How AI Is Helping Financial Advisors and Teams Serve Their Clients | With Expert Matt Reiner

So just to kind of help understand a little bit about the, the product a bit better for myself, how is Benjamin helping other of these advisors and their team working with their clients? Can you speak more about how the, the AI piece is integrated into that?

Yeah, so Benjamin, as I said, is a business support system, and the business support system is meant to utilize the APIs within the, you know, the advanced technologies that we now have, open APIs, to connect all the technologies that financial advisor uses to bring all the data into one standard location. We cleanse it, we unify it, we structure it, and then we allow the advisor to utilize simplistic RPA, or robotic process automation, to train Benjamin based on their processes and their data that's specific to them. To go execute on tasks that fall within five different buckets, right? Anything from prospecting to meetings. So something as simple as you know scheduling an annual review meeting or doing meeting preparation prior to a meeting to onboarding, helping getting paperwork set up and finalized to ultimately proactive maintenance. Anything that happens post a meeting, right? Following through on different tasks to also know your client. How do you keep data up to date and clean, and then keep it within all the systems structured in that way? Benjamin is meant to live in the background, right? It's a, it's a connective tissue of all the technologies. That's the challenge we face in our industry, is that we live in disparate systems, and every person on the team has a different goal and objective from each system, and they utilize the system in a different way. And so it's really hard to scale a company or a firm, right? We always have capacity issues of how many clients we have, and then we have to go hire more people. And in an industry where we have margins that are being compressed, Because we're charging the same fee and delivering more services and more value, we have to figure out how to help that middle part of the P&L so that we can keep margins higher and deliver more services and more value, and we can serve more people. And so our technology brings all the data together to act on different tasks, and then we utilize natural language processing to be able to have conversations with the client and with internal team members to be able to execute on those menial mundane tasks that are repetitive. There's actually 40% of the day of an advisor and their team is spent doing menial, mundane, repeatable, and automatable tasks. And our goal as a firm is that we want to automate all of those to be able to— if we can give 40% of time back to teams, they can do what is most important. Our belief and one of our core values is that this is a human business. Our core value is be human-centric. What that means is that we're looking to build technology to allow teams to be able to spend more human-to-human time with their clients because that's ultimately a differentiator in this industry, is the relationship that you're able to build. And when it comes to behavioral finance and behavioral economics and psychology of managing money, there's slickness and seamlessness of a robo, but there's a need of a human, right? And we're trying to combine the two where the human can have that EQ and that emotional intelligence to keep people from making those silly decisions And we believe that if we can build technology to take off a lot of that menial stuff, every person in the team now can play a part in that. And so, you know, whether it's a task that's part of a workflow in your CRM, as opposed to assigning it to a human, let's just use something simple as scheduling, right? Even if the human has to send the Calendly link out now, as opposed to the human having to do that 400 times because you have 100 clients and you meet with them 4 times a year, Benjamin's able to actually go and execute that task, complete it, schedule the meeting, and then start doing meeting preparation and bringing documents and data from all the systems to the advisor prior to the meeting. So we are able to scale and leverage teams drastically, and we're able to now put a nominal dollar value on the ROI that Benjamin's able to provide. So we are— we're not trying to replace any of the technologies in a tech stack of an advisor. We're trying to get better utilization out of those technologies. And that's also what's won us over inside the community, right? Because the technology partners look at us as a true partner. As opposed to a threat, and that's, that's a great position to be in.

Makes sense. I mean, as somebody who's charging, you know, those high hourly rates, or even, you know, the kind of, you know, wages these people are being charged to the firm, you know, 1 hour saved, I mean, if they can be focused on high-value tasks of what they're being paid for versus the mundane tasks that, you know, a, some, you know, maybe an assistant could do, or if you can automate it, then I mean, there's this huge ROI on that so they can keep doing, you know, on the high-value tasks. This is kind of a personal, maybe a little bit more interesting, you know, maybe question from our audience. You know, it's a bit tricky of a conversation with clients who are selling, or when selling, you know, advice solution as a registered advisor, right? You're selling this solution, but now, you know, computers are being more involved in kind of the decision of where the investments are made. AI is doing a lot of the backend work of deciding how to optimize your portfolio. What do you see kind of an expected increase of ROI when leveraging these type of tools, like as an investment advisor or team versus the old way? And, you know, where do you see that balance?

Yeah, I think that our industry is going through some drastic and major evolution, right? The thing is, is that the robo, you can see it in different evolutions, right? You had Charles Schwab and Vanguard come in the '70s, and they brought in discount brokers. What they did is they enlarged— they expanded the pie of people who could get services. And then you had E-Trade doing online in the '90s, and then you had Betterment and Wealthfront and Personal Capital in the late— before 2010 or so, 2008, 2009, with the robo solution. It just continued to expand the pie. But what it's done is that it's slicked up and streamlined a lot of the— some of the inefficiencies with onboarding. And what it's mainly done, though, is commoditize investment management. Investment management with the evolution of the ETFs, exchange-traded funds, with robo-advisors, knowing that passive investing tends to perform better than active investing, or at least it's like a reversion to a mean, and outperforming the market consistently is a really difficult thing, even with an algorithm, just because of the metrics of reversion to the mean. This business is evolving. And what I mean by that is that we're becoming, instead of just being investment managers, we're becoming wealth managers, and we're helping people with all of the wealth advising. And it's everything from investment management, still is a part of it, but you have to be better at building a relationship and serving them from estate planning, tax planning, all around financial planning. And so what I think that AI has done and what the robo-advisors have done is that they should be used in combination with advisors, as opposed to thinking of them as threats. We should look at them as tools. And if we can look at them as tools, again, we are a service-based business that people trust us because they build a strong bond with us and a relationship with us that we can help them Keep their emotions in check, both in the good and the bad time, keep them from being too greedy and keep them from being too fearful, and help them see— because we see it time and time again because we manage so many people's clients— help to navigate them. And the moment that we can shift our mind and accept that investment management has become commoditized, then I think that our industry can provide more value, more services beyond what we've ever done before, which is an enhancement to the ROI of what we do as an advisor, where our value isn't hinged on what we do and how we perform in the market, but actually how we actually help clients reach milestones and goals that they have within their whole life, which is so much more powerful, uh, than what the market did because the market's out of our control. But what we can do is we can help them budget, help them estate planning, helping them, you know, build, you know, generational wealth, uh, and protect that. That's the value of an advisor, is the, uh, that psychology of it. You know, we look back, the pandemic has been a rough time. There's a lot of people that sold, you know, March and April at the beginning of the pandemic, um, and they never got back in. And we saw it in 2008, 2009. But then we saw a lot of people that had an advisor and they talked to their advisor and some of them stayed in. And the ones that got out versus the ones that stayed in, the, the gap of where their assets are right now is drastic. Right? Just because cash earned nothing and the markets actually, they recovered in all aspects. And, you know, I think that that's a value of an advisor, right? It's not that we made better investment decisions, it's that we helped them see and understand how to not emotionally react to what's going on in the headlines in the world and stay true to their financial plan. Now, not every advisor did that, not everybody did that, but that's an example of where I think advisors can add value. And it's the relationship and emotional side of it. And we need to be better at that. And that's what AI is allowing us to do now. Is to get better and more focused in that way.