Episode Summary:

Join host Sam Sivarajan in this episode of The Future-Ready Advisor as he engages with Brandon Chapman, founder of Advisor Flow. Brandon delves into how his platform is reshaping client onboarding and the overall advisory experience with innovative digital solutions.

Key Quote:

“Technology doesn't fix a broken business; it just accelerates the success of a well-run one.” – Brandon Chapman [22:12]

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Revamping Client Onboarding [1:50]
• Personalization Meets Automation [6:09]
• Challenges of Technology Adoption in Finance [11:36]
• Impact of Regulatory Changes on Advisory Practices [22:43]
• Future Trends in Financial Advisory [24:06]
• Integrating AI in Financial Services [24:41]

Episode Transcript:

Access the full transcript for the whole conversation on the changing onboarding landscape.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Advisor Flow, a platform for streamlining client management [2:46]
• Subscribe to the Podcast: Don’t miss an episode of The Future-Ready Advisor, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
• Follow Sam on Social Media: Join the discussions on LinkedIn to get more insights and updates.
• Check out the website: Visit www.samsivarajan.com for more resources and episodes.

Tune in to understand how technology is becoming a cornerstone in the evolution of financial advising.

Sam 1:12

Hi, everyone. I'm Sam Sivarajan, and welcome to today's episode of The Future Ready Advisor. Today, I'm here with Brandon Chapman Tech Company founder and financial advisor, Brandon. Welcome to the show.

Brandon 1:29

Thanks so much for having me on, Sam. I

was going to say I first heard you speak when you were rolling out Constellation with the goals based investing program at Canada Life. And it's great to see that you now are sharing so many practice

Sam 1:43

well.

Brandon 1:43

management strategies online for the financial advisor community. I think we all get better as we collaborate and work

Sam 1:50

I

Brandon 1:50

together

Sam 1:50

Brandon 2:46

Sam 3:58

Interesting.

Brandon 3:58

myself.

Sam 3:59

And when you're talking about the onboarding process, can you speak a little bit about that? Is that specifically on the wealth side, on the insurance side, on the planning side, all of it.

Brandon 4:16

Yeah. So what we did is we looked at the overall financial planning process from end to end. So we looked at client discovery to analyzing a client's situation, recommendations, implementation of an ongoing management, the client. And when we did that, we realized that it was really that first mile of client discovery that was being handled poorly by most financial professionals. There's good quality financial planning softwares, there's CRMs, there's dealers and MGAs. But none of those groups are really focused on helping advisors at that front end. And so that's really where our niches, if you will, and where we focused on all of our development efforts

Sam 4:53

Yeah. that's a great point, Brandon. I haven't seen too many that focused on the front end. And as you say, it's been a hodgepodge of PDFs, paper, spreadsheets and what have you, and you have to make sense of it. And I dare say that in many cases, the experience for a client is disjointed and it isn't uniform from client to client, even for the advisor or their practice themselves. I that something that you would agree with?

Brandon 5:26

100%. I think the big issue is even if it's a planning software or CRM or a dealer, they may try to give a cookie cutter solution to an advisor. But advisors inherently are the ones building the relationship with the client. And the reason why those clients like to work with the advisor is because of something unique about that advisor. Perhaps it's the way they present themselves, their unique knowledge, their connections to the community. And I think that's why this area of digitization hasn't really happened, is because it needs to be a combination of standardized and customized, which inherently isn't scalable. But we're doing our best to make it as scalable as we can for advisors in growth mode.

