks what should be the first step in terms of digitization? Joseph says the first step should be to focus on the things that are taking up the time you want to do, and secondly is really streamlining the conversations you have with clients and digitizing them.19.35: Robert says you need to understand your client's willingness to do and willing to use.21.05: Tom affirms “You should always start with the process first, not necessarily what gets technology in reforms over process around that. You have to do several book works to find out techniques which can help you to make better from better you are.”21.30: Kendra says she will highly encourage the identification of the right partner. Added to that she will encourage a small group of individuals not to over customize any out-of-the-box technology.23.30: Jason asks What is the biggest issue in providing advice to clients in the mass market? What trends are you seeing in addressing this issue?”23.50: Tom says digitizing onboarding is the biggest battle in scaling advice and finding all the tasks.24.13: Robert says once you digitize how many systems are out there that need to go, and we are willing to accept it. Digitize it upfront first and figure out how to float it everywhere that needs to float.24.56: Joseph agrees with Robert that getting systems talking together is the expectation for the next generation. 25.31: Kendra does not agree to everything. She says, “When we think about scaling advice, we have to think about challenging the paradigm. You either get advice or you don't.”30.48: The panelists talk about the most exciting and innovative technologies they have seen in the last 12 months.31.02: Robert talks about the “unified platform”; he has not seen it in Canada. Joseph is impressed by the AI-enabled search engine launched by “The Tifin Group.”32.34: Kendra votes for what Merrill Lynch's digital team has done. She is really impressed by their latest launch, “Fully Digital On-boarding”. 33.21: Tom reiterates that technology is allowing us to get access to mainstream fashion. 3 Key Points: Today's panelists are Tom Burmeister (VP of Financial Planning, NaviPlan by InvestCloud), Robert Smuk (President & CEO, Agora Dealer Services Corp), Kendra Thompson (Partner, National Wealth & Investment Management Leader, Deloitte Canada), Joseph Lo (VP Wealth Innovation, Broadridge).The panelist shares their views on the troubling trend that they see happening and what are the risks coming from that?”The wealthtech innovators talk about opportunities and unveil trends that are shaping the future of the wealth industry. They discuss the latest technology trends and how to incorporate a digital experience to accelerate business. Tweetable Quotes:“Clients are more tech-savvy than it ever been” – Robert Smuk“Technology enables to open eco systems” – Joseph Lo“It is easier to consume the trend and the changes that are closest to our own experiences” - Kendra Thompson“Investment is just one slice of what we see” – Joseph Lo“Technology is thought of equation of being successful in future” – Tom Burmeister“Vendor space is really getting better” – Kendra ThompsonResources Mentioned:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendrathompson/?originalSubdomain=cahttps://www2.deloitte.com/in/en.htmlhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/joewlo/?originalSubdomain=cahttps://www.broadridge.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomburmeisteradvicent/Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInPodcast Editing See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tony Stich, COO of Advicent NaviPlan joins Mike Langford for an expansive conversation about the evolution and future of financial planning. Tony and Mike also explore how technology will be employed to allow financial advisors to serve clients at scale during the coming wave of advisor transition.

Tony Stich is the chief operating officer at Advicent (you may know him as “Mr. Purple”). After seeing a drastic increase in clients making updates to their financial plans during the COVID-19 pandemic, his company took the unprecedented step of making NaviPlan available for free. In this episode of Power Your Advice, Doug Heikkinen and … Continue reading Episode 17 – Entering the Third Wave of Financial Advice – with Tony Stich →

Is it Thursday again already? This week, the COO of NaviPlan by Advicent, Tony Stich, joins us for a truly epic episode. He talks with us about creating brand awareness, how to plan for and execute an amazing party, and he reveals that the best tacos in Milwaukee can be found...in a gas station? It's all in this episode of TacoTech.

