Rethink. The Financial Advisor Podcast - Episode 70: TradePMR's Product Vision for Advisors featuring Jon Patullo
Peering into the future from a product leader's perspective.
In this episode, Adam Holt & Derek Notman had a nice conversation with Jon Patullo, Chief Product Officer at TradePMR, about the future of advice. They cover everything from their service orientated model to support advisors to how AI is quickly accelerating. Jump in and learn how an industry insider sees advice today and where it’s headed.
They talk about:
Scale efficiency with open architecture
AI supporting Advisors
TradePMR’s acquisition by Robinhood and the future of human advice
Leveraging open APIs from vendors to drive innovation
The speed of AI and how if you don’t pay attention you will be left behind
And more
Resources:
Full Transcript Below
Connect With Adam Holt:
Connect With Derek Notman:
Full Transcript:
Derek Notman: Adam are custodians really delivering on digital first trends?
H. Adam Holt: You mean like the paper onboarding or repapering of your accounts or enabling AI or rebalancing platforms that they all promised? Is that what you mean?
Derek Notman: All of the above and then some. All that in a bag of chips.
H. Adam Holt: I think I know that they've been talking about this stuff and they know that it's in the media and advisors are trying to figure out what the heck to do. Where's this coming from?
Derek Notman: But is it actually happening, right? There's talk, and then I just saw a meme on this the other day. There's talk of starting a business, people that do that, and there's people starting a business and the line for people talking about starting a business is a hell of a lot longer.
H. Adam Holt: I think it really depends on who you're talking about, right? I mean, the bigger companies, the real big ones we know out there. The Mr. Charles out there, that's not an easy ship to turn. Fidelity, and they got a lot of loyalty and a lot of infrastructure put in place. That's not an easy thing to innovate.
Derek Notman: It's not, there's a challenge there. And I know I've mentioned this a couple of times over previous episodes, but Bill Harris and I were talking about this too. And these firms, these are the big ones, Chuck. Some of their technology could be decades old, and what's funny is that initially they were first early adopters of tech.
But then they spent all this money on infrastructure and now, you can only add so many features before the whole thing breaks down and to recode an entire experience.
H. Adam Holt: Yeah.
Derek Notman: It's tough. So I don't know if I want to talk bad about custodians, but are they delivering on what the trends are? We've talked about what's going on in the future of financial advice with the world economic report that we just recently saw this year.
What consumers want is changing, what advisors want is changing, and is it being delivered on is the question.
H. Adam Holt: Well, it's clear that a lot of the larger custodians that we've been using for years, you know, they've got relationship currency with us, like our boomer clients have relationship currency with us. Right?
Derek Notman: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: It doesn't matter if you change their fees, we already know 9 percent are not going to move for lower fees. Everyone else is going to stick it out, you know? And we joked about that, obviously. If you remember the Abby Salome conversation about, you know, people who stick with advisors, they don't even know how they're performing.
I think sometimes the infrastructure is sticky, but there's a trend here, and I think we should talk about it because we have had interviews in the past from newer companies in this space that are doing things differently.
Derek Notman: Yeah. Go back and listen to Episode 19 with Jason Wenk over at Altruist, you know, fully digital custodian. They're doing really amazing things, but they're not the only one out there.
H. Adam Holt: That's right. And we had an opportunity at Nitrogen's Fearless to interview John Petullo, who has enormous experience on this at TradePMR.
Derek Notman: Well yeah, and before that he was early on at TD. So he's been a Chief Product Officer, that's what he is now. And he has seen some really interesting, but what he's talking about now and what they're doing, that's crystal ball stuff that I would want to be paying attention to if I'm listening to this.
H. Adam Holt: Oh, it's really true.Let's share about John's background. Now you're right. He was at TD, but he was at TD when there were, I think, 12 employees.
Derek Notman: Amazing.
H. Adam Holt: And when you think about obviously their acquisition by Charles Schwab, a couple of years ago, and then the full integration of that a year or so later, I think it's really interesting to see for so many of us that were in the FinTech world, TD was such an open architecture shop.
There was enormous loyalty for their willingness to innovate and be open and put their APIs out there, and it was a great place to work, and there was a lot of loyalty to that. And I think as that has changed in transition, advisors have been looking for newer, more modern outlets. And it's interesting and ironic that we actually interviewed John just probably two weeks before the Robinhood announcement to purchase TradePMR, which just, I think, is an amazing thing.