Sam 6:09

you make a great point. at the end of the day, the tools are there and they're there to be to some extent, scalable and mass use. I mean, I use as a very bad example, a word processor, they sell it by the millions, etc. but everybody sets their word processor with their own shortcuts, with their own defaults and everything else to make it work for how they need it to work. And the idea of taking a tool out of its box and just using it as it is without thinking about how you want to apply it in the particular circumstance, I think is probably counterproductive for what an advisor is trying to do in terms of building a practice that stands out in in a crowded marketplace. And it reminds me of something that I found reinforced when I did my doctoral research. I had talked to a lot of high net worth clients as part of my research and did deep dive interviews with these clients to understand what they thought about the advisor client experience, investment decision making, etc. And they, to a person agreed with the sentiment that they believed the discovery process was critical and they bought into it heart and soul. But many of them felt that too many of the advisors, at least the ones that they had been dealing with, approached it as a check the box kind of exercise. Right. And I get why we need to do that, because there's regulatory or, dealer issues we need to address, but we're never going to be able to make a client feel like we've got a personalized service and a personalized solution for them. If we tell them, okay, here's ten questions, here's the form, please fill it out and bring it back to me. And we won't discuss any further.

Brandon 8:14

definitely and I think the advisors that stand out rise to the top are the ones that fully understand that every interaction that they have with their clients needs to be customized and personalized, or they're not going to attract high net worth clients. I think historically, because banks and large organizations own the market. Clients were just sort of expecting that experience with financial professionals. But if you look at how things are going in the United States, where you've got rates is taking up large positions of the market, that is not going to work going forward, especially when you have direct to consumer platforms that are creating that digital experience that the consumer,

the wealthy consumer of tomorrow is going to expect from any financial provider. That's the dish that they choose to do business with.

Sam 9:05

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think this omni channel solution for clients is going to be key. And so on that note, I think technology, as you alluded to, plays a critical role in scaling any business. Today. We have a lot of administrative work as an advisor, whether that's regulatory, whether it's compliance, whether that's just pure administrative, etc. and that's inescapable. But presumably technology job used, right, can play a key role in helping create processes that allow you to be able to scale and deal with a lot of this, I would call it, necessary, but administrative admin work efficiently and effectively. From your perspective, how was the adoption of technology and the advisory space evolved and where do you think are the key areas where you can make the most significant impact with the adoption of technology?

Well, that's a loaded question. There's a lot that's changed. Primarily, I would say advisors are more open minded to working with fintech solutions because they've seen the difference between how direct to consumer platform experiences are offering services to clients and then how they are presently offering services with the dealer provided solutions that they have. So ultimately, I think that open mindedness is is leading to more opportunity for advisors and it's adding pressure to dealers to start to make decisions more quickly and partner with third party solutions that they perhaps might not have considered working with pre-pandemic. Now, in terms of the challenges that I think offer the greatest opportunity, I think that as regulation on the financial advisor increases, that's going to lead to expected standardization among perhaps insurance carriers, investment companies, etc. And that's where technology providers can be fairly supportive if they have already prioritized as the client advisor experience and then can add the standardization that's going to be required by the regulators. It's a bit backwards, I would say, in that sense, because you would expect that regulation would lead to innovation, but because regulation in Canada is so far behind, I think it's hard to go the other way because the client experience was, in my opinion, ignored for decades.

And given the fragmentation of the market, if you will, in Canada? it's a weird combination of fragmentation and concentration, but your solution is for advisors. can you speak a little bit about the challenges that you've faced in terms of getting adoption by advisors? because you're having to get them aware of it and trained on the solution, but presumably you also have to get approval from their dealer or their MGA or whatever it is that their firm that they're working with as well. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, for sure. Well, frankly, the advisors that started on our product were around similar tenure to me. So they were 5 to 7 years in the business growing extremely frustrated at the amount of administration that they were dealt with and really the lack of support when it came to giving them tools for that kind of client discovery process. When you look at the comparison before advisors using our product, they were using a combination of PDFs, word docs excel, similar to what I was, many of which are not updated or maintained by dealers or NGOs anyway. So ultimately, using a software tool versus an outdated tool that has not been maintained was already a level of improvement. Now, as we kind of, I guess, starting to move up market and we're getting larger advisor firms interested, of course we do want to have support of dealers and is especially with say like our risk profiling questionnaire. That's been a back and forth process of a having enough interest from advisors who have the ear of decision makers at these dealers and building out the solutions that make those advisor firms really operate efficiently. But then also understanding what changes are taking place at the dealer level and on the regulatory side that may impact the client data collection methods that we have in the tool. So it's definitely like a two pronged approach. And we didn't used to have the ear of many dealers because most of the advisors were on my tenure who didn't have $100 million blocks. But now many of us are encroaching on those numbers to the point where the dealers should be listening to us because we ultimately will be the future

And

of

so

the industry.

talk to me a little bit about the business itself. So I think our audience will wholeheartedly agree with you that efficient client onboarding, that that client experience is critical for a practice's growth and client satisfaction. Talk to us a little bit about how Advisor Flow transforms this process for advisors and what immediate benefits they might be able to expect before and after this this transition, if you will.

