The Augmented Advisor: Recent Episodes

Blueleaf

The Augmented Advisor podcast, presented by Blueleaf, is a monthly show hosted by John Prendergast.

The show is designed to help independent financial advisors, RIAs, and broker-dealers learn new ways to grow their businesses, better engage clients and prospects, and become more efficient and profitable.

Some of today's brightest minds in finance, technology, marketing, and the wider world of business join John for an exploration of new ideas that we think you will find interesting and useful in your business.

Julie Pinkerton, CEO and Founder of ClientFirst by Evozen noticed a couple of trends that have likely affected your business in the recent years. First, clients are moving to other parts of the country well before their retirement years. This wave of movement has created interesting challenges for financial advisors looking to continue to serve these clients to the fullest.

Second, the demographics of the average financial advisor’s client roster is changing rapidly. For many clients, this means their financial needs and experience preferences are likely different from those the advisor has served in the past.

To help financial advisors successfully service their clients in this new landscape, Julie and her team at ClientFirst have built the wealth management industry’s first “national, fully diverse community for rainmakers to find, vet and professionally connect with each other as Centers of Influence.”

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Episode 10 - How To Build a Flexible Wealth Management Business That Supports Your Lifestyle and Unlocks Growth with Derek Notman
Bonus Episode - Why RIAs Need To Protect, Preserve and Defend The Fiduciary Standard with Knut Rostad
DNA Behavior - At the 15:26 mark, Julie describes how ClientFirst uses behavioral analytics to help financial advisors find the best matches for partners to assist in serving their clients.

H. Adam Holt, CEO and Founder of Asset-Map is not the first financial advisor to have had an epiphany that led to a revamped approach to how we worked with his clients. But, he just might be the guy who's quest to design a client experience that led to the most meaningful impact for the wealth management industry to date.

As you'll hear in this episode of the podcast, Adam and his team at Asset-Map have made a key discovery about the business of wealth management. We are in the "process as a service" business. Financial advice isn't just being a resource for clients and managing assets. It is about a process for helping clients maximize their life experience.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Adam’s Podcast - Rethink. The Financial Advisor podcast
John’s Book Recommendation - Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design

Ryan George, CMO of Docupace made an astute observation that "the industry has let the complications of the wealth management experience flow down to the client experience unnecessarily" and in this episode John Prendergast and Mike Langford joined him in-person for a conversation to unpack that assertion. The trio also dove into several ways that financial advisors can leverage technologies, including emerging AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard, to improve their clients' wealth management experience.

Resources From This Episode:

The Surprising Value of Personal Advice - Episode 7 of the Augmented Advisor Podcast featuring an in-depth interview with Kieran Bol from PriceMetrix by McKinsey on the state of the wealth management industry.
RIA Productivity Suite - John and Ryan dove into the benefits of systematizing the workflow of an RIA as a key mechanism for improving the wealth management experience for advisors and their teams.

This is a fascinating conversational journey that ranges from using Michael Kitces as a verb to leveraging deep empathy and the “righteous tricks” to help clients. Carl Richards shares some of his deep thinking about real financial planning, wealth management and working with human beings and their money to help them accomplish what’s important to them.

Core Topics Covered In This Episode

Making the abstract concrete
Words (and shared meaning) matter - the different meanings of Exposure
Deep empathy and the “righteous tricks” to help clients
Money, meaning and real financial planning (aligning your use of capital with what’s important to you)
Humans and their money are a complex adaptive system so goal clarification happens overtime as the system adapts and change
You could “Michael Kitces” your way to it (deep analysis)
Compound “influence”

Additional Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Behavior Gap - This is Carl's business and the jumping off point for "all things Carl Richards"
Behavior Gap Radio - This is Carl's daily podcast where he practices his concept of "compound influence".
The Society of Advice - Here there be dragons.
"Wanting" by Luke Burgis - Carl mentioned this book as a resource for financial advisors to gain a deeper understanding of what clients really want.
Larry Swedroe - Carl mentioned how Larry wrote books to share stories about his investment process and philosophies as a little marketing hack.

Episode Guests:

Katie Hendrix, Senior Researcher and Vice President at Dimensional Fund Advisors
Shawn Jaberzadeh, Vice President at Dimensional Fund Advisors

Historically, it has been incredibly labor intensive for financial advisors to deliver bespoke investment management to their clients. Until recently, even large companies like Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) required a minimum account balance of $20 million for their separate managed account (SMA) offering.

However, advances in technology and a shift in demand from clients has led DFA to create a solution that is set to democratize SMAs for the average investor.

You can learn more about the new SMA solutions offered by DFA here. Or simply email sma@dimensional.com

Michael Lane, Head of US Wealth Advisory at iShares by BlackRock shares his unique perspective and insights on how financial advisors can better serve their clients during this time of high inflation, increased market volatility, and great uncertainty.

The core of Michael’s approach is simple… and that’s just what we need in this uncertain time. Clients will tell you who they are and what they need if you approach them with the right mindset. From there you will likely discover not only how to help your clients more effectively, but also a new world of opportunities to grow your business.

Andrew Crowell, Vice Chairman, Wealth Management, D.A. Davidson & Co explains that the path to growth and long-term success for most financial advisors is sitting right in front of them. The children, grandchildren, and other members of the extended families of your clients are the surest path to growing a thriving business.

In this episode, Andrew shares several strategies and simple techniques that financial advisors can use to attract and retain new business sourced from the family networks of your existing client roster.

Henry Yoshida, CEO of Rocket Dollar shares the untapped potential of self-directed IRAs for today’s financial advisor. While most advisors are aware that self-directed IRAs exist, relatively few are leveraging them to help their clients invest in the growing universe of alternative assets such as crypto, NFTs, angel investments in startups, real estate, or… wait for it…. COWS!

