Critical digital tools for future-focused firms

Jennifer Wing, SVP, head of asset management at GeoWealth; Rod Sayegh, managing director, head of digital strategy & programs at Fiduciary Trust Company International; Samantha Russell, chief evangelist at FMG.

Transcription:

Jen Wing: (00:07)

Good morning, everyone. I'm Jen wing, head of asset management for GLF. I'm thrilled to be here this morning, critical technology for advisors is one of the things that GLF has near and dear to their heart. We are turn key asset management platform or tamp. We are technology enabled and advisor led, but with that, we wanted to kind of hear a little bit about who we have today. So if I could see a show of hands who is in technology and product at their firm. Okay. Got a couple of you. Who is a financial advisor? One, we've got one. Okay. Who's in marketing operations. I know we've got a PR. Any, anything else? Anyone else?

speaker 2: (00:59)

Investment management?

Jen Wing: (01:01)

Investment management. That's what I heard. Okay, good. so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our panelists, I've got right next to me, Rod Sage, he's the managing director and head of digital strategy and programs at fiduciary trust company international, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Franklin Templeton. Then we've got Samantha Russell, chief evangelist at FMG suites, which is a marketing technology platform for advisors and insurance professionals. And, the far left. We've got Todd roak founder of careful, which is a technology platform that helps banks and advisors serve older clients and then bridge those clients with the next generation of clients. Got that. Okay. So today we're talking about critical digital tools for future focused firms, and we've got three main subjects that we wanna cover. First one is collaboration and relationship management with digital tools. Second one is content and communications, and then the timeliness and in the importance of the timeliness of that content and communications for clients. And the third one, no surprise here is gonna be data and transparency in today's environment. So starting with collaboration in 2020, we were catapulted into taking meetings on zoom. But since then in the last couple of years, we've come much further. We do interviews on zoom. We close deals on zoom. We build real relationships on video and zoom and digital tools. So with that, I would like to actually hear from all of you, what should advisors and companies be doing to help facilitate relationships? And where do you think this is going? Is there another phase of this trend? So starting with the first, Rod will start with you.

Rod Sage: (03:01)

I think, when you look at zoom and what it did, for least for our firm is it brought our clients into our advisor's homes and vice versa. We also found that clients understood what was going on with their portfolio better during those like quarterly or annual reviews, because they could see the PowerPoint deck better than on a screen. And that says something to kind of the power of those tools. But for me, where it's going with us is, our strategy's called the digital collaborative advice strategy. And you really look at that. It's really bringing kind of the same experience to the advisor and to the client, oftentimes firms forget about the advisor and they invest greatly in their, front office or, their client facing tools, but really making those one and the same and giving the advisor the same tools that the client has and vice versa. And that's where we see things going in, both collaborating over a digital means.

Jen Wing: (03:58)

So is that kind of an interactive platform that the advisor looks at the client looks at? You're all looking at the same decking content?

Rod Sage: (04:07)

That's right. And it's actually, we're moving away from the deck. We're moving to a web based,. Yes no more binding machines or anything else like that. Moving away from that and having a, really a web based quarterly or annual whatever that happens to be tool that can I really answer questions that the client has real time? So it could the client can throw anything at an advisor. And the last thing advisor wants to do is look dumb or not have the answer. So you have to give them basically our entire CRM and reporting tool in a really nice fashion that they can quickly answer right. For the client. And then still give a printable version for those who, wanna memorialize that. Yeah.

Jen Wing: (04:43)

And Sam FMG suites is you're helping with collaboration across the advisor and the client, but you're also helping collaboration within, the firm and across employees. Do you wanna talk a little bit about both of those?