Well, looks and like efficient onboarding, it's it's paramount. If an advisor wants to drive growth and ensure clients are satisfied not only at the discovery phase, but as those clients remain with the advisory firm long term. The moment an advisor replies to an email hosts a meeting sends out a document that is creating a certain level of experience for the client. And so I think advisors in general, at least the ones that are in the business long term, they excel at building relationships and offering a personal experience when they're physically with the clients. Most of them aren't really focused on the digital experience outside of those conversations. And so I think that's really where our advisor flow fits in, is how do you revolutionize your client data gathering process and make sure that the workflows fit the brand of the advisory firm. We ultimately focus on digitization and automation, which allows advisors to focus on what they do best, which is providing that personalized advice, fostering client relationships.

And this is going to be increasingly important as we're talking about generational transfer of wealth and you're getting younger cohorts of family members coming in to the advisory relationship, they are going to expect more and more in our digital solutions from everything from onboarding to even take account management that they're going to want to see a portal, They're going to want to see electronic sharing of documents, no more web signatures if you can possibly avoid it. Right?

Yeah, and you know what Sam it's it's not going to get done by one tool or by one firm. It's it's essentially an evolution of the entire industry. And it all comes back to how you alluded to demographics and the demographic expectation among the millennials, who are now the largest cohort of the workforce. And then coming up, you got Generation Z and this that generation is perhaps even more attached to their devices and the digital experiences now no longer searching for information on Google, but searching for a video on Tok on how to explain a financial concept. And until I would say that two years ago, there was really no financial professionals on these platforms. So these generations are getting information from random people on the Internet

Mm hmm.

that are not regulated.

Well, I'm not either of those generations. I won't name which one I am, but I can tell you that for me personally, totally want, an online portal. I want digital documentation. I don't want to have to print out something, sign it. have a witness and all of this, like DocuSign and all of those things. I think there's a it's a long time coming. So I can imagine that if I have that experience and that viewpoint that, there's a lot more people that are a lot more tech savvy than me that will, want that kind of transition even faster. So let me switch gears. In your experience as both an advisor and a tech entrepreneur, what are the key components of creating repeatable, scalable processes in an advisory practice? Because I got to believe that in both of those realms, the better that you can create scalable and repeatable process, the better off that you are to be able to actually achieve the growth targets that you have for your various businesses. And how does technology actually facilitate the scalability?

You can't scale relationship building. And so I think in general, financial advisors will not become successful by serving more clients unless they're offering less service to those clients, regardless of what technology they have. Now, Simon Sinek says, start with why. And so I think what I have kind of picked up over the years from talking to other advisors and how they have become successful is understanding why advisors got in the business in the first place. And I hosted an event with Sean Todd in March. He runs a practice out of Ottawa multi advisor firm. Several had men and even he said when asked a similar question how they become successful, they focused on understanding their mission vision values and ensure that that emanated throughout the firm. Everybody who who's working with the company, how do we make sure they're all rowing in the same direction? When that's more clear, then you can start to focus on documenting processes, procedures. What can you automate? What pieces can technology solve? Wh pieces should people continue to be involved with? And that, I think, is ultimately where choosing technology starts to fit in is once you've got the mission vision values, once you've got your processes mapped, then you choose which pieces of technology get integrated into the practice depending on what type of clients that practice is serving. And it's not just a financial advisory practice, but even know no advisor for the software company very much focused on financial advisors. Every piece of content we put out, if it's not something I would be interested in, we're not going to put it out. And I think that advisors who are, you know, cookie cutter hosting cookie cutter content online, their process as cookie cutter all from the dealer. And there's no personality. They're going to have a much harder time building a business in the future. It's not only going to be about buying books, the business, which will be important for the next five or ten years, don't get me wrong, but attracting new clients online. The advisors need to think about the process, integrate the technology and ultimately realize that it's all about their brand shining through that mission,