This is the 18th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, and Jason Pereira interviews Anthony Stich, the Chief Operating Officer of Advicent, the largest provider of financial software in the world. Anthony shares information reguarding Advicent’s product line which includes NaviPlan, the power of their advancements and influence, and the ways in which they are able to service their clients. ● 01:06 – Advicent is the financial software developer that created NaviPlan. They are in seven countries and on four continents. They also have client portals, advisor dashboard, and API technology.● 01:31 – They have about 100 enterprise clients, about 60 of which are blue chip clients, and service about 100,000 users.● 02:03 – Advicent’s roots trace back to 1969 by Gus Hansch, a CFP referred to as “The Father of Financial Planning.”● 03:18 – Anthony Stich began with Advicent, which is a name comprised of advice + enterprise, four years ago, and his career began in marketing first.● 04:25 – NaviPlan, by user counts, and adoption rates, is the biggest financial planning software in the world with a cash flow first priority.● 06:56 – NaviPlan’s average enterprise contract length is between 10-12 years.● 10:30 – NaviPlan is highly customizable thanks to building their portal on top of APIs.● 14:08 – Figlo is Advicent’s European tool, available in five countries, with an office in Rotterdam outside of Amsterdam. Figlo used the APIs first.● 15:51 – Adviser Briefcase is their marketing and communication engine that has about 700 documents that have been reviewed by FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority).● 17:01 – As far as integration, Advicent is enterprise-first with back offices with all the core processors of the top five custodians.● 23:35 – Advicent has about 300 team members, most are in Milwaukee Wisconsin, the Fintech capital of the world. There are also members in Toronto, Winnipeg, about 50 in Rotterdam, and scattered throughout the United States.● 30:36 – The mission state at Advicent is to enable everyone to understand and impact their financial future, and it is about the end client. 3 Key Points:1. Advicent has about 100 enterprise clients, about 60 of which are blue chip clients, and service about 100,000 users.2. NaviPlan’s average enterprise contract length is between 10-12 years.3. Advicent has about 300 team members, most are in Milwaukee Wisconsin, the Fintech capital of the world, the rest in here are also members in Toronto, Winnipeg, Rotterdam, and throughout the United States. Tweetable Quotes:- “We’ve built a portal on top of APIs. What we’ve done is decoupled the user experience from those engines itself. And by doing so, we’re allowing larger enterprises and institutions the ability to use that API within their ecosystem.” – Anthony Stich.- “We’ve given them the keys to the kingdom. We have unlocked the powerful calculations of NaviPlan, and allowed people to access them and put them wherever they so choose” – Anthony Stich.- “Not only are we thought leaders in consulting our partners through these regulatory challenges, we are also developing in advance.” – Anthony Stich. Resources Mentioned:● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook● Woodgate Financial – Website for Woodgate Financial● LinkedIn – Anthony Stich’s LinkedIn● Advicent – Website for Advicent See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Male Speaker: Louis XI, the great Spider King of France, had a weakness for astrology. He kept a court astrologer whom he admired until one day the man predicted that a lady of the court would die within eight days. When the prophecy came true, Louis was terrified thinking that either the man had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy, or that he was so versed in his science that his powers threatened Louis himself. In either case, the man had to be killed. One evening, Louis summoned the astrologer to his room. Before the man arrived, the king told his servants that when he gave the signal, they were to pick the astrologer up, carry him to the window, and hurl him to the ground. The astrologer soon arrived, but before giving the signal, Louis decided to ask him one last question. You claim to understand astrology and to know the fate of others. So, tell me what your fate will be and how long you have to live. The astrologer replied, I shall die just three days before you, Your Majesty. The king’s signal was never given. The man’s life was spared. The Spider King not only protected his astrologer for as long as he was alive, but he lavished him with gifts and had him tended by the finest court doctors. The astrologer survived Louis by several years, disproving his power of prophecy, but proving his mastery of power. Announcer: Kelly Coughlin, is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping banks C-level offices, navigate risks, and discover reward. He’s the host of the syndicated audio podcast bankbosun.com.  Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyd’s Bank, and Merrill Lynch.  On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-suite offices risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discovery reward.  And now your host, Kelly Coughlin.  