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“There is a universal currency that we all pay, and it is time, and we are granted X amount. We have no idea how much sand is in our hourglass, we don’t know how much is left, but what we know is everything is paid in time.”

— Burt White, Managing Director of LPL Financial

When Burt White talks about technology benefits, he is talking from his experience serving LPL’s 16,000+ advisors. They can be a demanding bunch!

I spent almost an entire week at the T3 Advisor Conference and I can safely say that it was hands down the best T3 of the ten or so that I have attended!  So much learning, lots of great speakers and panels sessions, some ground-breaking announcements, and of course, terrific networking with people from across the industry.

This is the first of three episodes from T3 that we’re put together for our Wealth Management Today podcast by Ezra Group. We had so many interviews. 24 to be exact!  Too many for a single episode, so we’re compiling them into three, that’s really the “Best of T3”!

This week, our first group of industry experts include Burt White, Eric Clarke from Orion Advisor Tech, Nick Millikan and Andrew Smith Lewis from CAIS, Molly Weiss and Brandon Rembe from Envestnet, Brian Justice from SS&C Black Diamond, Robert Sofia from Snappy Kraken, and Linda Ding from Laserfiche.

Now hit the Play button!

This episode of Wealth Management Today is brought to you by Ezra Group Consulting. If your firm is evaluating new technology or looking to improve your current wealth platform, you need to contact Ezra Group. Don’t spend another day using technology that doesn’t offer an elegant user experience. Your advisors and clients deserve better and you can deliver it to them with the help of Ezra Group.

Topics Covered in this Episode

• The Software Design Process with Eric Clarke
• The Artificial Intelligence of CAIS’ Education System with Nic Millikan and Andrew Smith Lewis
• Salesforce Overlay Using Skience with Molly Weiss and Brandon Rembe
• The Life Cycle Prospect Approach with Brian Justice
• Marketing Best Practices of Top Performing Advisors with Robert Sofia
• Building Workflows in Your CRM with Linda Ding
• Why Convenience is the New Service with Burt White

Companies & People Mentioned

• Advizr [05:44]
• ByAllAccounts | Morningstar [19:14]
• CAIS [07:13]
• Envestnet [11:28]
• Laserfiche [24:40]
• LPL Financial [27:41]
• Orion Advisor Tech [02:55]
• Salesforce [11:36]
• Shufro Rose [24:51]
• Snappy Kraken [21:50]
• SS&C Black Diamond [17:31]

Related Articles

• #ItzOnWealthTech Ep. 32: Speed Podcasting at the T3 Enterprise Conference
• Diamond in the Rough: Orion Finds a Financial Planning Gem in Advizr
• Envestnet is Transforming into The Alibaba of Wealth Management
• #ItzOnWealthTech Bonus Episode: A Maniacal Focus on Advisor Convenience at LPL Financial

Complete Episode Transcript:

Craig: Welcome everyone to the wonderful world of wealth tech here, the Wealth Management Today podcast from Ezra Group. I’m your host, Craig Iskowitz. I’m a consultant and I run a consulting and research company called Ezra Group. This is, as I said before, our highlight podcast, one of three from the T3 Advisor Conference. I’m not going to spend a lot of time intro-ing, but I’ll just give a quick overview of the very first guest here is Eric Clarke, the CEO of Orion Advisor Tech. And we were talking about the session that they had at the T3 Advisor Conference where they talked a lot about the design process and I’m a bit of a design geek. I have a computer science degree, so I love looking behind the scenes at how they build software. On stage they talked a little bit about the design process and how they built some of the new tools and technologies that were launched at the T3 conference for Orion Advisor, so let’s take a listen.

