When Santiago Burridge
Now a solutions provider, Burridge said he wanted to find a way to leverage technology to harness “every advisor’s superpower” — that being the ability to guide and coach clients to their dreams.
He also wanted to deepen advisor and client relationships by focusing on family members often overlooked by planners, including spouses not typically engaged in money matters or children who may one day become the primary decision-makers.
With that approach and two years of growth in Australia in tow, the fintech company with a client engagement platform that aims to put families first is making its stateside debut, announcing the appointment of a new U.S. CEO and sharing plans to make more superhero advisors.
“Customers are our North Star. They have always been at the core of how we've thought about our platform, and we're very passionate about the financial advice industry because that's our background,” Burridge told Financial Planning. “I've been around too long in this industry, and nearly every piece of tech that I've ever used has underdelivered. It's never delivered on the promise … so I spend a lot of time thinking about Lumiant and how we can make it better.”
Currently serving nearly 4,000 families globally via its cloud-based client experience platform, Lumiant wants to help advisors more easily marry a client’s life goals and financial goals. Burridge said the tools they offer place a greater emphasis on life outcomes and extend the planning conversation beyond whoever may be considered head of the household.
By removing that key person dependency and focusing more on family members like the “non-financial spouse,” Burridge believes advisors can boost referrals and retention while forging stronger bonds with the people they advise.
To accomplish this, the software tracks and measures a variety of goals that have nothing to do with dollars and cents. Instead, advisors craft client conversations around values, ideals and aspirations.
For example, the top-ranked goals of clients on the Lumiant platform is supporting and protecting the people they love. Burridge said knowing that, advisors are able to give better advice and maintain long-term relationships with clients.
Lumiant focuses the spotlight on previously unengaged members of the family by creating accounts for each of them and tracking how often the non-financial spouse interacts with the platform. The goal is to keep them involved by encouraging them to take more active roles.
The platform’s newest feature, called
Through scenario planning and modeling the lives they want to live, families can see if they’re on track, underfunded or overfunded. This allows advisors to better identify what drives clients and aid them in making money decisions that align with who they want to be and what’s most important to them.
“In our opinion everything has been built for the first three months of the client relationship, and we want to build a platform for 30 years of it,” Burridge said. “We're just very proud that we've built a platform that heroes advice, heroes the non-financial spouse, and that helps this profession and this industry become the profession that it deserves to be. We know our clients better than any other profession in the world. Technology just hasn't supported that.
While Tuesday brought the news of Lumiant’s U.S. launch, it also came with an announcement that Blake Wood will lead the company’s stateside expansion as U.S. CEO. Most recently senior vice president of corporate strategy for
He added that Lumiant’s mission of centering the non-financial spouse resonates with him after seeing a lack of advisor engagement affect his loved ones.
“A little over a year ago, my father passed away and my mother was a non-financial spouse. It was eye-opening,” Wood told Financial Planning. “She was lost, her advisor was not engaged with her at all, and it was just a tough time. She didn't have anywhere to go to figure out where things were, and I showed up with boxes of paper everywhere.
“If an advisor would have engaged her and my father earlier on in a better conversation about this, I think it would have changed the last 20 years, and hopefully the next 20 years of her life, significantly.”
Wood said as part of his due diligence, he went through the value session that advisors using the Lumiant platform undergo to identify a client’s core values.
Keeping it in the family, he described the strong emotional reactions experienced by his mother and father-in-law when he recently asked them to identify their values in a similar fashion. Like many others, his in-laws put protecting the people they love at the top of their lists.
“They sat there, having these deep conversations that a lot of spouses aren't having. You're not providing them solutions. You're not even providing them guidance. You're just asking them why (something) is important and what success means to you,” Wood said. “Financial professionals should be helping clients be successful in all aspects of their life. Not just retiring with a boatload of money.”
Lumiant’s platform has two membership levels
“Traditional financial planning software largely exists to onboard a new client and help sell portfolio management or other financial products,” Gavin Spitzner, president of Wealth Consulting Partners and a non-executive director of the board at Lumiant said in a statement. “Lumiant has been purpose-built to sustain deep, meaningful long-term advice-based, emotionally charged relationships with clients. I have yet to see another technology provider champion and engage all members of a household like Lumiant.”
