Do you ever look out of your window and imagine being at the beach? Do you wish you could fast-forward through Wall Street's looming rainy season and get to something a little sunnier?
Then allow Financial Planning to transport you back to the dog days of summer and directly into the heart of Surf City.
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 speaks with Santiago Burridge, co-founder and CEO of Australia-based
Thatmove included a stateside expansion in May 2022 and naming Blake Wood as
"So we're having a few wins," Burridge told Mack while joking that working on the beach is the "Australian way" to do business. He added that for years, the industry has taken an approach that has ignored scores of people.
When he founded Lumiant, Burridge 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.
He recalled the advisor-client interactions he used to have, and presented that as an example of what Lumiant wants to do differently.
"I sat there as an advisor and I got to know people and I spent time understanding what drove them in life. And I empathized with them and did everything I could to get to know them. Right? Then I did this beautiful document that told them all of my advice and gave them this amazing, magical risk profile. And 50% of the customer relationship was completely bored out of their brain, you know?" Burridge said.
"I talked about how smart, I guess, I was and how good this firm was, and all this stuff. And none of it mattered. And I really started to understand something that was foundational to building Lumiant. That everything that ever has been created by this industry has been created for that sale. How can I onboard the client? I got a better piece of something. I've got a wonderful graph. I've got to be a tool that enables you to see this incredible stuff … and then I put it into this incredible magical filing cabinet never to be seen again."
Along with transitioning conversations to what clients cared about and engaging members of the household often disregarded, Burridge wants to ensure that advisors put client values ahead of returns.
"We saw this gaping hole. There was this whole new kind of developed world (and) ecosystem around advice that ignored that person," he said. "So we built a platform to hero that. To hero advice."
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.