The Software Design Process with Eric Clarke

Eric: Yeah. The design process for us isn’t just about having a nice user experience, it’s about binding together that user experience with the engineering behind the scenes and not being afraid to disrupt a well known workflow. Like for instance, you take the model trading workflow historically that’s been assigning accounts to a model portfolio, rebalancing that model maybe before you meet with a client or on some type of a periodic calendared basis. And instead of doing that, what we’ve done is we’ve tipped that process upside down and we’ve said, okay, once an account is assigned to a model, we know what the tolerance parameters are. Let’s rebalance every account every day, simply surface the outliers and make those actionable items ready for our advisors right at their fingertips on the dashboard so they can click into it and take action where needed. The same thing is true for tax loss harvesting opportunities. Again, surfacing those actionable items. Here are the exact accounts. You know, maybe you have 82 accounts that have tax loss harvesting opportunities and just putting that information right at the advisor’s fingertips instead of relying on the advisor to come in and do something, we’re trying to proactively surface the actionable items for the advisors.

Craig: Exactly, that’s less for the advisors to think about and to just make a decision. The software tells them, here’s the most important thing you should be working on.

Eric: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. Trying to surface those things that are top of mind. And even within the firm, surfacing those things that are top of mind for this specific job position that the individual has.

Craig: So you’re tracking every workflow that an advisor does in the system. Anything else you gleaned from that? Any other insights you got from looking at millions of workflows?

Eric: Yeah, we really did. In fact, a lot of it is somewhat critical feedback on our own system. We realized that some things that we thought were important, we made way too difficult for our advisors to execute and instead of taking six clicks to get to something we needed to make that information available to them right at the dashboard so that they could then take action on it. You take something as simple as an RMD calculation, you know whether or not a client is on target to meet their RMD or not. We made that way too difficult for our advisors to get to. And now with these actionable dashboards, we’re surfacing that information, letting the advisor have a proactive conversation with the client well in advance of your end to make sure that that RMD requirement is being met.

Craig: So the next question we pulled from my interview with Eric Clarke was about their financial planning tool or which was Advizr, which they purchased last year, and some of the things they’ve done with it since they purchased it, and some of the things we can be expecting, new stuff coming out of their financial planning software arm this year.

Eric: Where we have fallen short and what our advisors are telling us is that, hey, we need to be able to quarterback the estate process. So in the coming months you’ll see us roll out a version, an estate planning module that will allow our advisors to quarterback that estate process. And that’s something that we’re really excited about. We have just over 25% of our firms have already adopted Advizr and their leverage unit as their planning technology, which we think is a real great marker of success. You know, really being eight months post acquisition.

Craig: It’s impressive because you have a big user base, you have 25% of those on the platform is impressive.

Eric: Yeah. We have over 500 firms now leveraging the Advizr planning technology either directly as planning and/or the client experience. It’s been wonderful. And the team that we acquired at Advizr, we realized that they were doing things better than we were. We’ve reshaped the entire way that we do our application development as a result of that acquisition, really stepping back and saying, we need to keep what’s best across our organizations and move that forward.

The Artificial Intelligence of CAIS’ Education System with Nic Millikan and Andrew Smith Lewis

Craig: My next guests are from a company called CAIS, and it’s Nic Millikan and Andrew Smith Lewis. I asked them for the elevator pitch and then a quick overview of how the artificial intelligence that underlies CAIS’ educational system works.

Nic: So CAIS is an alternative investment platform that really services the independent wealth management channel exclusively. We’ve been around for about 10 years. We’ve raised over $9 billion in assets so far across hedge funds, private equity –

Craig: 9 billion.

Nic: Yeah, it’s a big number and 2 billion of that came from last year. So we’re really seeing an increase in adoption of alternatives within the independent wealth management channel. And that’s a topic that we’re trying to tackle with education as well. So we do have a broad range of strategies both on the private and the more liquid side, so mutual funds and things that are coming down the pike and getting a lot of traction with our market. But definitely all things alternatives could even have been a wealth management channel.

Andrew: It’s all about the content, it’s about getting the right content to the right individual and that last mile of them trying to learn to really get that stuff into their head is left up to them. So with CAIS IQ, we’re crossing that barrier and we’re using this system that helps individualized and personalized instruction and delivers great benefit to advisors in a very short amount of time.

Craig: What I wanted to know about CAIS was more about their AI and how it works and some of the research they’ve done in behavioral psychology and how the brain works and interacts. So I thought Andrew Smith Lewis’ answer was pretty interesting here.

