Ep. 347: June News

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Um, Come on in, sit back and relax. You're listening to the Wealth Tech Today podcast. I'm your host, Craig Iskowitz, founder of Ezra Group Consulting. And this podcast features interviews, news and analysis on the trends and best practices all around wealth management technology. And this is our June news roundup. We've got a wide range of stories for you, including Orion Flourish, Nitrogen lpl, Ultralist Trade, pmr, Future Vault, and a whole lot more, of course, Advisor Tech Map and wealthtech Integration. Score. And we've got a special guest host for this, uh, episode of the news. I won't tell you who that is yet. You'll be surprised. But, um, speaking of the Advisor Tech Map, if you're in an ria, your tech stack didn't evolve by design, mostly evolved by accident. New custodians, new portfolio management tools, new must have apps layered on year after year. And now your leadership is wondering why your advisors aren't using the tools you paid for and why operations feel harder, not easier. And as a group, we don't sell software. We just help wealth management firms objectively assess their tech ecosystems and, and make smart, defensible decisions about where to invest and where to stop wasting money. You need to go to ezragroup.com uh, and you should check out our 90 day tech stack reboot, which gives you clarity without committing to a years long transformation project. So if you want your firm to grow exponentially instead of slowing down, you need to run, not walk to our website Ezra.com and click the giant beautiful purple contact us button on the homepage and book a strategy call. As a group, we just make tech stacks better housekeeping tasks. Uh, please subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Uh, and check out our sponsor, the Invest in Others charitable foundation@, ah, investandothers.org all right, now let's kick this thing off. All right, all right. We are here with the news and I'm excited to introduce my host for the news. Rejoining, uh, us is Jeremy Carnell. Hey, buddy.

Speaker A: Hey. How you doing?

Speaker B: Um, I'm doing fantastic. Where are you? Where are you in the world today?

Speaker A: Austin, Texas.

Speaker B: That is excellent. It's a great place to be.

Speaker A: Morning. A little bit after last night's loss.

Speaker B: I understand that happens. Yeah, that's the best of us. So I always tell people like when they no matter what sport you like, no matter what team you like, no matter how successful they are, probably 99% of the time you're going to be disappointed 100% no matter what New York

Speaker A: so I was happy with the outcome. My son was.

Speaker B: There you go. Cool. And. Well, we're going to kick off the news with a story about you, Jeremy Carnell. Vast Advisor appoints Jeremy Carnell as Chief Product Officer. Congratulations.

Speaker A: Thank you. I'm employed. Finally.

Speaker B: Finally. Did you have, was it a long interview process? Did you have to go to, like, a lot of referrals?

Speaker A: You know, I know a guy.

Speaker B: I know a guy there. You have an An.

Speaker A: I know a guy. Yeah, it looks like me. Yeah. No, it's. It's been great to finally rejoin. The, uh, band is back together again. Right. So, Ian Carnell, band back together, man, identical twin brother, uh, Eli Gasser, our chief Technology officer. We're all back, uh, kicking it again with Vast Advisor and it could not be happier.

Speaker B: And for anyone who doesn't know, just give the 30 second elevated pitch. This is not a Vast Advisor interview, but just give us the elevator pitch.

Speaker A: Not a problem. Vast Advisor is a growth operating engine purpose built for the wealth, uh, management space we're really going after, uh, the lead brokers, um, and the incredible cost to wealth firms related to renting, um, their organic growth versus owning it on a platform like Fast Advisor.

Speaker B: And if you weren't here, I would just read this, uh, this, um, press release. Carnell will lead product strategy, platform architecture and the ongoing development of Vast Advisors AI native growth infrastructure, including its core intelligence leader, Vast Advisor iq. He joins as the company accelerates its enterprise expansion across RIAs, broker dealers and wealth platforms following its debut and at Future Proof citywide in March.

Speaker A: Yes, indeed.

Speaker B: And I can tell this was written by AI because it's got an em m dash in the middle of that sentence.

Speaker A: 100% em dash is the tell. Right?

Speaker B: And no matter how many times I say don't put it, it still puts it in like something's built into the core of every LLM, um, that it has to use EM M dash.

Speaker A: I don't even know how to actually execute an EM M dash on my keyboard. If I want. I have no idea where it is.

Speaker B: Word will put it in automatically.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: If you, if you put an EM dash into a space after the EM dash, it'll fill it out.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Anyway, cool. So that's great. Congratulations. You are, you were formerly, uh, head of data at envestnet and before that CEO of Trulytics, an, uh, Advisor intelligence platform that acquired. Investment acquired in 2022. So moving down, moving on with your career.

Speaker A: It's been a journey.

