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Our special look back at the Future Proof Festival continues through a series of interviews with insiders and newsmakers conducted by the Financial Planning editorial team.
In this clip, Wealthtech Reporter Justin L. Mack chats with Docupace CEO David Knoch, a fintech veteran who joined the California-based company focused on helping financial professionals on the move in 2020
At Future Proof 2022, Knoch was still celebrating a big milestone Dcoupace reached just a couple months before the start of the festival:
For Knoch, being able to take away operational pain for wealth managers is a privilege and an honor. Eliminating pain points is what good wealthtech is all about.
And bigger than that, making the process of "re-papering" clients less painless opens the door for advisors to focus on more important aspects of the job. "They tend to venture into areas like talking about disability, or long term care, or other parts of life that a lot of times financial advisors don't get to," Knoch said.
Knoch is also aware of how the role of the advisor has changed over time, and he wants Docupace to be an ally as wealth managers continue to level up.
"When I started, it was a quantitative job. It was about math. It was about portfolio management returns. There was a lot of technical stuff involved there. If you didn't know what standard deviation was, you couldn't serve a client. That's not the financial services industry we live in today," he said. "I mean, it's not to say that we don't need people who understand portfolio accounting and know how to do the performance math. But the reality is financial advisors are as much behavioral counselors for their clients these days as they are anything else. If you can't help someone have a conversation about their hopes, dreams and aspirations … talking about money and mortality are two of the most terrifying things. People that don't want to talk about it.
"And the financial planning process … you can't do it without having that conversation (or) if you don't understand humans and don't care about them at a deeply personal level. To me, that's the most profound shift."
Check out the full interview below.
Future Proof, an event billed as the first wealth festival, attracted more than 2,200 people to Huntington Beach, California, last year. Financial Planning was a sponsor of the event. Dates for Future Proof 2023 have already been announced. The event is slated to return to the beach Sept. 10-13, 2023.