Andrew: And the interesting thing is there’s a lot of research about how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information to build lasting knowledge. But this information has kind of been siloed and never applied broadly to education. So I’ve spent about two decades looking to take that information with some technology into the field and now CAIS is applying that system for advisors.

Craig: So this is real AI. You didn’t just put AI on the front and say that.

Andrew: No, this is real AI.

Craig: Could you explain a little more how that works, what kind of data sets you’re working with and what actionable intelligence is surfacing?

Andrew: For sure. So the underlying system is called Cerego, that’s the engine that powers CAIS IQ, that system which I co-developed has been used by over 6 million users. There’s 14 independent peer reviewed studies on the system. It’s used with everything from special force operators in the Army to Air Force pilots to employ as a target to couple thousand universities around the world. It was backed by Bill and Melinda Gates early on to help accessibility for at-risk and underserved students. So it’s got a very, very wide footprint in the personalized learning space. And the algorithm, what it does is it figures out for each individual learner, what do they know, what do they not know. It uses an error corrective adaptive controller, which is a fancy way of saying when you’re using the system it can measure, when you’re not using the system it predicts. And then when you come back in, it sort of checks that prediction. So it kind of error corrects and zooms in on what do you know versus what do I know, how fast you learn, how fast you forget. And it gives you just the information that you need at the right time. So stepping back, little and often is the magic recipe for retention, right? We all kind of do the opposite, we all like to cram for tests, which is a maybe a way of hacking your way to a better score. But then what happens after that?

Craig: It all disappears.

Andrew: It’s gone, right? Which is not a great thing, right? So we believe that financial advisors should hang on to that knowledge longterm. And so by using this little and often personalized algorithm, we can basically drip feed you the right content at the right time to promote lasting retention. And with this thing, we’ve taken it out to the purveyors of continuing education, credit, CMA and CFP, they’ve blessed it. And so people who use this product are also building their knowledge and they’re getting credit at the same time for it, which is important for advisors.

New Salesforce Integrations & Hyper-Personalization with Molly Weiss and Brandon Rembe

Craig: Next up on this jam packed WMToday podcast from the T3 Advisor Conference, we have Molly Weiss and Brandon Rembe from Envestnet. So first I asked about some of the news they released at the conference, integrations with a Salesforce overlay tool called Skience. So Molly tells us about that.

Molly: Yeah. You know, we’re really excited about some of the integrations that we’re doing into our proposal. In particular, we’re really focused on the advisor experience. So we’re thinking about how to make the advisor’s day to day experience better. We just recently announced an integration with Skience, allowing the advisor to be in Salesforce, use the Skience app and then launch right into the proposal. And then we’re also helping the advisor think more holistically about their clients. So the integrations that we’re doing with the exchanges, the insurance exchange and the credit exchange is all part of enabling the advisor to provide more holistic advice to their clients.

Craig: Envestnet has the largest number of advisors on their platform of any vendor. I think saved Morningstar, which is close, both are around 100,000 advisors on their platform. And when they improve their advisor experience, it has a big impact. So I asked Molly and Brandon how some of the improvements that are coming from Envestnet for the advisor experience this year.

Brandon: It’s kind of along the spectrum of evolution of how banks and advisors are really looking at their clients and interacting with their clients. The trend 3-4 years ago was starting to be able to produce these proactive alerts. So your client did something, a large deposit, and then you would alert the client that something happened. And then people just got inundated with alerts and inundated with, Hey, here’s the things that you’re doing, but it didn’t really produce better outcomes. It provided a little bit of insight, but, but not a lot of great outcomes. So one of the things that we’ve really focused on the Yodlee side of things is this concept of hyper-personalization, which is data is only useful if it’s meaningful to me. So how do I make that data meaningful to me? One is to make sure that you do, as Molly mentioned, have that holistic picture. So being able to not just look at their investment accounts, but look at their credit card spending, look at student loans do they have, their insurance, all of that. And be able to bring that data in, cleanse it, enrich it, normalize it, provide pure benchmarking. It’s something we’re very excited about. So I can see, Hey, am I spending more on streaming services than people with my similar income?

Craig: That sounds awesome. That can be super helpful for advisors to show their clients.