Samantha Russell: (04:56)

Well I think one of the things that, when I hear a lot about this, it's interesting we were talking off stage a little bit about, the company that my husband and I built, which we sold into FMG called 20 over 10, when we started it in 2013, we started it remote. So, people would ask all the time, like how do you get to know employees? How are you gonna hire people all across the country and get to know them? And I think that it's the same thing that some people are still having a hard time wrapping their head around when it comes to meeting with their own clients, how do I facilitate this relationship and build trust and, feel like the client is gonna actually share things with me and build that rapport because it's harder to do through a screen, but I would make the argument that that is really a generational thing. In a lot of ways, younger generations, they're very used to opening up. They they'll pull up Instagram and re they'll talk to their phone and create these quick stories and they'll share everything about their life and they have no problem doing, being vulnerable in that way, and so they don't want to necessarily have to get in their car and drive all the way to your office, to meet with you for an hour, they would much rather just hop on a zoom call and do it that way, and so I think it really depends upon the generation that we're talking with. If, it even feels like a switch.

Jen Wing: (06:12)

Yeah. And speaking of generations, Todd, can you offer some commentary here?

Todd Roak: (06:19)

Sure, we use technology. We believe that the tech allows advisor to serve whole families, allows you to do to give you an example. There's we allow advisors to serve older adults, but there are 45 million people in the U.S who are involved in their parents, daily finances, probably a lot of people in this room who are involved in their parents, kinda daily finances that logging in is their parents taking their passwords and transacting from those accounts, co-mingling money in their own accounts. This person, the financial caregiver, same amount of people that have student loans. And yet they're completely underserved by a lot of digital tools, almost completely ignore, they're doing what they think they're supposed to doing. So, the way we think about digital tools through advisors we're one of them it allows for what we call whole family relationships in a way that isn't okay, this is how I'm gonna get you your information. And then later I'm gonna find out who else is involved in the picture. So to be very tactical from the careful lens we think it expands who you can engage and how you can engage them.

Jen Wing: (07:31)

Yeah. And I think there's this big part of the population that we call the sandwich generation, right. Myself included where you're taking care of. I see heads nodding, you're taking care of your kids, figuring out like the 529 and the 401k and for yourselves. And then you also got, your aging parents, you're aging parents that not only, don't remember their passwords and don't know where their mortgage necessarily is. So you're trying to do that and then balance all of it. And then, they're calling you, like I can't remember my password for, my mortgage. So I think that resonates with a lot of people that are trying to do this yeah. And balance.

Todd Roak: (08:08)

Yeah, you've got somebody it's hard to find somebody in financial services who's so deeply underserved. Yeah, really. Cuz they're, been looking for life stages forever tools forever. And the digital tools today really are open up the ability to serve people in completely different ways and be underserved customers. One of those.

Jen Wing: (08:36)

Yeah. And so I have the stat here that 90% of wealthy children fire their parents, financial advisor after inheriting wealth, 90% and being in a generation where we still have our parents and some of friends and family inheriting wealth, like I believe that's statistic. I think most, of the time financial advisors just don't have the time to manage their clients and grow their business and market and do the operations. And, by the way, we're in a bear market now better reach out to, everyone. So I think this is a really powerful SAP for me and Rodd, I'd love to hear from you what advisors and companies could do to do better than these stats

Rod Sage: (09:20)

Invite the next generation to the meeting. Right. Like, I look at my partner's parents they're in there eighties, mid eighties, his mom still does Zumba every day. And she's the type who will thinks the subject line is where you're supposed to type all the information in the email. so that and she has a LinkedIn profile with no picture. It says retired. And she just sends me messages on my wall that says, like, call me. So that that's what she has, but she's using these digital tools. Right. And they won't talk about their finances with their four kids. All they'll tell them is like, you'll get some money when we die. And the thing is like there's no way that my partner is gonna retain that financial advisors. So it's like it's reaching out and having those multigenerational family meetings and that's really what needs to happen. And I don't know a lot of families where their kids live in the same zip code or city as their aging parents do right. Often they might. Right. Todd, you probably have some great stats on this, but the collaboration tools and really just exposing it's about transparency, exposing the information that everyone feels comfortable with. And talking about that and also bringing your younger advisors or the advisors that can speak the same language. Right. We has anyone here met the Kardashians.