Kelly Coughlin: Greetings. This is Kelly Coughlin, CEO of Bank Bosun, helping bank C-Suite executives with risk, regulation, and revenue creation in a sea of threats and opportunities. As we all know, other than funding the bank operations, banks do two things with their customer deposits. They invest in customers in the form of loans, and they invest in financial assets like U.S. Treasuries, mortgage backs, muni bonds, bank-owned life insurance. All banks do some combination of these investments that match their cash flow needs and their future liabilities. The common denominator of all these investments, whether it be loans or financial assets, is the competition for customer deposits, and these deposits can come in the form of checking and savings accounts, time deposits, CDs, or these “deposits”, and I'm doing air quotes here, they can come in the form of private client assets, wealth management assets, and/or trust account assets. These types of deposits are a great source of other fee income a bank can generate to operate the bank, generate profits, and pay a return to its owners. The margins are typically higher than net interest income margins, and it's potentially a great source of revenues and profits to the bank. However, these assets are a great source of revenues and profits to many others participating in the financial services ecosystem. To paraphrase Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities, as he's explaining to his daughter about what a bond was, he says, we don’t get the cake. We just fight for the crumbs, and there are many, many fighting for this cake that generates the crumbs. Other banks, big banks, small banks, brokers, small and large, independent financial planners, mutual fund companies, accounting firms. In fact, there are other one million individuals that fight for the crumbs as part of their business. I was CEO of an investment and financial technology company that helped some of these banks compete for trust and wealth management assets. And I know this implicitly. Competition is fierce, and harnessing the right tools and talents is critical to ensuring a bank can effectively compete. Having the ability to efficiently and consistently identify customer needs, risk tolerance, and financial profile, is important for all of these one million-plus advisors. But banks have multiple departments that face the client. The teller, private client rep, maybe securities broker, maybe insurance agent, wealth management, trust department, and of course the credit group. And this multi-facing setting presents interesting challenges to a bank. Today’s guest is the director of global marketing for a company that has one of the leading technology solutions that helps advisors, including banks, collect, compile, and present data related to customer needs, risk, and financial profiles. You might not recognize the company name Advicent, but you will probably recognize one of the flagship products, NaviPlan. Today’s guest is Tony Stich. Tony has experience with Bank Mutual in Milwaukee, and a number of other banks. I'll let him talk to you about that. He attended University of Wisconsin, and I'm very happy to have him today. And he's probably a dreaded Green Bay Packers fan, so I'm glad we're doing this before Super Bowl 51, because I'm fearful being a Minnesota Vikings fan, the Packers just might win the Super Bowl this year. Tony, are you there? Tony Stich: Kelly. Quite the introduction. Thank you so much. I am a Packer fan. I have to do full disclosure. In fact, my grandfather purchased original season tickets at Lambeau Field. He was one of the true attendees of the Ice Bowl. If you go by the stats, there was apparently about a quarter of a million attendees. My grandfather’s actually one of the real, authentic ones. We've had the same six tickets since they started selling season tickets, in fact. I attend myself the warmer games, and then the poor souls that like the December games, so be it. I do want to begin by just providing a brief history of my time in banking. I think it's very applicable to this conversation. I, in fact, started my career at a company called Guarantee Bank. They provided banking services for about a dozen states in the Midwest, but also across the country, they provided wholesale mortgage, secondary lending, you name it, again, to 49 states to which I served those needs. I also did some time first at AIG and then back to banking. And now, most recently, I was the director of marketing at Bank Mutual, third largest bank in Wisconsin. What we consider to be a community bank. We had 70 offices at the time. So, I have a great deal of understanding and awareness of the needs of banking. And in your introduction, and you talked a lot about the challenges a bank faces. I'd like to cover that today, ideally, but also how our technology can help bankers, especially at the C-Suite level in making sure they're saying relevant during this consumer revolution. Kelly Coughlin: I guess the, the thing that gets my attention first, Tony, there's been a lot of chatter about this robo advisor technology. My question to you is, where does the line between robo advisor and financial planning meet or differ? Or are they the same? Are you guys in the robo advisor space? Would you give us your definition of that and contrast it with a financial planning software? Tony Stich: Absolutely. Quite a hot topic. Let's define robo advice or robo advisor versus financial plan. Robo advisor is a technology that actually automates the entire process from obtaining the client through a website such as Betterment or WealthFront, and providing light advice based on data that is inputted from the user. A user could create a user profile, log into the system, provide a lot of data, both demographic data, but also financial data including in some cases goals, retirement age, and other objectives to meet retirement. And out from that robo advisor or technology, provides a lightweight plan. At no time is a human advisor involved with this planning process. It has to be done by the user establishing during the application process they want to be contacted by a financial advisor. What makes it even more interesting with robo advisors is oftentimes, you're not allowed to use a human advisor unless you have particular assets under manage, let's say $25,000 or greater. The unique difference between a robo advisor and a financial planning software is that in one situation, the advisor or financial professional’s inputting the data and then outputting the plan. In a robo advisor, it's simply websites, where the user inputs their own data, links their accounts, and then gets financial advice through that. Kelly Coughlin: It's kind of like they're the Uber of financial planning. They're trying to at least dis-intermediate the financial advisors and save the end customer anywhere