Brandon: And it really elevates the value proposition of the advisor. Instead of just saying, Hey, how should you be investing your money? It’s how should you be budgeting? How should you be saving? How should you be paying down your debt? What is the next best action for the advisor to take? Given this hyper-personalized an overall view of the client’s financial wellness.

Craig: I wanted to know how the trend of hyper-personalization and AI was being leveraged by Envestnet to improve consumer experiences.

Molly: You know what it is about integration. So it is about bringing the applications that the advisor might be using. Some of them are provided by Envestnet, but we realize that some of them are not. So we’ve continued to invest in our, what we call open ENV, but it’s really our API strategy, allowing firms and advisors to bring together what used to be disconnected systems into a single application. And then it really, literally is the advisor experience. We’re rewriting our proposal workflow. It’s one of the most heavily used applications on the platform. It’s one of the key components of the advisor, investor exchange or interaction. So we’re rewriting the workflow in a much more friendly user experience. It’s more intuitive. The advisor I think ultimately wants to be able to tell a story to the client, right? It’s not just about going through a proposal workflow and then getting an output that’s a PDF that you show to the client. But it’s really about sitting down with the client and being able to say, here is your financial plan. This is what I’m proposing. This is why. So we’re thinking a lot about ways that our technology can help the client tell a story to their clients.

Brandon: And to add onto what Molly was saying, I think not only are we trying to improve the advisor experience and the client experience, but we’re doing that in an omnichannel environment. So we’re trying to interact where and how the end client wants to interact. Whether that’s their desktop, whether it’s their mobile phone, whether that’s an AI chatbot. All of those channels are things we’re investing in and deploying for our clients today because it’s one thing to have great information, but if you’re not meeting the client where they want to interact it goes to waste.

The Life Cycle Prospect Approach with Brian Justice

Craig: And moving right along. Next up we have Brian Justice, VP of Business Development from SS&C Black Diamond. And I asked him to explain how SS&C Black Diamond is approaching the life cycle for prospects.

Brian: I appreciate that. Great question. With the prospect lifestyle, we might even call it the prospect journey, we really want that to start by giving the advisor the ability to get his brand out into the marketplace. So it starts with marketing and it starts with attracting that end investor and that household that advisor is looking for. Once we can establish that in the marketplace, I think we want to give the advisor the ability to use tools that can onboard clients much more efficiently. And what I mean by that is you don’t just get somebody’s money because they like you today, right? You’ve got to prove to them that your value prop is worth it in the marketplace, there’s lot of competition amongst advisors, and the ability for an advisor to see somebody’s investible assets as a whole, it can be very difficult. So that part of the journey, being able to see the current portfolio of holdings, being able to do a proper analysis for risk or financial planning and then being able to bring that client back to the value proposition that that advisory firm has and hopefully make that connection. And then of course from there, the typical onboarding, how do we get that new account open? How do we transfer those assets? How do we get you into our models or managed programs and be transparent with you over time from reports in mobility and whatever it is that end investor is looking for today.

Craig: Indeed. So you mentioned all investible assets, you have connectivity to data aggregation vendors. Do you have a preferred one you use?

Brian: I wouldn’t say preferred, but we use Covo we use ByAllAccounts. We’ve been using both of those for probably the last 10 years. Probably 11-12% of our overall account volume that Black Diamond are through those services. And I would call those held away accounts that an investor, their bank account, their 401k.

Craig: My next question for Brian was about a new product which they have launched called the Financial Life Hub, looking to bring in a lot of data from different parts of the client’s financial life and bringing it all into one place. I was pretty interested in Brian’s answer to this.

Brian: So great segue from the aggregation piece there.

Craig: Well thank you, I’m an expert at segues.