And I look forward to hearing both what John said, but also what Derek and I had an opportunity to rethink about post learning of that acquisition. Cause I think it's setting an interesting statement, Derek, for what's happening in the market.
Derek Notman: No question about it. Let's jump in and hear what John has to say.
H. Adam Holt: You got it.
John, it's great to see you here, the place that we hold near and dear. Derek actually and I met several years ago and actually what inspired this podcast. So it's always fun to talk to people who are doing something interesting and different in the business.
So, give us a flavor for what's your unique perspective given all the history you've had in the past with TD, on the business today?
Jon Patullo: Yeah, so I’ve been in the space for a long time, right? It really does seem like, you know, there's, it's such a huge opportunity, very exciting time for advisors
H. Adam Holt: Right
Jon Patullo: When you think of this whole generational wealth transfer that's happening, you know, all the different technologies that are out there today, you know, it's a huge opportunity for advisors to increase scale, efficiency, drive a better client experience, you know, leveraging a lot of these newer technologies out there.
And you know, I can't imagine a more exciting time at this point.
H. Adam Holt: No, that's true. Well, you've seen a lot and obviously helped to build TD from early stage.
Jon Patullo: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: And hearing some about that, that's amazing. You know, obviously we have so much history in this space. Uh, gosh, how many years have you been in the business now? Do we want to talk about it?
Jon Patullo: I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to age myself too much. Multiple decades.
Derek Notman: That's amazing. You've seen it from a technology perspective, you've seen it go from almost no technology, right, too. Well, you see the Kitces map today. It's great. You have to get a magnifying glass to find anything on there.
Jon Patullo: Yeah, I think, you know, we did a lot early on to really bring a lot of the vendor community together. You know, integration was a huge struggle for advisors back in the day. And we had the opportunity to really pull in a lot of the industry leading software providers.
You know, we didn't do it all ourselves and we were able to collaborate with a lot of vendors in the space, right. To make sure we're delivering the right solutions for, you know, for our mutual clients, all of our advisors. And, you know, that's where we really came up with the idea to open up our APIs.
And, you know, we started having, you know, 180 vendors innovating on behalf of us, right. Providing great, great tools to our mutual clients.
H. Adam Holt: Well, you definitely set the stage with Veo. No question about it.
Derek Notman: Oh yeah, that was a game changer for sure. So are you kind of the same mindset now at TradePMR? Is this, you're doubling down on technology and I guess what would you do differently now?
Jon Patullo: Yeah, I mean, it's a super exciting time. And then, moving over to TradePMR, I went from, you know, award winning platforms at TD to award winning platform that they do strive on service and technology. Their platform's been rated highest in client satisfaction, in the most recent T3 survey.
So you know, really stepping into a great situation, looking to really bring the platform forward and continue to grow the business, you know, just knowing, I think there's such an opportunity in this space for advisors that are looking for a better solution.
Derek Notman: And we were talking with a number of people just at this conference and the service thing keeps coming back. Like, how are you differentiating? How are you having those deeper relationships and so forth? It sounds like, I mean, you shared some statistics about phone call returns, like how long does it take?
Jon Patullo: Yeah, so our average answer time for phone calls is 13 seconds, which is sort of unheard of in our industry.
But you know, the TradePMR really strives on providing that white glove service, making sure our service folks know who the advisor's business, how they operate, what they like. And in addition to that, you know, the great technology. They do have, Fusion has a great rebalancing system.
The trading is better than I've seen, even in my TD days. So we have great trading technology, billing, it actually allows advisors to do calculations, your average daily balance. So it provides a lot of features to help advisors more efficiently run their business. Today we actually launched Fusion Sync.
So Fusion's our core account, account management platform. So Fusion Sync is actually a tool that allows advisors to easily transition business to TradePMR, leveraging AI. So it's actually, leveraging Fusion Sync. The advisor can drop files in. We're pre-populating, creating, you know, all the accounts.
It really takes that process from weeks down to a couple of days. Obviously clients need to sign the applications, et cetera.
Derek Notman: Of course.
Jon Patullo: But really trying to start leveraging AI to help drive a better overall experience for our advisors.
Derek Notman: That's huge to be able to speed that. I mean, the thought of switching for an advisor is really daunting, right? Especially if it's going to be months of paperwork.
Jon Patullo: Absolutely.
Derek Notman: Right. You know, and what's this experience for my clients going to be and so forth. Okay. So given what you guys are doing there, what is a missing opportunity for companies like TradePMR, right? Or a challenge that you may think that's coming, that they don't see yet and how should they deal with it?