from 50 basis points to 150 I suppose. Tony Stich: Right, and that's actually a really great point. We talked initially about the driving down of fees or money, a profitability an advisor can make, because a robo advisor on average charges 75 basis points less than a financial advisor. But what's interesting, Kelly, is much of our socioeconomic data that we have indicates that while millennials like the interaction with the robo advisor, they still want the expert advice of a financial advisor. In the last couple of years, we witnessed a considerable amount of activity in that space, both enterprise companies engaging with robo advisor technology, robo advisors working directly with consumers, but also look at the venture capital, companies infusing money into robo advice. A prediction that we have for 2017 includes robo advice in how we believe it is now a race to the bottom. Robo advice is becoming a commodity. It's driving down fees to manage assets; driving down the cost of doing business. In fairness, it is drawing a concern for bankers, wealth managers, registered investment advisors. However, we feel, have no concern. In fact, we're seeing a lot of the opposite in terms of millennials’ expectations for retirement advice. We look at robo advisors as a lead generation tool. It's really shedding light on what is necessary in today’s environment. That is the value of a financial plan. When you look at robo advice, the fiduciary rule set forth by the Department of Labor, and you couple that with a consumer revolution, millennials are beginning to want, if not expect or demand, a financial plan. To stay competitive against robo advisors; to stay competitive against other institutions, what can banks do to provide that level of service? I think that's a great segue into kind of explaining our technology stack at Advicent to better provide your listeners with an understanding of what we can offer to the banking space. First of all, a little bit of background about Advicent. The name comes from the word, of course advice. We have been in this industry for 50 years. In fact, Gus Hansch was the founder of our company. He was what they called the godfather of financial planning. He developed the technology that we use today. One of our financial planning engines, in fact, Financial Profiles. As you mentioned before, we also have NaviPlan. Those are the two banner products underneath our flagship financial planning engines. NaviPlan, of course, is the more sophisticated, comprehensive financial planning software. Financial Profiles is more of a down-and-dirty forecaster. It provides goal-based advice. It's designed more for helping institutions sell particular products using forecasting technology. Let's focus, of course, on the United States. So, let's focus on NaviPlan for today’s conversation. Our software is the calculation engine that a wealth manager, financial advisor, or another financial professional uses to generate advice through a financial plan. This advice can include things like estate planning, tax planning, asset allocation, retirement planning. What's very important here is, we believe firmly that an advisor must be at the core of this relationship with the client. Kelly Coughlin: I have some experience using NaviPlan. Would it be a fair statement to say that you guys were kind of the first generation of robo advisor, before that term was even around back in 2000, 2003? Tony Stich: Even back early 2003, we were talking about client portal technology, the ability to have a client access data digitally. We did talk about that at that time, but it wasn’t on our road map. Let's tie this back to banking for a minute. We looked in the mortgage process. There were some reports that we put together that when a person walked into a bank to meet with a loan officer to apply for a loan, they have already done eight hours of research online. Yet, they still chose to walk into an institution prior to making that life changing decision. We are finding the same holds true for financial planning. While robo advisors are attracting millennials, they're attracting more investors than ever before. At the end of the day, millennials, Generation X, baby boomers, we all still seek out expert advice from a human. We talk at length about the fact that robo advice cannot empathize with the loss of a child. We talk about how robo advice can never empathize with the loss of a job. While a financial advisor, which is now becoming a life coach for financing can come to your house, can talk to about your options, can truly understand the dynamic you have with your spouse or with your children, which can never be replaced by robo advice or the next thing, artificial intelligence. Kelly Coughlin: All right. Let's talk about how this type of technology can work with all of the different potential departments that can face the client. The teller, the private client rep, the securities broker, insurance agent, wealth management, trust, credit, all of these groups that can potentially have a relationship with the client. Is it your vision that the bank will get all of these groups to buy into the technology platform that you have and kind of force the trust people, who are a completely different animal than the securities brokers, for instance, who are completely different than the tellers? Tony Stich: And that is our vision, in fact. Let me talk a little bit about NaviPlan and why it's the number one financial planning technology across the globe. And that's because it is sophisticated, yet it's also simple. So, it's a repeatable process, as well, which we talk about all the time. Simple and repeatable, but also sophisticated. So, when you talked about that internal architecture, you mentioned bankers, tellers first, of course, personal bankers, maybe your investment team. Let's just go up to your trust services. Our technology allows those advisors to help manage people’s money through the financial planning technology. The buy-in question, that's simple. If you provide a technology that's