Speaker B: You are here not as your Vast Advisor role, but you're here as our host for the news and we're going to talk about other companies and other interesting stuff and not vest advisor. So uh, first story is about Orion and Orion and Flourish expand integration to bring cash into a connected advisor experience. So uh, these two firms announced an expanded integration that helps advisors bring cash more fully into the wealth management experience. So the enhanced integration allows advisors to initiate Flourish Cash invitations from within Orion pre fill client information to streamline account opening and incorporate eligible cash accounts into Orion's reporting and planning workflow. So I think this is kind of cool because cash management kind of flies under the radar. It's not very flashy, it doesn't get a lot of, a lot of press but it's a huge benefit for advisors that use it. It's a, it's a nice revenue stream and having it built in to your platform where you say invite and boom really reduces a lot of friction.

Speaker A: Agreed. I think held away cash and lending were really how banks kept their high net worth clients. That that was their st this and pulling that into sort of advisor relationships sort of flips that retention dynamic. So I think it's smart.

Speaker B: And Flourish also I know has integrations uh, with Salesforce and a lot of other uh, companies where you can still. We can also do that same thing where you can click just invite and it invites the client right through your application with one click uh, which, which greatly improves restriction, makes it much easier for the clients to, to sign up and then getting more assets on your platform is, is hugely beneficial. And Flourish Cash has you go. If you go to edgegroup.com and look at the integration scores under cash management Flourish has the number one score with an 8.47 because they have tremendous number of integrations I think. Let me see how many integrations they have. I'm guessing at least 30. Yep. Uh, I think 30 integrations. So tremendous amount of integrations with all the key applications. So once linked client cash balances can be incorporated. Orion's unified reporting and planning experience supporting more holistic financial conversations that includes improved visibility for cash flow planning distributions, windfalls and excess cash management as well as a more complete foundation for long term planning discussions. By bringing cash into a consolidated client view, the integration helps advisors better understand a meaningful component of household balance sheets that has traditionally been less visible within the advisor relationship. Uh, I agree, unless it's something that's been really bothering me for many years is the lack of holistic planning. We say they were holistic all the time but we're not. Uh, everyone's really focused on in the investable assets and very little else.

Speaker A: Well, again, I think that um, it goes to the proof points when I was at envestnet disregarding um, our insights around Held away Cash and just how it was literally one of the most utilized um, for wealth advisors. Like I think everyone's running after that category. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, ah, it's, it's really tremendous. That's, I think and I think there's some, some new things coming down the bike for Flourish. So they've launched, they've got Flourish cash and they launched Flourish Annuities so you can buy annuities through the platform. And they bought SARA Finance which is a very cool product for lending, having advisors be able to do lending to their clients. And that, that's where you, that's to me that's holistic where you, you, you have to look at both assets and liabilities.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. Agree.

Speaker B: I mean did you see any of that in truelytics when you were doing, I mean that, that kind of data provided a lot of value to how advisors are running their businesses.

Speaker A: Yeah, that it, yeah, I, I agree with that. I don't think at that time you're talking, I'm having to have some, some cobwebs here. Yeah, I don't think we were actually looking at um, the value of wealth firms through that lens back in the day. So. I agree. I think it'd be uh, a critical component today and an RIA or an IAR style evolution. I agree.

Speaker B: So everyone knows orion. They've got 6 trillion in assets under administration and 185 billion of wealth management platform assets. 8 million accounts. They have Windows Flourish, um, they have high yield cash accounts and home lending. They help RIAs under new assets defend against asset loss and better compete with wide warehouses and banks. So you can find them@flourish.com and of course@orion.com okay, next story. Nitrogen launches tool for advisors that capture wealth transfer beneficiaries. Uh, so Nitrogen, an advisor technology provider, on Tuesday launched new a new AI driven tool designed to help advisors build relationships with clients beneficiaries before wealth transfers along with other upgrades to its tax product and its agentic AI workflow manager. Nitrogen said the new wealth transfer tool Legacy center generates a visual representation of a client's estate including accounts, trusts and insurance policies and beneficiaries with projected dollar amounts. Then uh, this is this June. So I guess this article wants to come out in May. Um, they're going to, they're going to launch Another tool, uh, called Legacy Key, an advisor branded message sent to each beneficiary through nitrogen that provides a point of contact and guidance when a wealth transfer occurs. So what do you think of that Jeremy?

Speaker A: You know I think uh, you know there's a stat I forget where it's referenced. Like 98% of advisories say that wealth transfer matters but really only 40% have a plan for that. In fact in many respects a lot of conversations that I know we've been having on our end has been like with this huge uh, wealth transfer that's about to happen right now, that. But because it's going to be a wholesale new generation digital first generation AI first generation that have been brought up on vastly different tool sets, the likelihood of existing advisors retaining the next gen is very small. It's going to be a very uphill battle for them. So I think this is really selling into that gap. Um, I think it reframes retention really around sort of a relationship graph problem uh, versus a portfolio problem.

Speaker B: So what do you mean, what do you mean by a relationship graph problem?