Jen Wing: (10:36)

I feel like I know them from Instagram.

Rod Sage: (10:38)

That's exactly the point. Right? You know them from these tools and you get to know them through these digital tools and these, digital actions, but you've never really met the Kardashians. Right. So it's really applying those same principles to that same model.

Jen Wing: (10:52)

Right. And so I wanna talk Sam about marketing to different generations. Do you market differently to do different generations? Can you do that? How do you think about that from a marketing lens.

Samantha Russell: (11:04)

Yes, absolutely. One of the tenants of marketing is you wanna, your message needs to meet people where they are. So if somebody that you're trying to target is not on Instagram to your point, then you can be there all day long and your message is never gonna get through to them. I think one of the interesting things, going back to your point about people firing their parents' advisor, I don't think that the air, the child thinks of it as I'm firing my parents' advisor. If they think of, it doesn't even cross their mind to continue the relationship cuz they don't have the relationship yet. So they're just thinking, I need to go find my own advisor, not I'm firing my parents' advisor. And so or maybe they already have one that that they're working with and striking while the iron is hot. We all know this. You wanna, establish those relationships when the need, even before the need is there so that when somebody finally does have a need to hire someone, you're who they think of. So there's some great advisors I work with where they create programs, for instance, where with their clients they offer free financial planning and, reviews and things like that all the way up until those children are one person does it until they're 26 to coincide when their normally insurance kicks you off your parents' insurance at 26. So it's a nice it's a nice time to do it. I guess it makes sense. Other times they'll say as we're managing your parents money, you can be a part of those meetings, as you mentioned. And we'll also talk about the ramifications with their estate plan of what it's gonna mean for you to really that whole what's in it for me mindset. So that's what you can do and with current clients, when we're talking about prospects too, which if the child isn't your client yet, then they're really still a prospect, right. Then you need to be thinking about how do you market to them just like you would to any other prospect. And so that's making sure you have an email list where you're sending information to them, that is going to be relevant for them. So you're not just emailing the parents, but maybe you have a separate email list that you keep of all of the children, of your particular clients and they're getting timely communications that are specific to them, things like that.

Jen Wing: (13:16)

Yeah. And speaking of timely communications, one of the other topics we learned to talk about today, I think this is particularly relevant for this generation. That's used to immediate gratification and social and Twitter and all these things, but it's important, no matter what generation you're looking at. And I think Todd, when I think about financial scams for elderly and aging parents, like it feels like there's a new scam every day, I ignore real emails cuz I think they might be fishing, my mom is probably calling me about her Amazon account that she needs to send some crypto for. But how do you think about that? How important is it and how are you tackling that with different companies and advisors? Yeah,

Todd Roak: (14:00)

So, there's about 50 billion of fraud every year just targeted toward 12 older adults and it's fraud from outside, but just as much. And the advisors in this room know this as much as it's elder fraud, direct, it also comes from within the trusted circle. And I sometimes it's we're always obsessed over that one moment, when things are moved out of an account, but systematic drain by someone close to a client is pretty sinister as well, to look for those things. So, we look for things that disproportionately affect older adults. So political donations that wind up being recurring, both political parties, convinced your older clients, that the world was ending and to sign up for recurring political donations every month, things like gift cards, duplicate payments, every fraud rule that's written for the kind of general population is almost on its head. It's the inverse of things for older adults. But content is a big piece of this as well. And we write we either write a technical rule or an article every week and push that out as fast as possible, the example that I used, there was one of our advisor clients and this will happen to everybody in this room in the next 90 days, told us about a particular Zelle scam that's going around, you will get a text say if you haven't already saying that you have Zelle someone $1,500 and would you like to, and was this real, of course it's not, you get a phone call within 30 seconds, that phone call says, hi, we're the fraud department. Would you like to reverse that this doesn't look like it was you? And the reversal of that is actually when you're sending money out of your account, now it's hard to take when you're kind of our age, but your parents it's really they don't know Zelle. They don't know things like that. And they move things out. So, timely content moving getting your advisor something to push out under their brand every week. Really, really important. Just as much as the technology.