Brian: So you have that data aggregation and you know that Financial Hub is just not the advisor’s money that he or she is managing for that end investor or that household. Right? There’s a lot more that goes on. You know there are mortgages, there are insurance products, there are 401ks and bank accounts, a number of possibilities and institutions. So the collection of that data I think is paramount, we do a really good job of that at Black Diamond. That’s the core of our platform. Data aggregation, performance reconciliation, being very accurate and you know that data integrity is important. So it starts there, but then that Financial Hub, so connecting the financial plan, connecting that risk analysis and giving the advisor and the investor the ability to talk about those things and how they affect the goals that that end investor is trying to reach, it’s not about performance. We just said that performance reporting is part of the picture but not the whole pie anymore. And you know, reaching an investor’s goals is often not looking against the S & P every single day. So performance does matter. You would hope, right, performance does matter. However, goals based investing I think is very strong these days and having that gamified experience through a Financial Life Hub that Black Diamond could offer, you know where again, tying in the risk, tying in the planning, using budgeting tools, just understanding an end investor’s habits and how they might be helping or detracting them from reaching those investible goals.

Marketing Best Practices of Top Performing Advisors with Robert Sofia

Craig: Moving right along. We now have Robert Sofia, CEO of automated marketing firms, Snappy Kraken, and they just did a study on millions of data points that they gathered through their marketing automation platform through all their clients, and came up with some really interesting observations about marketing best practices of the top performing advisors. Let’s hear what Robert had to say.

Robert: How advisors who are getting the top 25% of results are behaving differently online than the average advisors.

Craig: So the top quartile.

Robert: Exactly. Yep. And it’s not just their behavior in general, it’s their activity, it’s how invested they are, it’s the amount of time they spend. And so for example, we really took the averages and compared them with the top 25% to make a profile. What does a top 25% advisor look like? What does an average advisor look like? And just to give you some, a few of the key differences. For example, an average advisor will run six digital marketing campaigns a year. The top 25% advisors are running three times that many. They’re running 18 campaigns.

Craig: Digital marketing campaign.

Robert: Exactly.

Craig: So how you define a digital marketing campaign?

Robert: So you think about a campaign, it’s not just one single random act of marketing —

Craig: Don’t do random acts of marketing!

Robert: But that’s what most do. They just, Oh, I’m going to send a tweet or I’m going to post this to social, I’m going to send this email, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s not part of a journey. Campaign means you’ve got a subject, you’re going to create all these top of funnel activities around that subject, drive traffic into a journey perhaps to start with the landing page with opt-ins followed up by email nurturing sequences. So that’s a campaign. It may have 30-50 elements all around one subject or one thing. And so this is what our system empowers.

Craig: So we have 18 campaigns run by the top quartile of advisors.

Robert: Versus six for the average.

Craig: So that’s one measure of why they’re successful.

Robert: You’ve got activity, right? Obviously they’re doing more marketing, but there’s other ways they’re doing more marketing too, like for example, the number of emails they send every month to their contact list. Average advisors are sending 1.6 emails per month. Top 25% advisors are sending 4.3 emails per month. So almost four times as much email, a little over one a week. Well, some advisors will say, well, that’s too much. My clients don’t that, my prospects don’t want that. But that activity is actually yielding better results for them. So if you look at what the constant nurturing they’re doing is leading to, it’s actually a multiplying effect because even though they may be running the same types of campaigns, the sheer volume leads to better performance of their individual campaigns. So what I mean by that is the average advisors are generating only 6.8 leads per campaign, whereas the top 25% are generating 15.8 leads per campaign. So they’re both running the same campaign, but based on the sheer volume of their activity, because they’re keeping their list nurtured and warmer and they’re more invested, the campaigns are performing better by more than double.

Craig: That’s pretty good performance.

Building Workflows in Your CRM with Linda Ding

Craig: Next up is Linda Ding. She’s Director of Strategic Marketing for Laserfiche, the documanagement and workflow company. I asked Linda something that I saw during her presentation where she had a client, an RIA client from Shufro Rose, Vib Arya, their COO, talking about the workflows they built in Laserfiche that connected to their CRM and how it helped the firm to grow. And I asked her the differences and why you would build workflows in Laserfiche versus building in your CRM.

Craig: Talking about workflows. you had one of your clients, a Vib Arya from Shufro Rose, an RIA in Manhattan. Talk about how they’ve implemented Laserfiche. And one thing you mentioned, and it was a very good question from the audience, about why you would build your workflows in Laserfiche versus the CRM. So can you talk about why firms would do that? The pros and cons.