Speaker A: Meaning like they need to understand who they need to get to to be able to retain these assets. I think that's what this story is really telling.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's an interesting new product for nitrogen. If you look at their products they really focus on things that engage with clients. So yeah, they turn risk tolerance into an engaging tool marketing and tool that would never was before. They launched um, their research center which is analytics and competing with Morningstar Direct and Morningstar, other Morningstar products they have the tax center which is competing with holistic Plan. Um and they've got an income center which is uh, does, it does model Risk Time horizon, the probabilities for success. Uh now their legacy center. So I see these as a pretty interesting uh, collection of tools that advisors can use to engage their clients better.

Speaker A: Yeah, no doubt. And I think the business model for this, it's bundled into Nitrogen Complete, am I reading that correctly? 490 bucks, is that right? Yeah. Or it's sold as an add on as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, they have a, they have a bunch of different options. I think they can, they can sell everything, they can sell everything separately or you can bundle them in different options. They've got, if you look at their pricing they've got each one as a separate option if you want and then they've got bundles. So they've got Nitrogen Complete Nitrogen Elite and make your own bundle, which is pretty cool. I would do that. I would make my own bundle If I could. All right, so um, any other thing here? Nitrogen said Legacy center is its fifth advisor product since uh, the firm was founded in 2011 back, back when they were risk allies and was prompted to create. Ah, they were prompted to create it by their own clients. In a survey that of their own clients said 98% believe generational wealth transfer will be important to business but only 40%. 40% address it. Um, um, Natixis had some global wealth transfer more to 84 trillion. Um, so I think they'll, they'll definitely do well with that. It's, it's, it's sort of an area that a lot of advisors maybe not be thinking of when it comes to how they look at their tech stack.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And they also have some new AI tools. Uh, they have their, their agentic AI engine called Nucleus, includes context aware conversations across client apps. Everyone's now got an AI engine in their, in their technology. So it's not, I've always not surprised by that. Okay, so nitrogenwealth.com for them. Okay, uh, let's talk about LPL. LPL shares tumble after Rich Steinmeier told analysts of key AI headwinds namely that any use case has to work foremost for 30 plus advisors. So uh, LPO Financial um absorbed his greatest grilling yet about AI and AI again during an investor call. And the stock, this is back in uh, this is last month the stock lost 5% um when they were talking uh, through this they're very forthright about the, the AI headwinds for broker dealers um, and how it's going to be impacting them. Theoretically it should be straightforward to affect change especially since we don't have to contend with the constraints of operating a bank and all that entails. But on the other hand we only exist to serve the over 30,000 advisors and over a thousand institutions that have trusted us with a business uh, in the 8 million American families we serve. So they say that this is, could be a big issue for them. How do you feel about this?

Speaker A: You know I think, I think the central, one of the central tensions of uh, enterprise AI, I think I saw this at invested as well is that traditionally scale is remote and you're anchored. Right. And a uh, 30,000 plus advisor base means really you can't ship on the bleeding edge. And you ship what's safe, right. What's supportable and compliant for everyone. And I think um, that's probably the right posture for these large um, enterprises but the market definitely is punishing them for a lack of any type of vision of a moonshot. So I think that's what this is.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's tough when you're a company of that size.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. I mean you're talking about, you know, that they can't really move that fast even if they wanted to.

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker B: Um, it's just, it's very difficult. I mean the price, the stock price is under 300. So back in May it, it, it was over was 340. And since May 1st it's been down bounce a little bit. Uh, I'd be buying it. I, I'd be a buyer of LPL stock. Just looking purely on technical analysis. I think it's um.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And, and they're fundamentally that. They seem to have a great business model and if the stock is. I'm looking at as a sale. Right. Stocks on sale under 300 could be a good buy for me. Not that I'm giving any investment advice, I'm not an advisor. But it could be, it could be useful. Um, and they're still growing. I'm just waiting for the next shoe to drop. But they just, they just absorbed Commonwealth and that seemed to go pretty smoothly. I think they, they lost a, you know, a reasonable number of advisors. I'm not sure what the exact percentage was but I know Roman James got a bunch of those other ones, you know. But that was, that was to be expected. But that was a huge, a huge uh, change for the industry and definitely didn't help a lot of vendors. When vendors consolidate, when broker deals consolidate, uh, it's not, it's no good for vendors. You remember that?

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: Thousand percent when you get churned. So 2024 MIT study by entrepreneur magazine found that automation was more economical in just 23% of roles that rely heavily on visual tasks. Um, the other 77% of cases keeping human workers was still the more cost effective option. So how do you feel about advisors being replaced by AI Jeremy?

Speaker A: Um, you know, I think, I don't think it's going to happen wholesale. I think there are going to be portions of advisors that manage certain segments that it will happen in. Um, but I, I do think we need to, I don't think it's an all or nothing category. Right. Um, and I do think there are going to be firms that lean on um, AI, um based advice and they're going to be firms that lean on human based advice and they're going to be great sort of examples of hybrids of that. Um, and they're just going to serve different segments, um, uh, efficiently in their own way. Right. I think the, the mass segment, the, the younger segment is going to obviously be leaning more towards AI advice. I think the high net worth um, is, is not wholly going to rely on human advice either. I think they're going to really want to see that whoever they are working with from a relationship perspective is armed with um, the same tools they have at their favorite tips. Um, and so it's going to be an interesting three to four years ahead of us.

