Q: Rich, can you talk a little bit about how AdvisorEngine differentiates itself from the competition?

Rich Cancro

Our secret sauce starts with our ethos, which is personal, scientific, and beautiful. When we first start talking about beautiful and financial services, most people are like, “What are you talking about?” And yes, beautiful, you need to deliver a beautiful experience to ultimately deliver that delightful experience. When we think about personal, there’s a lot of layers to that. One layer is understanding the different types of users that you have. In our case, it’s going to be advisors, the principals of the firm, managers, business ops, which can be anywhere from people who open accounts and things like that, and the clients. The next part of the ethos is the science, which is how you connect all of them. Through workflows, through experiences, through communication, messaging, all those things have to be connected. So we spent a lot of time from an engineering perspective, as well as the design thinking perspective, to really understand how to connect all those workflows and moments that an advisor, their staff and their client have together.

Q: We’re referring to the word ‘experience’ quite a bit here. Can you explain how, at AdvisorEngine, you guys really define experience?

Rich Cancro

We think of people, process, and technology. When you think about technology the starting point is going to be the data. So having a robust data set, an accurate set of data, an accessible set of data, and sometimes that’s the hardest part, making it accessible and connecting all the data. So you have all this data, and it’s not connected, it’s very hard to make that meaningful and drive that connectivity. The second thing is processes. So really looking at processes, and understanding each step in them, and how the data needs to connect and flow through it. On the people side, that’s where we spend a ton of time. We have three core constituents. We like to say we’ve coined this phrase, AX which is the advisor experience, BX, which is business operations experience, and CX, which is client experience. When we think about the industry that we’re in, historically, people either built good advisor platforms or good client platforms. What we did, which I think is quite unique, is that when we started, we wanted to connect all three into one platform. By doing that, and having a robust data set, then you can truly connect the three, the three can be connected experiences, whether it’s messaging, whether it’s opening accounts, moving money, all those types of things that you need to do to service a client is all fully connected and flowing through all the different stages of a client lifecycle. So that means from a lead to opening the account, funding the account, putting that money to work, trade rebalancing, and finally, fee billing. And of course, you want to report to the client, how their portfolio is doing. So, if you connect all those pieces, then you now have a scalable environment, you have a consistent environment, and you can deliver your brand, your ethos, and the service level that you want to deliver that you’ve promised to deliver to your clients.

Q: Rich, can you share any new and differentiating capabilities that your team has launched on the platform recently?

Rich Cancro

Sure, I love talking about the new stuff. We recently rolled out new BI dashboards, and it hit all our ethos: personal, scientific, and beautiful. We spent time with over 400 of our clients and really did deep dives in understanding what is the data that’s meaningful to them, and how can we make it not only have insights in it but make it actionable. We don’t want to produce a bunch of flat data. There are things you need to do. We show how you’re operating. Here’s how you’re growing. And then take action from it. By the way, you can also gain insight into what isn’t working well. Sometimes the hardest thing is to have that conversation because it’s easy to say ‘this is going great’. It’s much harder to have the discussion with the team that, ‘oh, this is not going so great’. But if you have actual data, then you can have those conversations. We make it very easy for a firm to access to their data, and we provide actionable insights that you see. You don’t need a technologist, you don’t need a data scientist, you don’t need a cadre of consultants to set up your environment, you just need to log in. We created all these templates based on roles, and we went very deep in the roles. They can just plug and play and start. They can also be customized. You can start from scratch or start with the template, and drag and drop, and you’re done with setup literally in seconds.

The next new thing is that we enabled sharing, so that if somebody is in a similar role, and they can share a view of data that they think is important. For example, a manager can create templates very easily and share it with their team immediately, so each person on the team has access to the same set of information.

We like to think about it in three different layers. One is on the revenue side. Think growth and revenue. For an advisor, what that really means, is what opportunities do we have in the funnel? Where are they coming from? How do we get to the next best action to hopefully move that from an opportunity to a client? What are the insights into where these kinds of prospects coming from. Second is operations. One of the most important things for an operations team in a financial services firm is to know what they need to be doing. I come in in the morning, what do I need to do? What is past due. It needs to be super timely, I need to get this done. Think of this as a tier one client and needing to move this forward. So, it’s very easy to see what you need to do that day, what the priorities are and take action, and make it real time. The third is core business metrics. How is your firm performing? Think about the CFO, CEO, COO roles to understand how their firm is growing, how its operating, is it efficient, and actions for that group to take. And again, the science behind that is also super-fast. So, part of it is delivering delightful experiences, not only accessible data, but getting meaningful insights, making them actionable, personalizing it, and then also having a very fast experience from it. Our team really hit it out of the park with these new capabilities.

Q: Rich, I have to ask you about AI. Roboadvisors have been out for several years now, but how do you see generative AI impacting the WealthTech and RIA space?

Rich Cancro

I think it’s going to have an amazing impact in the future. I think we’re just scratching the surface now. People are talking like we are in the first inning; I think it’s the first pitch in the first inning of where it’s going to go. But I think AI is the next place that is going to transform, not just financial services, but how people think about interacting with technology. I think, obviously, within financial services, you have to start with compliance, unfortunately, or fortunately, and creating a guidepost, I think that’s also starting to take hold. I think one AI use case that will be really important is how advisors can deliver unique value propositions. If the AI makes starts making everything sound the same or delivers the same content, you’re no longer differentiated. So, I do believe it’s going to be important that an advisor, their marketing team, and AI all work really close together, so that advisor can deliver unique content, unique thinking. So that they are engaging. My team has done a ton of studies, over 1000 High Net Worth prospects of advisors, and what’s happening is that two out of three times even though they’re getting a referral, they’re not getting a phone call or email that they want to connect. This is because of their overall messaging and engagement. So, I think this is a powerful opportunity to really move the needle from two out of three, to one out of three, by creating engaging content that delivers your value prop in digestible terms, that can really drive this, and create scale. I think we’re just at the beginning of this and it’s going to be really exciting, and it is going to move fast. This is one of those things where it’s not going to take six months, a year, two years, three years. Every day it’s changing. So, we’re in a very exciting time.