easy to use, that shows the benefits of a product or service, it will certainly be adopted by that whole group. One more unique characteristic about Advicent is that we are the only provider of financial planning software that has end-to-end solutions. We offer a technology called Advisor Briefcase. Advisor Briefcase is a marketing communications tool that has over 600 pieces of FINRA reviewed content. This content is customizable to the bank or the financial advisor, and can be distributed to different groups of customers. Now, what's beautiful about the system is that the content is relative in nature to that person’s financial place in life based on groupings of the names that the financial advisor sets for them. Secondly, that data is again all FINRA reviewed. Our marketing communications tool, everything is looked at by FINRA. No one else can say that. So, every document that you use within AB, the Advisor Briefcase, actually has a letter from FINRA saying that they've acknowledged receipt and review of this documentation. That is the beginning part of the process. Attracting that prospect into the bank’s product offering set. Then, you go into the leads technology or the financial planning engine, where the wealth manager or the advisor engages with the client, after being attracted, of course, by the marketing communications, and then we put together a plan. We also offer technology, our Narrator technology, which is a stack of technology that surrounds of financial planning engines that includes a client portal; that includes API technology and that also includes a dashboard for business intelligence and metrics. I'm going to focus on the client portal for just a moment. Many community banks have a core processor, but they don’t have a lot of money to invest in PFM tools; account aggregation tools; things like that. I understand. I've actually been in banking. I've seen what they charge, core processors charge, for PFM technology. We actually offer that, too, at a much lower rate. It's not a usage rate. It's not a transaction rate. It's a flat rate. Kelly Coughlin: Tell us what PFM is. Tony Stich: Personal financial management. It's the ability for someone to manage all of their accounts in one roof. The benefit, of course, this to a bank is that you then get to see all the accounts. You get to see the whole wallet, and you get to see where you can help. Where you can reduce a car payment; where you can invest the money into an annuity; where you can do x, y, or z. This is actually called Narrator Client. It's our client portal technology. Kelly Coughlin: Does Narrator have the ability to pull in “held-away” assets as well? Tony Stich: Yes, so that's the account ag features. We have account aggregation technology, which allows you to see all the other banks that they're with. You can bring all that in to this one PFM technology, this one personal financial manager. You can put your car loan in. You can put your 401K in. Kelly Coughlin: Of those “held-away” assets, are they static or are they market to market? Tony Stich: Nightly update. Every night, that's updated. So, as we go along this client journey, we're back in this client portal. The advisor, the wealth manager, the trust team can actually review this data with the individual. What's unique about our client portal is that we don’t just account ag. We overlay your financial plan on top of that. So the end user can actually see their financial plan. See if they're drifting from a goal. See if they're on track for retirement so that can make a course correction. This is where we get into this BI, business intelligence. The ability to kind of aggregate all of the data of your customers under one roof within a dashboard, which allows your audit team to review it to make sure there's no anomalies, but also to make sure your wealth managers are reviewing it to make sure you are not losing AUM. Your demographics are normalized, anything you can imagine for the BI. And we will close that client journey with Advisor Briefcase again, that marketing communications tool. Now that you have these customers under your roof, you can actually use again that marketing communications to further educate your new clients on trends, more important data, newsletters, things like that. Community banks oftentimes don’t have a dedicated marketing department. In fact, many times, marketing person might be the administrative assistant or someone in operations. Perhaps a personal banker that does two roles. Advisor Briefcase, a very inexpensive tool, will help provide that content, that extra little lift that a bank needs to kind of stay above and beyond and keep that relevant data going to their customers. That's what sets us apart, is that we provide a technology stack that spans the client journey. Kelly Coughlin: And all of that is allegedly simple and repeatable. Tony Stich: Simple and repeatable, and we promise you that. It's simple and repeatable. Of course, technology requires a bit of adoption. There certainly is a learning curve. However, we make it as seamless as possible, especially for these community banks. We will again come in, we'll educate through the procurement process, through the implementation stage, and then we have account managers dedicated to you going forward. After the technology’s implemented, we check back. We make sure everything’s going well. If it's going really, really, really well, we're going to write a case study on you. We're going to brag about you. We're going to show our friends about you, because we know NaviPlan and our other technologies are going to help the banks stave off robo advice. They're going to help these community banks stave off the bigger competitors. They're going to keep you relevant during this consumer revolution. They're going to keep you relevant during this generational wealth transfer of $30 trillion in North America alone. We're going to help keep you relevant so that you are maintaining that AUM, maintaining those bank accounts, but also growing your business through