Speaker B: Yes, I have a different feeling, um, on that. I really think that AI is going to take a bite out of some advisors that don't expect it just because it's not the same as robo advice. Right. AI can be smart, AI can be empathetic, AI can pass the CFP. So you could go to ChatGPT right now and say, give me a fetch plan, it'll do it. It won't be great, won't be as good as an advisor can do. But most people don't know that.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So how much will that siphon off? How many people say why AM I paying 100 basis points or 80 basis points when I can get most of this through AI? So I think it's going to be, it's going to push advisors to really deliver holistic advice whether it's through the Ryan Flourish combination, whether doing cash management, lending and others or more estate planning or budgeting, whatever it might be, um, more alternative investments. Some ways they need to differentiate themselves from what AI can do.

Speaker A: Yeah, but you know, I think that's, that's going to be just consistent against any professional services dynamic. Right. I mean hell, even with engineering like right now, AI allows any one of us to vibe code software is that, and that software specific to us is fine. But that software being able to be monetized at scale, no, they're very different things. That's where engineering really, really can shine and uh, you know, understanding what that full stack looks like, being able to wire everything together, financial advisors are going to be the same thing. Right. So yes, AI is going to be able to take you so far with advice. But if you really want, you know that that full service comprehensive um, uh, approach like you're talking about, it is still going to require that advisor, but it's going to be that advisor having to be very well equipped with some great tooling, um, tooling that's emerging today.

Speaker B: So, so my good friend Michael, uh, Keatsis was down in uh, Boca at Wealth Management Edge talking to another friend of mine, Jason Piera.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And they were talking about AI. And uh, speaking of which, so Michael was saying that with new tech promises more speed. He also believes that advisors may go deeper because they have more time to do so. Taking the, so rather taking the time savings from AI instead of adding more clients they'll say so what if the future is not that we have 40% more clients but we have the exact same number of clients but the advice is 40% better.

Speaker A: That's what Kitchen said.

Speaker B: That's what Michael said. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean all things being equal, if the market doesn't change then he's probably right. But again we're seeing uh, the first generation of wealth advisors retire and, or die and they're not getting replaced anytime soon. So someone's going to have to pick up that uh, those clients. Um and obviously some are going to obviously feel off with AI but I don't see a world ahead of us where uh, books of business for advisors don't expand pretty dramatically. They're going to just have to do more work less.

Speaker B: I think everyone's, it's going to be, you're going to have advisors into different categories. Some advisors are going to expand their scale, how many, how many clients they can manage because AI makes it easier for them. And some will do what Michael said, they'll keep the same number of clients but do more for them. Hopefully gather more market share and other, other advisors will go out of business because they can't keep pace.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. That's right.

Speaker B: And I think AI has a double edged sword. Some and investors may do what they did with robo advisors, put their beta, uh yeah assets with the AI tools and keep their alpha with, with advice with advisors which we've seen that happen. Um, some may use AI as a launch pad. It may be like a legion. You know, you know a lot about legion. So they may be starting with AI getting look, getting the hang of it. Then go this is, I need more than this and I want to find an advisor.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: Right. And there was a, I think um, Samantha Russell was talking about how to, how advisors can make themselves more visible to AI because AI is becoming lead gen for advisors.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean that's what best advisor is. Leveraging a great deal um, and being able to dramatically reduce the cost of um, organic growth. Leveraging that tool set. So yeah, I mean it's, it's definitely the wave of the future because we've

Speaker B: been getting here at Ezra Group we've been getting uh, more and more leads from AI.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: If you look at our website. We're seeing an increase, like it's still below, way below what Google sends us, but we're seeing a rise of Both Claude and ChatGPT inbound referrals.

Speaker A: Got it. So you're, you're, I'm sorry, so when you say you're getting them from AI, you're saying that this is the impact of your, uh, content and thought, uh, leadership being covered in large and some of the frontier large language models. So when people are leveraging that and asking it certain things, they're bringing your name up. Uh, and that's how they're finding you.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So they're, they're, they're asking, I don't know, I don't know the exact question they're asking about prompt they're putting in, but they're saying something like, who should we talk to about advisor technology? And this comes up Ezra Group, and they click on that link inside ChatGPT and it takes them to our website and we can track them. We track that.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean that's, I mean that is quickly replacing the entire concept of search engine optimization. This sort of large language LLM optimization. Definitely.

Speaker B: I'm going to send you in a chat. Another story I want to talk about,

Speaker A: but did Jason Pierre say anything in that conversation that you were having with Michael?