I

vision

couldn't agree

and values

with you more, Brandon. It's funny you mentioned Constellation before and since I've been involved in a number of fintechs, the one thing that is clear and common through all of those is first, you have to have a good process in the offline analog world. so how you onboard a client, how you build a portfolio, how you do rebalancing, what have you? Once you've got a good process, then you can think about digitizing or what portions of it is digitizable and in that sense scalable and repeatable and everything else. But I also think that you hit a very important point here. There are always going to be parts that you don't ever want to create into a process, let alone a digitized process, because then you commodify, what exactly might be your secret sauce that your clients are coming for, right? So if you are going to make it a process on how you're going to actually do a deep dive discovery of your client, you might end up having the outcome. It may be very efficient, it may be very repeatable, etc. But you're going to leave clients with the view that I got out of my doctoral research, that it feels like a check the box type of exercise, right? So you're right. You're going to be very careful. You have to have a very good process. Analog first on what is the process. Then think about digitizing it and then think about what you want to leave to be kind of your secret sauce and that you're going to use as, that human component that you're going to bring to each and every interaction that you're basically going to do an audible in in that meeting or in that client interaction.

Well Sam technology doesn't fix a broken business. It just accelerates the success of a well-run one. So it's imperative to integrate technology thoughtfully by considering feedback from clients and staff members to ensure seamless implementation, as opposed to, I think some leaders at large brokerages are listening, reading a report from McKinsey and then are making decisions for their entire organization without talking to advisors, clients and ultimately the end users of technology that they may choose

Yeah,

to be implementing.

I think we've all seen that. And you're absolutely right. At the end of the day, I love the way that you put it. Technology doesn't fix a broken business. you have to make sure that your business is competitive and well-positioned for the future. And, then you can think about what technology makes sense that, is going to accelerate that growth. if you don't have a great business model or if you don't have a great team, and if you don't have a great value proposition no technology in the world is going to save your business,

Well, and Sam I've had advisors who have started using Advisor flow, and then once all my team members does some deep dive into that advisors business, the problem isn't

automation or technology, it's that they perhaps don't have enough clients that they're approaching. So adding a software to your toolbox isn't going to save your business. But if you already are talking to lots of clients and you're so busy that you know you're busy doing administrative work or segmenting of clients, that those are some pieces where technology could actually add some some value. So what we found is the advisors that are most benefit, the most benefit from the software are those that are growing their practice by adding many different clients or those that are in acquisition mode where they're buying blocks of business and then needing to reach out to many clients at one time. That's where a combination of of automate automation and customization can

makes

really catapult

Looking

in advisors

forward,

business

what emerging technologies are trends do you believe will shape the future of financial advising? I mean, do you see a role, for JPT. Everybody's got a new generative A.I.. Do you see a role for this? again, I think we talked about, what you can process, what you can commodify, where you want to keep your unique value proposition. How do advisors prepare to integrate or at least work with or compete with these technologies?

well. So Sam I used to JPT, I use it primarily to reduce the amount of proofreading that my wife has to do. So I think she's been the greatest benefactor so far from these large language models, at least for me. But advisors need to focus on how technology partners are working together. I follow many different software provider, some in Canada, some in the U.S., and I haven't yet seen

a game changing integration of artificial intelligence or generative AI into financial services. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One being that we manage a lot of private information that should not be entered into any large language model. So that's one. Two, there are a number of different pieces in the advisory process that cannot be automated because ultimately they're in the lead for human conversation. So I do think that there will be an integration of AI into various software tools.