Jen Wing: (16:00)

Yep, and Rod thinking about the investment perspective, wealth management the markets are moving very quickly these days, there's a lot of volatility. People are panicking when they see moves like this. How are you thinking about getting content out faster? Not overloading people getting the right content to the right people.

Rod Sage: (16:20)

It's, their marketing department and the digital department really work together to figure out what is the right piece per client, and really give them, a number of things to peruse, right? Cause it's not just one topic that is germane to everyone at the moment. Part of that is using the CRM and other tools to really tag information about a client that we know, and really using analytics around the data. We know to say like, this is right for this client. Or we think this is right for this client and start to push that out. But there's a real important cadence of how often content goes out, not to overload as well. Like, cause the last thing you want is a lot of opt outs because you're sending too much information and come back. I think the other isI know we'll talk about transparency, but you really have to push the transparency. I know we talk about millennials in the next generation they like instant gratification, but is there anyone in the room who doesn't like instant gratification? Yeah. Like I like baruka and Charlie chocolate factor. I want it now. Right. And I think we all want that. It's just that generation forced us all to get there, right with that. And that really relays itself to, transparency and making sure you're hitting the right content.

Samantha Russell: (17:29)

And, I think to just follow up on that point there's this big discussion all the time in my world, in the marketing world, I keep doing that where we, always say like, well, how much is too much communication? Right? Like people are always worried. They're over communicating with their clients, but nobody really fires their advisor for overcommunicating. They ignore that email, but they might go looking for somebody if you don't reassure them enough and you don't communicate enough why charts did a really great study recently. And they talked about how much people want communication from their advisor. And the general takeaway. I can't remember the exact stat though, was that people are not communicating enough because they're scared. They're overcommunicating. One thing you can also do, you know? So like a lot of times people will come to me and say, well, I send this monthly newsletter, a weekly newsletter, no one reads it. And then I go and look, and the subject line is just like your weekly newsletter. Well, that doesn't tell me anything about what I'm gonna read. So I'm just gonna ignore it. But if you say something like the market's dropped 20%, here's what I want you to know because that's, what's in the body of this month's newsletter. People are gonna be a lot more likely to open it and read it. And the timeliness is just so, so important. I mean, sending somebody a recap of what the markets did in may today on June 17th just does not cut it anymore. And, that also comes back in talk, talking about tools and, firms are just gonna have to rise to the occasion with compliance workflows and getting things approved faster because people expect to be able to have you help them contextualize what's going on the day. It's happening, not two weeks later,

Rod Sage: (19:06)

Right? It's the early we call it the early and often rule. How many times has maybe your kid come home with a report card with a grade that you're not happy with and. They could have told you that three months. I don't have kids. How often do you get great reports once a quarter, once a quarter, right? You, they could have told you that three months ago that they weren't doing good in math or science or whatever. Instead of getting the report card and seeing it's, not an A, I'm sure everyone wants A's here, but C or D or and F right. And you could have that, but wouldn't it be great if your kid just said like, Hey, I'm not really doing good in this subject three months ahead of time. Right. So you could have got ahead of it, right. To see the report card later, you're like. Like, why don't you tell me that earlier?

Jen Wing: (19:46)

Right, and one thing I'll say as an X content employee is that it's not always writing the content. That's the hard thing. And Sam, you kind of touched on this in terms of compliance workflows. And I know people in the audience know this, but like what are some best practices in getting the right people, the right processes, collaboration so that you can get that tweet or that fin talk or whatever you're doing out the door.