digital technology. Kelly Coughlin: Yes. That’s good. If a bank wants to explore this further, should I just have them give you a call, then you can get them routed to the right person? Would that be fair enough? Tony Stich: You know what? That's probably the best approach. Our 800-number is 855-885-7526. If you want to shoot us an email, it's simply sales@AdvicentSolutions.com, but I want to encourage your listeners to visit Advicent, A-D-V-I-C-E-N-T.com, because we have a great deal of thought leadership content, blogs, videos, and you know what's really important for these C-Suite guys? They should be reading our white papers and downloads. We have some really intelligent stuff on client journey mapping; on staying relevant in the year 2020. This kind of, this is the kind of documents that these guys and gals want to read, because it's going to help them craft their one, three, and five year strategies and help them relay that message both vertically to their counterparts, and of course, horizontally. Kelly Coughlin: Tony, that's good stuff. Okay, thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate it. Tony Stich: Thank you, Kelly. We'll talk soon. Kelly Coughlin: Well that concludes Part One of my interview with Tony Stich, Director of Global Marketing for Advicent. In part one we spent quite a bit of time on robo-advisory technology and the difference between that and financial planning technology. And as I see it, the difference really is you have a system…a robot…with all its behind the scenes algorithims and logic creating a financial plan as opposed to Advicent’s advisor-driven technology, where you have a human wealth advisor utilizing some pretty cool technology with algorithims and logic that are simple and repeatable…I think you heard Tony say that a few times. In part two, we will focus on how Advicent integrates with a bank’s platform. How the technology passes bank procurement and vendor management standards and how Advicent’s technology can help a bank compete against non-bank brokers and advisors. Thanks for listening. Announcer: We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com. The audio content is produced and syndicated by Seth Greene, market domination with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by the Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. Voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. The view expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity, and do not in any way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor, or supplier.

Kelly Coughlin This is part two of my interview with Tony Stich, Director of Global Marketing at Advicent. In part one of my interview with Tony Stich, we focused on the definitions and differences between financial planning technology versus robo-advisory technology; and we spent some time on their technology solution, Naviplan which is designed to enable a bank financial advisor and other representatives of the bank collect, compile and review relevant customer financial planning information in a simple and repeatable way…simple and repeatable are Tony’s words and seem to be the enterprise-wide mantra of Advicent. We will start part two with some of the unique and special procurement and vendor management needs of banks and how Tony thinks Advicent is uniquely prepared versus all other of his competitors, when dealing with the integration of this technology with the banks platform. And also, how this technology can help banks better compete against non-bank brokers and advisors. Part two, Tony Stich, Advicent. We’ll start talking about procurement. Announcer: Kelly Coughlin, is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping banks C-level offices, navigate risks, and discover reward. He’s the host of the syndicated audio podcast bankbosun.com.  Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyd’s Bank, and Merrill Lynch.  On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-suite offices risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discovery reward.  And now your host, Kelly Coughlin.  Kelly Coughlin You said you wanted to talk about procurement. Is that procurement of data? Tony Stich: Technology procurement…the challenges the bank based due to Dodd-Frank legislation, when it wanted to add any new vendor into the fold. This regulation makes it very cumbersome and challenging to add new vendors. Now, this was all done in the efforts to minimize cyber security, privacy risks, but also the jeopardizing anyone’s accounts, deposits, things of that nature. So, when I mentioned procurement, Advicent keenly understands the challenges a bank faces when it attempts to adopt a new technology. First and foremost, we understand that that decision is not made lightly. When you consider a new, in this case, financial technology product, such as NaviPlan, you want to consider the alternatives. You want to look at our competitors. You want to look at what your core processor might offer. You want to look at all those decisions. Then, you want to talk with IT. You want to talk with auditing. You want to talk with the executive team. Advicent knows this, in fact, and we go through a step-by-step process that our competitors do not to make sure that procurement goes smoothly and all of the boxes are checked. So we know with a great deal of certainty the time it’ll take for us to implement our technology with your existing banking ecosystem. Our competitors simply don’t do that. And that comes from nearly 50 years of our experience in implementing enterprise wide technology. We have over 4,000 customers globally. We service their needs with our technologies. We are uniquely qualified to go through that procurement process; to show you our financials; to show you our ISO certification; to show you how we are going to tie back to your core processor, your legacy back office systems. I would argue that that is probably the largest inhibitor to making a decision, is the core processor, that back office solution. We know how to work with those individuals. We