In this episode, you will learn how easy it is to set up and manage a self-directed IRA for your clients and how to get paid for the new wealth management offering.

Lacy Garcia, Founder and CEO of Willow offers some brilliantly simple ideas for financial advisors looking to grow their business while securing the legacy of the firm they have built to date. By going beyond financial advice and creating new, opportunities for your clients, prospects, and referral partners to interact, Lacy says you can create a unique, growth-oriented community that will thrive for generations to come.

Your ability to deliver high-quality financial advice to your clients depends greatly on the completeness and quality of the information you have about their financial lives. As Jason O’Shaughnessy, Head of International Business at Envestnet | Yodlee explains, the Open Finance movement is creating new opportunities for financial advisors and clients alike.

Once a clunky and manual process, account aggregation is now moving to a system that is more reliable and more accurate. And this same connectivity, made possible by companies like Envestnet | Yodlee is opening the door for new services.

Younger investors are critical to the future of your business as a financial advisor. According to our guests, Runik Mehrotra and Samir Vasavada, Co-Founders of Vise, members of the Millennial and Gen-Z generations are set to inherit $68 trillion in the coming years while they also build their own wealth. Yet, these younger investors have dramatically different expectations than their Gen-X and Boomer counterparts.

In this episode of The Augmented Advisor Podcast, we hear how the team at Vise is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to help advisors build hyper-personalized portfolios for their clients.

John Merante, Chief Economist at SkyView Partners offers a deep dive into the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. What happened? How the U.S. Government responded? And what does this all mean for financial advisors and their clients?

Dan Egan, Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment explains how financial advisors can leverage new strategies to grow their business. John, Mike, and Dan tackle things like the Impact of free financial products and services on the wealth management industry and how it affects the end client. They also attempt to answer the burning question of "If a computer does it... can we call it financial advice?"

ESG investing isn't just for Hippies and Gen-Z. It's about driving returns and growing your practice.

James Katz, CEO of Humankind Investments and Nick Cantrell, Founder of Green Future Wealth Management discuss all things ESG. Studies indicate that ESG investing themes are growing in importance to your clients, even if they haven't said anything to you.

But why? And how do you go about offering ESG investments "the right way" to your clients?

In this episode, Ian Karnell from Truelytics shares how financial advisors and RIAs can discover hundreds of thousands of dollars of unrealized value in their business by taking a few simple steps.

Laura Gregg, Senior Vice President, and Director of Practice Management & Advisor Research at Northern Trust’s FlexShares ETFs for a deep dive on the rising importance of women for the wealth management industry.

Jamie Wise, Founder of BUZZ Holdings breaks down how he and his team are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze investor sentiment shared on Twitter, StockTwits, and other online forums for the creation of a new large-cap, stock index that has outperformed the S&P 500 since inception.

Derek Notman from Conneqtor talks about how the pandemic unlocked new business models like remote, virtual, and distributed practices that can both make your life better and turbocharge your ability to grow.

Aaron Hasler and Scott Wetzel, from SkyView Partners, join John and Mike to explore the current landscape for mergers and acquisitions for RIAs and independent financial advisory businesses.

Theodora Lau (Theo) and Bradley Leimer, authors of the book "Beyond Good - How Technology Is Leading A Purpose-Driven Business Revolution" share how wealth managers can grow our industry by widening and deepening our pool of potential clients through the use of technology and thinking more broadly.

Theo and Bradley are also the co-founders of Unconventional Ventures, a boutique consulting firm focused on helping companies improve systemic financial wellness.

Kieran Bol, Head of Platform Operations at PriceMetrix by McKinsey shares lessons from the company's data on 70,000 advisors.

Learn how our industry has fared through the pandemic. How advisors are growing (or not) and where value is actually being created for clients.

Read a summary of the firm's 2020 State of North American Retail Wealth Management report.

Matt Reiner, CEO of Benjamin joins John Prendergast and Mike Langford to explore how financial advisors can leverage AI-powered tools and automated solutions to save time and expand their ability to serve clients.

Advisors and their staff spend so much time on repetitive tasks that can easily be automated today. Seemingly simple things scheduling a meeting with a client or a prospect actually take a lot more time and effort than we think. In this episode, we discuss how to augment your advisory business with tools designed to free you and your team up from the mundane.

Dave Hinnenkamp, CEO of BerganKDV joins John Prendergast and Mike Langford to explore the proposed changes to the Federal capital gains tax rate and how these changes might affect your clients and the climate for mergers and acquisitions for RIAs and independent financial advisors.

Changes in business models, technology, and demographics are shaping the future of wealth management right now. Hear from Geof Brown, CEO of NAPFA on how these 3 forces are combining to shape the future of the wealth management business and create new opportunities.

Chances are your clients have asked you what you think about Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, or the blockchain at one point in the past few years. And if they haven't... they will soon.

In this episode of the podcast, Ambre Soubiran, CEO of Kaiko and one of the world's leading authorities on cryptocurrency markets joins Mike Langford and John Prendergast for a deep dive on crypto and the blockchain. They'll talk about what these things mean and how to explain it so you'll sound like the smartest person in the room.

The remote work and work-from-home trends seem to be here to stay. But, for many financial advisors, the shift happened abruptly with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulted in a crazy mess of thrown-together solutions.

Jason Park of Margo Park Financial, however, designed his business to operate in a fully remote fashion from day one. And that, as they say... has made all the difference.

John Prendergast, CEO of Blueleaf, and Mike Langford sit down to share the origin story of how (and why) John founded Blueleaf and explore the concept of The Augmented Advisor.