Samantha Russell: (20:14)

Yeah. I mean, I think it does come down to having the right digital tools. So at FMG, for instance, we have it built in where for each individual advisor they're affiliated with their BD or their RA, somebody who's got a compliance officer reviewing everything. So it's a systematic process. There's other tools out there like that you need to put these processes in place. And then I personally think being on this side of it in marketing world, that the firms that are really gonna succeed in the future, they are going to invest in true compliance positions that do nothing but review content and review it fast so that the right they can keep attracting people. I mean, I mentioned this before, but the number one reason that people will leave a firm to go independent RIA is because of fees. They want more of that, the wallet chair, and the second reason is marketing. And so people are gonna continue to flee if they feel like they're handcuffed because they can't tweet about something or they can't help people feel better about this bear market, just because of a compliance is saying you chose the wrong word here.

Jen Wing: (21:16)

Right. So if I think about today's wave, I think we have a pretty good handle on the sales forces and the CRMs. And we know what stage everything is in, but it sounds like the next kind of wave of technology will be figuring out that getting the content, the communications, the marketing out the door faster, or the investment report, whatever that is. Right, let's talk about data and transparency. People don't like meeting with financial advisors, according to the A R P nearly half of us adults say, they'd rather visit the dentist than meet with a financial advisor. And there are many reasons maybe they don't wanna hear the truth, but a big part of it, I believe is that this industry has historically been incredibly, non- transparent, like a little bit of a black box, 175 page PDF that nobody understands. So I wanna hear from each of you on this one, we'll start with you rod, but what are you doing to tackle this, to provide more data and transparency and then provide it back to business so that you can take action on it.

Rod Sage: (22:20)

It's, about creating very similar experiences, right? So that they're not scared about what the client is gonna see. I think the other thing is we are about ready to launch performance online, which doesn't really seem big. But in a lot of firms fact with my advisor, I have to ask him to turn that feature on for me. And it's turned off by default, and I care the performance of your account performance of my yes portfolio, which is what I care about the most. Okay. Let's be real, not like what I could retire. I wanna know the performance, especially right now. So what we are doing is we are automatically opting all clients into performance and getting that and advisor can't turn it off. Right, so that is a radical transformation. Yes. I mean, it's, they get it every quarter? Why can't they see it in real time? And it's really kind of pushing the boundaries. And I think on a lot of firms, it's always placating the advisor and I rather placate the client. Right. That's who the revenue comes from, that's who the income comes from. That's why we all have jobs. That's what pays my salary. And that's, really the most important thing, but you kind of have to do the same thing for the advisor at all times, cause they don't wanna be lost in the dark.

Todd Roak: (23:32)

I'd also say just Agree, performance is incredibly important, but it's what you look for as well. There's a lot of things that you can use the data for. We build an AI engine just to look for other things. Alot of the reason they don't wanna see their advisors. They don't wanna see the balance all the time, they don't like that, but I'll just give you an example of what you can do with the data, from our world. So Johns Hopkins study from last year that concluded that Alzheimer's can first be diagnosed in the wallet up to six years before it can be diagnosed in the doctor's office. Right? So that's our data set. That's your data set? That's incredible. So, we can see that we can have an impactful conversation with a family that says, actually we see a pattern of forgetfulness, of two standard deviations of when you used to pay bills, things like that. And so you can in the spirit of transparency, whether it's okay, this is how your passwords work, this is where your documents are, there's a lot of value you can add if you build a smart enough brain. And so AI does a lot of work there to make sense of data that before was put, okay, you're doing well. You're not doing well. You're doing just okay, performance, but there's lots of other things that you can do for families that, that deepen that relationship. If or have an engine where you can leverage the data.