know how to work with that technology. We have the APIs. We have the integration. We are uniquely qualified to do that through the procurement process all the way through delivery. Kelly Coughlin: You understand the financial situation that community banks are in. They can't afford a $100,000 installation. Do you guys have an offering that recognizes the financial statement of these banks that gives them a solution they can afford? Tony Stich: Great question, Kelly, and absolutely. We have installed the large enterprise companies in the world. We have provided installations at the smallest community banks in the world. One thing remains the same. We understand this implementation process, and we have different levels of service; which includes onsite visits; which includes training the trainers; which includes implementation. That all can cost a variety of different levels that will meet those needs. But what's important is, we'll help you go through ROI calculations. We can actually go through the procurement process with you. We're going to show you the cost to both implement and stand up the program, but then we'll show you the recovery time. For the sake of this discussion, let's just walk into a community bank. There's your tellers, your loan officers, and in some cases, you will have a wealth manager or trust team on demand right there at the office. The point of our technology is, we can make it readily available. Simple, easy to use, right at your teller line. I think the biggest thing a bank wants to do is increase the share of wallet. I think we'd all agree. What better way to do that is at the teller line? Making sure the teller’s asking the correct questions. Making sure the teller’s offering the opportunity to answer a quick questionnaire on this iPad or tablet, where a bank visit can turn into a conversion. I remember back in the days when the financial advisor at a bank would say to the teller, hey, do me a favor. Next time you see someone with a larger savings account, that should still happen today. That seamless communication between tellers, personal bankers, and your trust teams, that should still happen, and we allow that to happen with our technology. Unless they opt in, a bank cannot share with a wealth manager the data of that customer, because they're two separate entities, correct? Kelly Coughlin: Yeah. Tony Stich: A wealth management company, which is not FDIC insured, of course, and the bank. So, how do you get past that? How do you get that wallet share? You use our technology. Let me explain. When the individual’s waiting in line for the teller. If you have, for instance, tablets set up with the nice leads tools, just sitting there waiting to be touched or waiting to be engaged with while the teller’s transacting, that's a great time for that individual perhaps to key in some data. Once that data’s keyed in, then the tellers picks up on that cue. I don’t want to go into too much detail on that whole buying or selling process, but what I'm suggesting is, technology bridges the gap between the teller and the wealth manager or financial advisor, and then of course, the customer kind of goes through that process more seamlessly. Kelly Coughlin: I'm sure that all banks have some sort of financial planning process going. It may not be very efficient and simple and repeatable, but they have something. Aside from kind of a home-grown bunch of Excel spreadsheets connected together, linked with a word processing document type thing, aside from that, are you guys tending to replace existing technology solutions? Or are these all pretty much new installations that are kind of replacing, upgrading a home-grown process? Tony Stich: We will come in, and it's just you with taking out your existing process and implementing our technology. And I want to be very clear, Kelly. Our technology replaces your process in a good way. We show you how to best provide financial advice. We're not going to tell you to do your jobs. What we're going to do is say, hey, you want to follow fiduciary standard? Do you want to make sure you're providing the right advice? Our technology will do so. I cringe at the idea of financial advice being provided through Microsoft Excel. Nothing wrong with Microsoft, but the very idea that calculations through Microsoft Excel are providing financial advice, I'm just not sure that that is the right thing to do for yourself clients. Our technology replaces all of that. It makes it easy to do. And finally, if you do have existing technology, possibly through your core processor, oftentimes we win those deals because our calculations are better. Our processes are simpler. And quite frankly, we are the best at providing financial plans through our technology. We usually replace but I'll tell you one thing. You won't miss a beat. We will integrate your back-office technology. We'll make sure your processes still follow the same course, and with our work flow technology, with our compliance frameworks, we're going to help make sure that the plans are going the right way. Auditing sees them. Your trust team might see them. If a personal banker’s getting involved, making sure the financial advisor’s always seeing it as well. This will help replace processes that are quite frankly, probably antiquated in nature. This will help make sure that you are competing against robo advice, because you are now providing a technological solution that provides good advice, good reporting, and if you choose to do so, a client portal that exceeds the expectations of the modern-day investor. Kelly Coughlin: Banks are competing against brokers and financial advisors that are using a Schwab platform, Fidelity platform, Pershing, and TD Ameritrade. I think between those four custodian brokers, it's probably about 75% to 85% of the market. When you look at the offering Schwab, Ameritrade, Fidelity, Pershing have what competitive edge do you think banks would have by using your technology? What are you seeing those four are using in terms of technology that these