Linda: For sure. I think in our world, so with processing, whether it’s a new account or any sort of accounts, maintenance activities, there are still fair amount of legal documents involved in the processes and the decision making. And the traditional CRMs are very good at handling databases, what’s called the metadata, and in the rows and columns in the spreadsheet. However by law we still need to process the physical paperwork and that’s where Laserfiche comes to play. In terms of how to initiate the data collection to the approval to the sign off and then finally having a compliance archival of the physical documents. So that is outside in parallel to all the workflow happening in the CRM. That’s why we’re very good partners with a lot of the CRM applications out there.

Craig: Then financial planning and portfolio management and all the tools that RIA’s would use.

Linda: That’s right. For any of the tools that require actual generation of the documentation, we are there to catch all.

Craig: Laserfiche has been around for a long time. How long have you been in business?

Linda: 32 years.

Craig: Which is crazy for this industry.

Linda: And we’re expanding. In fact, our CEO just invested in a some real estate and we are building more office space.

Craig: Oh nice, where?

Linda: It’s right next to our existing building in Long Beach, California.

Craig: Long Beach! Lovely. Oh, that sounds really nice. So how many clients do you have now?

Linda: In wealth management we have over 2,500. That includes both RIAs and the broker dealers and the institutional buyers.

Craig: Cause you work with both the individual RIAs as well as enterprise firms.

Linda: Yes, we have individual RIAs. So a guy in Florida in his 70s and he’s still going strong with institutional users with 2,500 RIAs.

Why Convenience is the New Service with Burt White

Craig: And finally the star of our show, Burt White managing director of LPL. Here are a few clips from my interview with him which was really just me going through my notes from his presentation, which just knocked everyone’s socks off at the conference. Everyone was just amazed, he’s such a dynamic speaker, and he has a lot of great information to share. The first clip here that I pulled from our interview was about how the great new service is actually convenience, and what that means.

Burt: Yeah. You know, I like to classify something called the Four Levels of Want. If you’re coming out of the desert and you haven’t had water in forever, all you want is the availability of water. You’re not gonna decide. You don’t really care about what brand there is, a choice isn’t what you’re looking for. The second level is choice. And that ends up to be where, going back 30 years ago, this is where everybody competed, right? At one point in time, supermarkets only had 7,000 things on the shelves, now it’s 50,000 these days.

Craig: How did we survive back then with only 7,000 things?

Burt: Right? But the third level where everyone’s competing now is on service, right? And this is sort of how you begin to compete for clients, but the new great service is all about convenience. And that’s the fourth level, right? And what people are beginning to realize is good service isn’t good enough anymore. That what you really need to have is convenient service. Things that just work, things that are usable, things that are simple things are intuitive. And so this element of sort of migrating from this element of service to convenience, I think is one of the real changes that advisors and not just advisors, any industry is going to have to do. And that’s what we’re trying to do from our technology perspective is not just have a great technology, but to have technology and services that are convenient, that makes things simple and usable.

Craig: I was at your conference last August and saw some demos of some of the new stuff you’re doing. It looks really good. I really liked how you watched what the advisors were doing in their workflows and counted the number of clicks it took them to open an account, for example, and say, we’ve got to fix that. A lot of people do that, it’s not unusual. You were measuring how many screen scrolls they were doing, which I’ve never heard of anyone really looking at that closely because, but then I realized, yeah, I’m scrolling all the time. If you can cut that down, that would save a lot of effort.

Burt: It’s interesting because you start looking at things like, one of the things that we did is we got on the other side of the monitor from them and just looked at, do they do their eyes go left first or right first. And it’s amazing how that demonstrates sort of how we want to put nav bars.

Craig: Which way do they look?

Burt: Left first. Most people read left to right, which is where most nav bars are, but it’s that level of validation you want to do. One of the things we’ve done here recently, which I thought was really neat, is we went out to a bunch of advisors offices, got there before they did, walked in with them, and we were curious what do they do before they finish their first cup of coffee? Because that element is what we want to be able to help with as you’re driving that efficiency through. So it’s a lot of fun to focus on these workflows, these customer journeys to try to deliver better services and technology.