Samantha Russell: (24:53)

And I think when one of the things that, I'm always focused out and when it comes to transparency is building trust. I mean, one of the things that our industry really struggles with is still people feeling like, how do I know which of these advisors I'm going to trust or, and that's why for the longest time referrals were so big, right? But there's a whole new generation. The spectrum group did a study recently. And they found that when you ask people, what's the number one most important factor with choosing an advisor getting a referral from friends or family has fallen way down that list, actually. So it's not the number one most important like thing that people will go for anymore. There's other things involved. And one of the things that I find that's really, really impactful is something called the mere exposure effect. So it's like when you hear a song on the radio and you don't like it the first time, but the more you hear it, the more you like it, the more we see somebody and we hear from them, the more we start to think that we like them and we can trust them. And so if you already have content, you already have communications. If you can get somebody from your firm to be the face of the company and take that blog post or that written email and create a quick video on it, where they're, giving that message in a video format where someone can see your face, hear your voice, see that like me, you talk with your hands all the time. And you do that every single week, that mere exposure effect is going to start to build that trust and start to make somebody feel like they can see the person beyond the screen. So I'm a really big proponent for video in that way and helping to really make, people feel that they can trust the potential advisor that they're gonna hire.

Rod Sage: (26:32)

It's very true. We did a study of clients. We had a firm go out interview clients around this client book, things we were reinventing it. And one constant theme we had was, well, I like the lunch that I get. Right. And that it was more of a social type of meeting with the other person and collaborating more so than the actual, 137 page book. So speaking to your advisor, they liked the lunch.

Jen Wing: (26:57)

Okay. The lunch at the meeting with the financial advisor, that's what they're well, usually get a pretty good meal outta financial advisor. Okay. Last one I wanna talk about is time savings. We know advisors are busy according to a recent Kitsis research study. The typical financial advisor spends less than half of their time on direct client tasks and only 20% actually meeting with clients. So I'd like to hear from all of you on this one again, on what advisors and what companies can be doing to help advisors to save time.

Rod Sage: (27:35)

Automate, automate, automate, automate, get out of the operational tasks out of the front office. You gotta automate and provide them, information that they can act upon. What do I need to know about today? What do I need to react to? What do I need to do? Get it done and over with.

Samantha Russell: (27:53)

From a marketing perspective, so many people, they hear the word content marketing, and it just makes them feel like a deer in headlights. They don't know where to start. It feels overwhelming. They're like, I'm a financial advisor, not a content marketer. I don't know where to start. So one thing I try to tell people is switch the word content to just communications. You all know how to communicate with your clients. You know how to send an email a big time savings is to take the communications you're already doing. So what are you saying in the meeting? What kind of emails are you sending and repurpose them into content and then bulk, a batch them for approval. So if you're already sending out an email to everybody, Hey, we officially entered a bear market. You take that, you make a few tweaks to it. And now you say to compliance, I wanna put this on my website as a blog post, and then you keep repurposing it. You take a couple snippets of it and you turn them into social media posts. So you don't need to recreate the wheel. Content marketing is really just communications that you're already having with your clients.

Todd Roak: (28:52)

I would say, at this day, tech can do a whole lot of work for you. So let it do the work. It's, it's another way of saying automation. There are these conversations that take an advisor out of their day of how do I deal with my dad? or I feel unprepared or I feel like I'm getting scammed, how do I stay independent? Should I open a joint, very specific question. Should I open a joint bank account with my kids? How do I do my parents' taxes? That stuff that takes you out of your day can be automated. That content can be automated, the rules that look for those things, they exist, but most of these things are done manually today, particularly when it comes to bridging generations and bringing in the next generation of clients. So, it's a long winded way of saying the tech can do the work for you, even when it seems like it's, specific or niche. And so, I would be open to, across the board with content or marketing portfolio management or kind of elder care, there are now tools for this that didn't exist three years ago. Right. And let those tools do the work for you and give your back your day.

Jen Wing: (30:08)

All right. Well, we're out of time, if you wanna quickly give your websites, if people wanna find more information really quickly and then we'll.

Todd Roak: (30:15)

Yeah, so we're at, getcareful.com. There's tons of information on how we work with advisors there.

Jen Wing: (30:22)

Great. Sam, fmgsuite.com

Speaker 6: (30:26)

Fiduciarytrust.com

Jen Wing: (30:28)

And geowealth.com

Todd Roak: (30:30)

So thank you all for being here. Thank you everyone. And we'll have a good one.