Speaker B: Oh, nothing useful. I was joking. Poor Jason. Let me go back. Where is that? Uh, let me go back. Yeah, Jason said something, but again, I'm just reading the story on wealth management dot com.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, they were, they were just

Speaker B: focusing on what Michael said. Unfortunately, they didn't really mention what Jason said. Poor Jason. I mean, come on, buddy. Well, here we go.

Speaker A: Michael said about AI at, uh, Advise AI last year. I think he said it was just like a fancy calculator or something like that.

Speaker B: Maybe. Wait here. Jason said, um, I'm trying to get some advisors to serve a thousand to two thousand clients. And I said, respectfully, you just described my nightmare here. Pier said, either I want to provide so little value to 2,000 people that I'm, I'm a commodity that's easily replaced, or I've completely burnt myself out because how do you fit that? The math doesn't work. Yeah, so that was Jason's comment there. They, uh, were eating hot wings and having a conversation. So that's the new thing on in these, uh, conferences, people eat hot wings and, and talk about tech.

Speaker A: Well, we should do that for the next news.

Speaker B: Okay. You want to eat hot wings while we're.

Speaker A: I think it'd be great, but we could do that.

Speaker B: Um, that seems to be a cool, a fun thing for people to do. They want, they want to cough while they're trying to talk. Maybe we should eat something else.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Something that isn't making us cough. Okay. All right, so let's do one more story here. Um, Future Vault. All right, so Future Vault launches MCP and AI Orchestration layer. I really love these stories. I think we're going to be flooded with these soon. Uh, because you know, here at Ezra Group we're building MCP servers as well for our clients that want to be able to talk to chat about their data. Like we built an MCP server for, for Black Diamond. So our RA clients can just say, show me my top 50 clients or whatever you want to. They want to ask them. Right? So now Future Vault can do that. You can with, um. They announced the launch of its MCP and AI Orchestration layer, turning insights into automated next best actions. I thought you liked the story. Giving from secure way to connect tools like Cloud and ChatGPT directly to their document infrastructure without breaking governance permission or data privacy controls. Jeremy, go.

Speaker A: I think MCPs are slowly and surely, maybe not slowly quickly replacing APIs as Ah, primary sort of data integration, um, layer. Uh, yeah, I think this is table sticks as well. I think for example on BAS Advisor side we are replacing a piece of our stack because they don't have an MCP server and we need our agents to be able to talk to it. And we're looking at all of the different software that we license today through that lens. Like can our agent swarms interact with your tooling? If not, we'll replace you.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah, exactly. Uh, built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for secure context aware data access. Future Vault MCP enables AI systems to search, read and reason over enterprise data using natural language, connecting directly to documents across Client Advisor and enterprise vaults. MCP is becoming the new API and the standard connection point between a firm's data infrastructure, AI tools and agentic orchestration layers. Future Vault MCP is built to participate within this broader ecosystem, enabling firms to connect Future Vault directly to any MCP compatible AI agent orchestration harness or tool queries and outputs leverage private LLMs, ensuring document data stays within the firm's own security and privacy framework and is never passed to external models or public infrastructure.

Speaker A: Yeah, like I said, it's table stakes. I think this is very smart for them.

Speaker B: What firms can do with future volume CP tax document review, missing an unsigned document detection, estate insurance retirement gap Analysis, client summaries and deliverables, automated next best action. So that's the thing that, that, that raised my uh, antenna. So uh, I think everyone's going to be going to be driving for this. Every vendor is going to take whatever data they have and try to say we can, we can do next best actions, work with us.

Speaker A: Well, I mean I think what you're gonna, I agree with your statement before that we're gonna start seeing more and more of these announcements around MCP servers in the stacks themselves. It is literally going to be where these solutions allow a lot of their clients to be able to operate within their enterprise native AI environments. Right. That is, that is what's compliance is approved and that is, that's the, that's the uh, desktop for a lot of these users. And so they don't want them having to log into multiple systems. And the MCP service will just allow anyone on their client end to be able to engage with the document intelligence straight through. Doesn't matter if it's Claude, it doesn't matter if it's copilot or whatnot, and it's just going to be table sticks.

Speaker B: But I think the issue is yes, everyone's going to want this, but who provides it is, they're going to be the winners. Right. So if you, if you go with the future fault next best actions, you're basing on documents. Right, Going with investnet's next best actions, it's more transactionally based.

Speaker A: Right. But, but I, I think any uh, sophisticated user would probably build an orchestration layer above all of those MPS mcp, uh, servers to be able to take and tie all of the NDAs together. Right. So it's not one or the other because they're sort of apples and oranges, they're sort of approached and calculated and so yes, they're next best actions, but what the data is, it's going to be different, how it's calculated is going to be different. Um, and at one plus one equals three type of situation is probably what we're talking about here. It's just making sure that you don't go down the rabbit hole being like those are your only next best actions. Right.

