When wealth technology leader Dani Fava made a career pivot to the Carson Group last month, she was partly looking to jump on a moving train.
"Where generative AI is at right now is transformative for the industry, and it's going to significantly increase the [clients] that every individual advisor can serve," said Fava, the new chief strategy officer at Carson Group. "Where do you want to be right when that happens? You want to be at the advisory firm who is at an accelerated growth in the journey, because that's going to be the clearest winner in this equation."
Carson Group has certainly been accelerating its C-suite with a slew of top hires, many with tech backgrounds, including Fava, who had been group president at Envestnet. Fava joined the same day LPL Financial veteran Heather Randolph Carter came on board as chief marketing officer, with both hirings announced on April 11. Just a few days prior, the firm announced that its founder and CEO Ron Carson was stepping over to the chairman role, appointing Burt White as the new CEO. And more recently, Carson Group named Daniel Applegarth the new chief financial officer and Eric Vrba as controller; both had worked at Orion Advisor Solutions.
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Fava sat down with Financial Planning to discuss where Carson Group is headed as well as the role she will play with her background in technology amid a rapidly evolving AI landscape, and the importance of using AI to work less at your desk.
"We need to step away from the screen. And that means innovating for the home office so our home office can spend more time with our partners," she said. "In order to do that, we need to free ourselves."
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Financial Planning: What were the reasons that led you to the Carson Group?
Dani Fava: I really wanted to think about what type of company I wanted to go to. Not only that, but the point that company was at in their journey, and also who I wanted to work with.
It's so important to know the people who you want to spend time with because you can end up spending more time with them next to your own family. So I spent a long time interviewing the executive team and specifically Burt [White]. And what I found was an authentic group of leaders who really care about stakeholders at Carson and are incredibly passionate about what they do.
They all want to win together, not to win in spite of each other. The level of authenticity that I've experienced here at Carson has been incredible.
You have companies in every stage, from startup to sunset. And Carson is on the accelerated growth part of the journey. The fuel is in the rocket ship, and we are ready to grow like crazy.
So when you put those two elements together: this amazing group of authentic people, with the point in time where the company is at, which is accelerated growth. That's really the magic, right? Carson is the place without question. That's where I want to be.
FP: Where would you like to take Carson Group within your role?
DF: I would distill it down to two things that I'm looking at that are really high on the list.
One, our M&A strategy at Carson is core to our success, so we're going to get that right. And data is a big part of that. So data strategy is really high on my list. We need to understand ourselves from a data perspective; we need to understand firms from a data perspective. That will help us find the next best firm to add to the Carson ecosystem.
So then there's the Carson partners, right? We've got this ecosystem of great advisors. I look at that, and I say, 'Where do we need to innovate?' We want to innovate inside of Carson. We want to be able to coach and mentor and understand and listen. And in order to do that, we need to free ourselves.
We need to step away from the screen. And that means innovating for the home office so our home office can spend more time with our partners.
And then the second thing is innovating for our partners to enable them to do the same.
So I look at innovation within Carson in those two areas, but for the same reason: to get away from the screen and go spend time with each other.
FP: Diving further into innovation, what does that mean in terms of where Carson Group is going with AI?
DF: We're experimenting. We just rolled out our AI training for our home office and partners, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And we're experimenting not only with leveraging AI vendors, but we're also experimenting internally.
And go back to data for a second: What's the real differentiator around AI? What do you need to be good at in order to take AI?
The thing you need to be good at is you have to have a core source of data. So if you layer AI on top of a well-oiled data machine and really compelling content, those are the companies that are going to win, the ones who have data.
For example, we see really innovative things happening at Morningstar with their research. They're able to layer AI on top of their research because they have all of that data, and they've spent decades creating research in that machine.
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So at Carson, we've got amazing expertise and the data layer. We're experimenting internally, and we believe we have all of the final pieces in place that will make our AI journey really powerful, and our willingness to partner with great vendors is also going to help us get there.
FP: Where do you see the best fit in AI in the wealth management space?
DF: I think a lot about that, because I can see it in every area of wealth management. But I want to give an answer on where I think the best, most impactful place is going to be. And if I had to sum it up into one word, that word would be: communication.
So communication is so broad, right? It's the clients. It can be developing content. That's communicating with your clients or communicating with research. I can communicate with a spreadsheet. It could be a better communicator. It could be language-translation-like communication; it can be a whole host of things that AI will enhance, will augment, will create.
And that's where I would say the opportunity is inside the wealth management space, which is very much human, right? It's going to be at the communication layer, where I think the most impactful place AI will help.
FP: On the flip side, where could you see the common missteps, or the potential pitfalls, for the industry when everyone is experimenting with AI?
DF: There are a lot of "gotchas." There are a lot of things to be concerned about.
The thing that keeps me up at night around artificial intelligence is the potential for bias. We're very focused on that here. We think a lot about: How do we bring a more diverse set of advisors into the industry, into Carson? How do we get a more diverse set of clientele?
This causes me to think about bias inside of AI. If we are training AI on the current dataset that exists within wealth management, clients, advisors — all of those things — it's very homogenous. Our data set inside of wealth management is very homogenous, just historically.
So if we train an AI model on any set of data inside of wealth management, it very well may end up having biases that we don't want it to have. And it's very hard to unwind those biases.
Because it's a product of the data that was used to train the model. I think that's the biggest thing I would highlight. This is a very real risk in terms of using AI, and you have to be careful what you use it for.
