With an analogy that began with Tom Cruise and ended with Abraham Lincoln, fintech executive Oleg Tishkevich layed out the all too common scenario of financial advisors struggling to solve complex tech problems on their own.
But Tishkevich, the CEO of the
One wrong move can lead to havoc, confusion and the need to rebuild into something better. After all, Shelley's 1818 novel's full title is "Frankenstein's Monster: The Modern Prometheus."
Tishkevich then invited the crowd of sweating but engaged listeners to imagine a wealth management industry that mirrored the universe that Cruise inhabited in the movie "Minority Report. The executive's vision: One where advisors could rely on just their tech stack and a wave of their hands to clear even the largest integration, automation and data management issues.
"Why can't the future be like that? Why can't applications in the future be already completely pre-integrated into everything that we do?" Tishkevich asked. "Then we drop a little piece here and a little piece there. Just like an artist creates a unique Mona Lisa as opposed to building a Frankenstien. In my mind, that's where we're going.
"And as Abraham Lincoln said, the best way to predict the future is to create one."
The conversation between Tishkevich and
The inaugural event, organized by Advisor Circle and Ritholtz Wealth Management, attracted more than 2,200 people to the West Coast to close out the summer, including more than 1,000 financial advisors.
Guests included 220 speakers and nearly 100 sponsors including Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors, Morningstar fintech firms, investment managers and financial news outlets. Financial Planning is also a sponsor
Tishkevich's example required a bit of creative thinking for listeners but was rooted in actionable advice on how advisors can leverage tech to serve investment clients better. From integration woes and M&A challenges to succession plans and data collection, the trio of speakers gavea soup-to- nuts session that advisors could digest in 40 minutes.
As for where wealthtech is going next, Mackrill explained how much has changed over his nearly 20 years in the industry. When he started his career in 2004 with Orion, he said things were fairly basic and largely server-based.
Since then, the rise of products and services like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics sparked a shift that made customer relationship management software what he called "the central heartbeat" of an organization.
Mackrill then asked how many people enjoyed paying their CRM bills every month.
Very few hands shot up sweltering heat.
"Isn't it a lot higher than you thought it would be when you first signed a contract?" Mackrill asked. "It's a little bit cumbersome. We've tried to jam so many things into our CRM. But the structure of the CRM is not reflective of your firm. Your firm is, in a lot of ways, conforming to the CRM."
He added that the cloud experience offered greater flexibility and the opportunity for advisors to do business on their own terms.
"Which is why many of you have gone independent. You want to do business on your own terms," Mackrill said.
"If you serve surgeons, say you want to be the best platform for surgeons and I'm going to control my data to deliver that ideal client experience that knows the best action for them to take going forward," he said. "If your customers are other advisors, it's the same idea. How do I uniquely deliver value to them that's better and more informed and using the best technology?"
But Tishkevich said that for many advisory firms, the discussion of how to do things differently is a difficult one. There is the desire to evolve, but also the fear that something that isn't broken may become so once "fixed."
"It's kind of a thing you have to overcome. Otherwise, you're just stuck in the infinite loop of 'let's just do it how we did it before.' And that doesn't solve the problem," he said. "It's up to having a strong leader, which usually is very helpful. Community types of solutions are sometimes more challenging because you really have to agree with everybody so those tend to take more time."
Mackrill said when solving for the future, keep the past in mind. Otherwise, the fears of doom and repetition may rear their ugly head. He referred to necessity-based tech solutions that advisors turned to during the pandemic, and urged them not to abandon them.
He added that if you get stuck, the best question to ask is "why?," and to view the technology you create or employ as an asset to your firm, instead of an operational system that merely gets the job done.
In Greek mythology, Prometheus created fire and mortals. Echoing Tishkevich's theme, Mackrill said that "you have to be delicate anytime you're trying to implement change. You want to do it from the ground up. But whatever decision we're making, let's pretend it's the future. Why are we doing this stuff here? Why are we scanning documents? Why do we have these filing cabinets? Why are we not acting the same way we did in March of 2020?
"Let's think about this from a modern standpoint and let's let that guide our perspective on the decision we make everyday going forward."