How that will be done, we'll see. We are looking at a use case of artificial intelligence with advisor flow and with we'll announce that probably over the summer. But I think that advisors need to just stay on top of the trends as they evolve because I can guarantee you that the venture backs companies that are going direct to consumer are looking at any way they can automate and go after the launch of advisors. If you look at Wealthsimple, you know, they've done a great job of replacing retail bank experiences at a better price. We look at policy, they've done a great job at replacing transactional insurance sales. But the technology stack of the future, it's going to be

Look,

about integration and

I've

customization.

been writing and talking a lot about this. My own view is that and the premise behind this podcast is this idea that, look, there will always be a role for human advisors. And the example that I always use coming from my background is an investment guy to my dying breath. I will wholeheartedly defend the importance of asset allocation and portfolio selection and risk profiling and all of that. Okay, I believe that. But over the last 5 to 10 years, any advisor that hung their hat on that as the differentiating factor for their practice probably got their butts kicked. Okay. Because it's table stakes at this stage. And I would say definitely in the next 5 to 10 years you will get your butt kicked. So it's not saying that these things aren't important, but there is AI because these are numbers. you can optimize it, you can create models, etc. AI can do that probably faster, cheaper. And And let's face it, better than most human advisors can do. Okay. But if you're wanting to go compete, head to head against, these direct to consumer or other types of businesses that have got this, you can't compete with them by saying, well, I'm going to do what they're doing, but I'll do it on a spreadsheet or, on a computer, etc., and I'm going to charge you more for the privilege. you have to focus on where your value add is. And my belief is that, you're able to focus as a human advisor on the human on the other side of the table. So it's not about the policy, it's not about the portfolio, it's about the person behind the table, behind the policy, behind the portfolio. So the better that you can engage with them, the better that you can do a discovery and understand their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their preferences, the more likely that you're going to build that connection that is going to help you be able to identify what they're really looking for and what their solutions are going to be. And the more likely that you're going to be able to compete. And here Ai, it's going to play a role. You have tools like Advisor Flow that can help ease the administrative burden or call it the note taking or the record keeping kind of burden on things. To me, the way that AI and human intelligence kind of blend together to create. the advisor of the future.

Wholeheartedly agree with that. Advisors Best conversations with clients happen when the advisor already knows 40 to 50% of the client situation before that first fact. Fine. And the only way that happens is if they're gathering information in a efficient manner. Prior to that discovery meeting. And when I think of like what's the ROI of software in a financial advisory process, it's if you can increase your batting average from prospect to planning engagement or from planning engagement to implementation, that is where the software can really add value to the advisor experience and ultimately create that stickiness with the client. If a client wants to sign into a tool that you've offered to them because they're actually adding some value or it's helped them gain more clarity, that's going to encourage them to engage with the advisor more proactively and not only reactively when the markets go down or they receive an email from their advisor,

Brandon, we're coming to the end of our podcast, but I'll have a few final rapidfire questions that I ask all my guests. So you're ready. Let's dive in. So number one, professionally, what is

Let's

the most important lesson you've learned over the years?

Stay humble. There's always someone

I

smarter

think that's

than me.

a good lesson for all of us. Number two, what is one practical tip you would offer listeners keen on applying your lessons and insights?

Try to integrate one piece of new tech over the next year and if it doesn't work out, realize why. Before you look

Well,

to integrate

that's a great

more.

tip. That's a great tip. So may not be a technology issue. Maybe your existing stack that you're dealing with, how it integrates. Any other parting words of advice for listeners?

Stay curious and let's work together. I'm very active on LinkedIn as a Sam, so love to engage with other advisors. I don't know everything and I'm always trying to find other smart people to talk and learn from.

Well, on that note, if listeners want to learn more about you or find your work, where do they go? Obviously there's LinkedIn, but anything else?

Oh yeah. Advisor Flow. ca, We post all of our webinars. We bring in some top subject matter experts. Just as Sam is doing here with is his podcast. So yeah, if there's other topics that you think we should be delving into or people we should be talking to, then please let us know because we're always trying to learn and

Awesome.

grow together.

Brandon This has been fun and lots of great stuff and insights to take away. Thank you very much.

Thanks a lot, Sam.