Speaker B: Uh, but I think you can have multiple next best actions. Like the AI note takers are all doing next best actions. Right?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So where do you get it from? And yeah, so building it layer on top. So, but everyone wants to be the layer on top like the note takers want to be on top. They want to be, they're the gatekeepers for all the data coming into your organization, they want to be able to parse it out to whoever. Right? But then, then everyone else is getting disintermediated.

Speaker A: I mean I think that that's really where the game is being played right now. Right. I think if you look at the three tiers of uh, the wealth tech stack, you've got the assistant layer, you've got the control plane, you've got the system of record that control plane layer. That's exactly what you're talking about. Orchestration, uh, the data, uh, ontology models and the plumbing across, uh, the client lifecycle is really where switching costs like data gravity and defensibility lifts. That's where the moats live. So the people that control the control plane, or at least that are beginning to um, acquire uh, that capability and be able to build that capability and really drive that at scale. They're going to with. At the end of the day

Speaker B: it's going to be a crazy fight. I really think we were already running into clients that are like what do I do? Like which way do I go? We're spending a lot more time in AI governance, AI, uh, architecture, AI orchestration. Like how do you compare these things? How do you manage these things when every single application is pushing some sort of AI tool or AI function out to you? All right, um, we are running out of time. I've got a couple more things that uh, I want to talk about. I lost my screen June news. Right. So we talked about that. Oh, let me hand it to you. Uh, I've heard there's some news from, from a company called Vast Advisor. Jeremy Cornell. Is that true? Can you, can you tease us with some news? It's not on the wire yet, but not.

Speaker A: This is breaking news, uh, through you. I, I actually I, I embargoed this specifically for you Craig, so you'd be

Speaker B: able first, this is going out this week.

Speaker A: This is, it's going to be announced tomorrow. Version 1.2 of uh, Fast Advisor. It's a huge release. It involves three epics, uh, that we, that we sort of uh, pursue, uh, like at the same time over the last three or four months. Um, first and foremost we've got direct CRM integrations, uh, with Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics. Um, we've been able to layer in a memory into our AI now. So we've got a memory palace and every client now will have their own bespoke, uh, ontology and knowledge graph that leverages Vast Advisor. And finally we shipped um, uh, theme Intelligence. So we added in several different real time signals. Um, the signals mapped to ah, clients Ideal, uh, customer profile and their CRM data. Now uh, produces multiple themes that can be saved that can drive your campaign moving forward as well. So CRM integration, memory and dynamic theming. You're on mute, Greg.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's really great stuff. I keep going on mute because of course the landscapers are here right now all day. They're not here. They show up right when we start this recording. Perfect.

Speaker A: Talking.

Speaker B: I'm trying to keep the sound of the lawnmowers off this podcast. Uh, right. So I think that's great for Vast Advisor. I mean I, I think the tools like you guys are really going to be the next, the next generation when it comes to, to lead gen and marketing. And they, they advisors are, are fooling themselves that they think they can do it on their own without a tool like you guys.

Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate you saying that. We the same way.

Speaker B: Of course you do. M. Uh, so that's Vast advisor dot com. All right, so one more story. Let's, let's squeeze in just two more stories about custodians.

Speaker A: Sorry.

Speaker B: Oh, so Invest Advisor IO Apologize. AI One of these. What, what domain top, uh, level domain are you using? Just pick one. AI vastadvisor AI. Okay, I'll put it in the show notes. All right, let's do some Custodian news. Uh, Altruist to launch beta of new RIF RIA affiliation option uh, Altruist is launching a beta of a new model that gives advisors access to the compliance, custody and operational infrastructure needed to build an independent practice without standing up their own firm from scratch. Sounds familiar. Don't IBDs do this? Uh, the firm will see fine with the SEC to create Altruist Advisors, an RIA that's awaiting regulatory approval. Sort of beta program with a small group of advisors. According to Altruist founder and CEO Jason Wenk, the RIA also joined the protocol for broker recruiting, an intra industry agreement that allows advisors some leeway to take client data with them when they change firms. The whole purpose of Altruist is to make financial advice better, make it more affordable, make it accessible to everyone. Wank said. So this is uh, interesting. What do you think about it, Jeremy?

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean it looks like they're going to handle a lot. They're taking over, um, or at least they're going to handle all the compliance support, including the SEC registration, the ADV filings, the customer relationship summary and code of F. All of that, so it's um, it's a, it's, it's pretty big news.