banks would compete against? Tony Stich: This is one of our value props. This is our value proposition. We will tell you any bank of any size that we can give you technology that will enable your advisors to provide the same experience as the Fidelitys and the Schwabs of the world. Now, to be completely fair and on the record, we integrate very deeply with all those brokers. We have great relationships with all of them. However, it's very important—Pershing, for instance, Schwab, Fidelity, they all offer client portals. They all offer simplified financial planning technology. They let advisors use our technology. So, the bank has to compete. How do you compete? By offering the same service. Now, I'm going to tell you in my opinion, what the gamma is. Let's lay it on the table. You have a bank. Let's say a community bank, and you adopt or implement NaviPlan technology in a client portal. It's beautifully designed. It's well branded. It offers the same level of service that you're going to get from Pershing’s client portal with their technology. Here's the gamma. It's the community banker. That’s the value add. The person I believe is going to naturally gravitate to that community banker, to that trusted source. We offer technology better than those four custodians, and what we'll do differently is, we'll help your advisors, your wealth managers, become that gamma, become that value proposition that you can say, hey, you should be investing with us. You should be getting your advice from us. In short, we provide you the technology to stay competitive and to be valuable to your customers and prospects. You're on par with technology. You have evened the playing field, and now it goes to the bread and butter. It goes to the community relationships. It goes to your charitable efforts. We talk about that. That, again, that's the value prop. That's why community banks are going to win, is because, keep it equal in technology, you're going to win everywhere else. Kelly Coughlin: Yes. Right. Tony Stich: You know, we have a mission here at Advicent, and that's for everyone to understand and impact their financial future, and we really believe that people ought to have a financial plan. If we can help one bank or 1,000 banks provide financial advice to the customers, that makes us happy. I think it's important that people understand that there are options out there that you can beat the robos. You can beat the custodians. You just need to know that the technologies available to you, and you need to embrace that change. Kelly Coughlin: Great, okay. I think I've got all my questions. Anything else you wanted to add to this? Tony Stich: Banks are slow to adopt. They are, they're hesitant for change, and we just hope we can be the catalyst, because the reality is, they do need to change. I don’t think the branch infrastructure’s going to go away. I think it's going to iterate. It's going to, it's going to, like, look different. The banks really need to embrace technology. We were over in London back in March, and we actually wrote a white paper on how incumbent banks need to start thinking like startups, and I'll get you that white paper, because it's really fascinating how what we lay out in a few steps of how to change the culture of your bank or your large enterprise institution and how you can start thinking like a startup so you can start adopting the technology to be successful, especially in, in, in today’s day and age. I want to encourage your listeners to visit Advicent, because we have a great deal of thought leadership content, blogs, videos, and you know what's really important for these C-Suite guys? They should be reading our white papers and downloads. We have some really intelligent stuff on client journey mapping, on staying relevant in the year 2020. Thank you so much for having me, Kelly Kelly Coughlin: Okay, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. That concludes my two part interview series with Tony Stitch at Advicent. Tony can be reached at 855-885-7526 or you can shoot him an email a sales@AdvicentSolutions.com, A-D-V-I-C-E-N-T.com That’s it for me. Kelly Coughlin at BankBosun. Thanks for listening. Announcer: We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com. The audio content is produced and syndicated by Seth Greene, market domination with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by the Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. Voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. The view expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity, and do not in any way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor, or supplier.

Financial planning as practiced today is going away and will be replaced by an entirely new way of interacting with and delivering value and connection to clients. The days of offering a free financial plan in order to snag AUM are done. In today's show, I chat with Phil Cunningham, CEO of Advicent, the global provider of SaaS technology solutions for the financial services industry. You may know them better through their products including NaviPlan®, Profiles™ and Figlo™ financial planning tools, the Advisor Briefcase® marketing tool and the Narrator™ application builder. Advicent has about 100,000 advisor clients across North America so Phil has a bird's-eye view of what's happening in the fintech space. Our conversation covers the spectrum including: The changing role of the financial advisor (See: Going beyond money management to make a deeper client connection). How advisors can stay relevant and add value. The impact of technology on the client experience, managing your business, marketing it, and advising clients. What "big data" means for advisors and how you'll benefit from it (See: Jud Bergman discussing big data). Where financial planning fits into the equation and how the definition of financial planning is changing radically. What you should do with Robo-technology to benefit from it instead of being threatened by it. How to compete against a big brand like Vanguard.