Craig: I really like that clip. My next question for Burt was about ROI. Everyone knows what ROI is, return on investment, but what Burt was talking about was you shouldn’t be calculating so much return on investment as return on experience or ROX. So how ROX is the new ROI?

Burt: Yeah, well advisors and I think in industry in general has been so focused on this return on investment. How, yeah, we’ll invest in technology or new services or people and think about what kind of a return you get on that. But I think what people are beginning to realize is that if you invest in the experience, the ROX. If you can invest in the experience, there is a massive return on experience. McKinsey did a study and found that companies that really focus on this customer experience they have deeper loyalty, more revenues, more sales. But on the other side, because the experience is so much better, they have less breaks, it’s cheaper to serve and so forth. Less dislocation, more efficiencies. And so they end up having you know, 20% reductions in costs. And so therefore there’s this massive move towards this ROX this return on experience, which is the new ROI. And I’m a big believer in it and sort of dovetails back to this convenience conversation we had. If you can deliver a great experience, people aren’t gonna leave you and you can deliver exactly what they need. You can do so more efficiently. The example we gave was on, on Starbucks. Starbucks now, because they’ve delivered such a great experience with their mobile and digital tools, about half of all of their orders are done digitally. Which means that I don’t need to have someone up there actually physically doing it, which saves 12 hours per store per day. And that is real money when you add that up across thousands of stores stores.

Craig: I really can’t get enough of Burt White. I could’ve done a whole podcast just of him. Unfortunately we were crunched for time. So I’ve only got a couple of clips here and the last clip in this episode, one of three highlight episodes from the T3 Advisor Conference, talking about how a new way to measure the benefits of technology. And with T3 being a technology conference, looking for ways to measure benefits is always a good thing. Burt’s suggestion is we measure it in human currency and the most important human currency is time. Let’s hear what Burt has to say about that.

Burt: We joked about it before we got on air here that you know, we wouldn’t talk about my midlife crisis and it’s a good midlife crisis. It’s not a bad one. It’s not like race cars and jumping out of planes, right? But it’s about reflection. And when I’m beginning to realize is there’s a universal currency that we all pay, and it is time. And we are granted X amount. We have no idea how much sand is in our hourglass. We don’t know how much is left. But what we know is everything is paid in time. And my belief is that when you begin to think about the currency, the universal currency, it is human currency measured in time. And so when you begin to think about anything, let alone technology benefits, it needs to be priced in time, not in dollars, not in terabytes, not in any of it. It’s gotta be priced in the time, the time to learn it, the time it saves for me. And you know, all that stuff, right? It’s all measured in time. And so my belief is that that element of human currency is the most important currency. And it’s how we begin to measure how effective your technology really is, right? Is it delivering the savings of time, the growth that you need and so forth it’s all driven out of that one thing. It’s all about how many laps around this crazy fireball in the sky that you have.

Craig: And that was wow, the most clips I’ve ever put into a podcast. I gotta tell ya, 36 separate clips here, intros and guests, clips and breaks. That was really a lot of work. So I hope you enjoyed that one of three, our first of three highlight reels from the T3 Advisor Conference. We learned a lot of great stuff that I really enjoyed, especially from Eric Clarke talking about some of the future plans they have for their financial planning tools. Really interesting the CAIS company and their AI and how it’s helping advisor education in alternative investments. Always like to hear what Brandon and Molly, the heads of product for Yodlee and Envestnet all together are, are going to be telling us, considering the, the major footprint that investment has. So that’s always interesting to hear anything. Molly and Brandon have to say. Brian Justice from SS&C, Black Diamond, their Financial Life Hub, good stuff there. Robert Sofia from Snappy Kraken. If you’re an advisor, even if you’re running any business, their marketing advice is invaluable. I know I’m always taking little bits, snippets from the Snappy Kraken webinars for my own business. It applies to anywhere. Then Linda Ding from Laserfiche client workflows and finishing up with the one and only Burt White some of his, what I call Burt-isms, sharing that he did at the conference. Hope you enjoyed that. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast and please remember to subscribe, leave five stars, blah, blah, blah. And just keep listening. We really appreciate it and I hope you had a great time.