Speaker B: Yeah. Looking at. So Michael Keats has covered this in, in his news, um, of the month. And the main takeaway that most corporate RA is that Ultras provides not just tech and the compliance support of a corporate ra, but again operates first and foremost as the custodian, which has two main implications. First, similar to its software, Altruist doesn't necessarily need to generate a lot of profit from its corporate rea business for it to make economic sense. It only needs to bring enough client assets on the platform to make up for the cost of the services it provides. That's always been, I find, why more firms aren't doing what Altruist did. When they started, they were a tech vendor that was reselling custody, right? They were given the tech away for free to like they were, they were reselling, um, drive wealth. Believe it or not, when they first started, then they switched to Apex, then they launched their own, right. So they, you know, they're, they were the model of hey, just buy the custody, we'll give you the tech for free. Which is what most custodians do. But they didn't have their own. Now they're saying, well, hey, be on our ria, which will give you, you know, for almost whatever. We just want the custody. So custody is so profitable they can give you almost everything else for free.

Speaker A: Yeah, it looks like they're targeting the sort of the, the mid market, right? They're, they're attracting breakaway brokers with between 25 million or hundreds uh, of millions in assets. They're not like going after the billion dollars of aum, so not yet.

Speaker B: They want to. They don't want to. They've been living in this, the under the sub 100 million space for a long time. They're definitely chopping at the bit to grab the billion dollar and up RIAs

Speaker A: to get this to pass.

Speaker B: Uh, for that, no, it could very well. So the second takeaway on, on Keith's site, Altruist could be uniquely appealing as a corporate RIA that doesn't push its advisors to stay with the corporate ria. So if the advisor converts to their own standalone, Altruist doesn't care. Right. Just give us the custody. So it's similar to the way Raymond James work, right? We don't care how you work with us. You can be a W2, you can be a 1099, you can work on our custody or not. We just give us the assets. We have a million ways to work with us. Right. So, uh, it seems that that's, that's the flexibility is beneficial.

Speaker A: So earlier this year around Hazel and just what that did to the market. So it's, it's great that they continue to push things.

Speaker B: I think Jason is, is a really brilliant entrepreneur. Blow smoke up his butt. But you know, it's, it's hard, you know, it's hard to get attention in the space and especially as a, as a custodian, they don't have a lot of assets. You know, you can tell they don't because they won't tell us how much they have. They tell us, oh, we've got 2,000 clients or some number. I thought they throw the number of RIAs they out there, but they won't tell you how many what the assets. That means they don't have a lot, but they still manage to get great news, great coverage. Free, right? They get free news coverage, right? What, you know, that's, that's paid out. That's paid. You know that they're not paying for that getting for free. So the fact that you can do that is pretty genius when it comes to marketing.

Speaker A: 100.

Speaker B: So that's. And that's going to drive more advisors. Right. So that's uh, allchoice.com. even the name altruist was brilliant when they came up with it. Whatever. 10 years ago already. I remember when that. And then that happened. All right, so. Right. Altruist.com you can find that out. And then the next news story is uh, another up and coming, uh, custodian Trade PMR that was acquired by Robin Hood. Uh, so Robinhood and Trade pmr and one of the, one of the, the um, the benefit, the benefits or the drivers of that acquisition when they first announced it was that they were going to do an RIA referral program from Robinhood's customers. And everyone said that's never going to work. Robin's customers are too small. But they finally launched the program. I just came out, uh, this month. Robin Hood trade PMR's financial advisor referral network is live with a SELECT group of RIAs. And clients came during their Synergy conference. Uh, they've been working with a group of uh, 17 advisors and um, according to Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage officer, Robinhood. So they said firms participating brought experience from being part of the country's other referral networks at Schwab and Fidelity. Robinhood's version is available to rea firms with at least 500 million in assets and a relationship with Trade PMR for clients. It's available as a phone app that lets them browse advisory firms with a swipe. So Robinhood built its base of 27 million clients largely with young investors testing the waters of small accounts. So they made the case that those young investors are not only wealthier now, but will also be recipients of the great wealth transfer. So the Robinhood Advisor network targets customers at 250,000 in assets, though operational efficiencies are expected to make lower balance relationships profitable for advisors over time. What say you Jeremy?

Speaker A: You know, start seeing more of this. I love this, this the uh, Digital first AI, first uh, tooling that a lot of the next generation has been using for most of their young adult lives. Um, they're getting into the RIA custody business overnight through steps like this. Right. And it's interesting because you look at how wealth enterprises have been dealing with that segment up until lately because they've been obviously servicing wealth advisors and high net worth individuals and they're coming up with digital tools that they can push that next generation into. Here's an example of that. A digital tool that that next generation has been using at scale actually getting into the advisory business. And so it's, it's flipping the script. It's really cool to see.

Speaker B: I'll say. Uh, so in the meantime other players have been getting into the referral game partly to lure more RAs to the platform. Goldman Sachs Custody channel has a program BNY Purging and um, Betterment both have pilot programs. Um, so one thing about Trade PM Treat, Trade pmr, they are not their own custodian. They have a contract with Wells Fargo First Clearing. And they just said uh, Rob Baldwin, the, the uh, president, uh founder CEO of Trade PMR announced they just extended their contract with Wells Fargo through 2032. So meaning RAs can choose to stay at Wells or move clients to Robinhood. So I probably thought they were going to not re up that contract. I thought they were going to start pushing clients to Robinhood hard. But I guess they're going to keep the bi directional or bifurcated process.

Speaker A: Seems so, yeah.

Speaker B: Cool. So that's trade pmr.com and robinhood.com um, so the first thing, so we, every month we get a whole bunch of new uh, vendors on the map. And this month, uh, this is June's Map Op Alpha added to the advice engagement category. It's the next best action tool. It sits on top of your CRM and surfaces which clients need attention, flags who you should be calling and when. Think of it as a Client relationship intelligence layer. Um, so that's Advice Engagement used to be the cool kids on the block, but that's really fallen by the wayside when it comes to the um, AIs. Really blown them out of the water. So I was very surprised to see anybody coming into Advice Engagement. Uh, so Op Alpha. If I can find their website, it's up Alpha IO Opal P H A. Uh, next one, Advice AI. Um, which we added, we put a new, we created a new category called Planning supports. Uh, which is new subcategory under financial planning. Uh, so Advice AI is built on top of tax tax status and surfaces tax planning opportunities ranked by complexity with a focus on high net worth clients. So Advice AI, where is that? I can't find the website for that. Sorry about that folks. Look them up. Advice. I don't have the link to the website. All right, well Stream, so. Well stream has been on the map for a while. They're a marketing tool. We move them for some reason they were in financial planning. Oh, uh, no. What's well Stream Financial planning. So I'm thinking of somebody else. Wall street moves from financial planning into the new planning support subcategory. So we did that. So why did we do the. Why did we do planning support subcategory? I forget while we created that. Um, all right, so in the meanwhile we have a couple more. We have Hive Tax AI move from tax into planning support. So this distinction the group is drawing effect. If it has a calculation engine, it stays in planning or tax. If it's doing analytics and recommendations on top of your existing software, it goes to planning support. Oh, there you go. That's why we did that. So Hive Tax AI is another tool. Do I have the link to that? Man, this is. I'm doing a bad job. Hive Tax AI. Don't have it either. You can look them up. Fiduciary Genius was promoted from planning light into the retirement category. So it's adding enough depth on the retirement projections and spend down modeling to uh, earn that move. That's fiduciary genius. You can look them up. And then we've got Ready AIM Retire, which I think is a very cool name. It's a new addition going straight into the retirement category. Ready AIM Retire Smarter Retirement Planning Calculator is a powerful visual retirement planning platform designed to support advisors who want better client engagement, clearer conversations, more confident decision making. It's readyameretire.com that seems like a pretty cool product. Our next one is Fingale. We added the client meeting support it's not a note taker. It sits on top of your CRM M and handles post meeting execution work. Now I just don't know how these guys are going to get any business. It's just there's so much out there. Why would you, you know, I guess you can type but we're not a note taker. We do the post meeting better than note takers. But how many tools are you gonna. Everyone's got a note taker now. You know, you gotta replace something. I don't know how they're gonna fit that in but Fingale thinks they can, they can find a, a niche fingale.com what do you think Jeremy?

Speaker A: I, I agree with you. I, I think I'm, I'm uh. It's interesting to watch how the AI note takers are really beginning to diversify their offerings pretty quickly because I think they writings on the wall and so I agree with you.

Speaker B: If you want to learn more go to ezragroup. Go to wealthtechtoday.com which is our blog. We have a report on AI notetakers which we're calling the ainotaker/agentic os because they've all a bunch of them have expanded become these new pseudo orchestration engines, tools, platforms um, that we. You can schedule a report for free on our on Wealth Tech Datacom. A couple more here. Pocket Filing added to investment data analytics. It tracks changes between quarterly 10k filings. So if you've got a client with a concentrated position in a specific company stock you can monitor, monitor material disclosures. It's very niche but there's a use case there. But again how, who's going to pay for it? I don't know. Maybe you've got a lot of clients with 10ks pocket filing.com future uh, vault. Oh they stayed the same. They're still inclined file sharing. Uh, Finney uh, is staying in prospecting but we were looking to move it. They have a new product called Hunter. Their drip marketing extension is growing but we're looking at moving them somewhere else but like not as a standalone marketing platform. That's the problem with a lot of these tools like Vast Advisor like Finney, like where do we put you guys? But we're keeping fitting and prospecting for now even though I think they might be moving into standalone marketing at some point.

Speaker A: A vast advisor would be a prospect.

Speaker B: Yeah, we would want to move that. There you go. Cool. Jeremy, thanks for being here man.

Speaker A: It was awesome. I really enjoy this with you. I have a safe Milwaukee.

Speaker B: You too. Man. Cheers. Congratulations. You've reached the end of another episode of Wealth Tech Today podcast. But before you go, please head to our website ezragroup.com and scroll to the bottom of the homepage and sign up for our newsletter. Once a month receive an email chock full of wealth management goodness, news, information and updates. You will not be disappointed. Thanks again for listening and talk to you all again next time. Sam.