Maybe don't give away all your secret sauce, right, but you know, you've got a unique perspective. It'd be interesting to know.
Jon Patullo: Yeah. I mean, we're excited, right? Obviously advisors are looking to scale, create efficiencies. We do have tools like Apollo, which is a tool we launched at our conference in May, which gives it, it's a behavioral science tool that helps advisors learn more about the spouse, you know, the clients in the relationship and sort of brings the family together. Because a lot of times advisors may not focus, you know. They might focus on just one person and in the household, you know. We've heard all the stats around, kids firing their parents, the spouse firing the advisor too so this actually allows them to start, leverage some AI to create content, but gives advisors good content to make sure they understand how the, you know, the other spouse right might feel about money. And a lot of times they might be more conservative and not like what's going on.
So this allows the advisor to bring everything together to really help grow the business. So we see it as a huge growth engine for us to help bring on new clients, right? You can survey, learn about your clients, how they feel to make sure you're putting them in the right portfolios, et cetera.
H. Adam Holt: It's interesting. So as a Chief Product Officer, which is not a very common term we hear for certainly a custodian, if I can call you a Custodian.
Jon Patullo: Yup.
H: Adam Holt: It sounds to me like you're focusing the technology on removing barriers, moving friction, for advisors to seamlessly move over their business and get business done, right?
Jon Patullo: Yup.
H: Adam Holt: Efficiency seems to be like a big piece. I'm curious, a lot of our advisors tend to think, well, what can they do? What kind of action steps can I learn from John to go implement my practice right now? What would be the recommendations you'd make to advisors to some action steps?
Jon Patullo: Yeah. I mean, the big thing I see in this space right now is obviously AI is huge. We're still early stages, is probably where, you know, the internet was with dial up. So, you know, this is something to grow exponentially. And it really helped automate a lot of non-business generating activities for advisors.
Right. So that they can go out and focus on growing their business. It's a tremendous opportunity. And it feels like advisors are still kicking the tires. I was at a conference specifically for AI last week, Advise AI. And it was a great. It was good, good crowd. A lot of advisor interest.
But, you know, there's, I think more and more advisors need to start kicking the tires because this is really going to change the game for them. All of us want to be able to do things more efficiently, right? Anything from chatbots to, you know, helping with client meetings. But the amount of people in an advisor's office they need today, relationships always going to be there, right?
So they're not going away, but you know, they're still going to need to continue to automate as much as possible with less folks, right? So, and adding a lot of scale for them.
H. Adam Holt: So true.
Derek Notman: Would you say that advisors who don't kick the tires with AI are probably the ones that are going to get taken over by AI?
It's not that AI is replacing human beings, but if you aren't using the technology and others are, you're going to just get pushed to the side, right?
Jon Patullo: Yeah. I think you're going to be, you know, not making as much revenue, right? It's going to be harder to do business. Right. It's going to impact everybody.
And I think the folks that are adopting earlier are going to start getting some benefits, you know, obviously, it is still early stages, but advisors should realize just seeing, you know, what that can do with client meetings, right? During and post meeting, it could save them a couple hours on each meeting, right?
It helps generate content. It helps take the notes, put the notes in the CRM. It’s really amazing some of the tools out there today.
H. Adam Holt: Got it. Have you gone to open architecture? Or are you dictating what the tech stack needs to be for PMR?
Jon Patullo: We're obviously, you know, at conferences like this, working closely with firms like Nitrogen.
So we're open architecture and want to really, we believe in the vendor community and sort of did that at TD Ameritrade. I was able to sort of get a lot of vendors to innovate on behalf of our advisors, right.
Derek Notman: It’s a really good model.
Jon Patullo: Yeah.
Derek Notman: It's a really good model. Yeah.
Jon Patullo: Yeah. So it brings more capabilities to advisors too. Again, to help them scale and run a more efficient practice.
Derek Notman: So as a Chief Product Officer, one of your responsibilities is let's see what the tech out there is. What makes sense for TradePMR and how it can help advisors, right? You're assessing that all the time, I'm guessing, right?
Jon Patullo: Yeah exactly. So a lot of it's talking to our clients. We have a variety of ways we meet with our clients, you know, we have a client experience panel, right? Core users of our technology, to gather feedback on things they may need. I've done panels like that. Historically too, you know, we've done it with the vendor community too, which helps make sure you're building the right solutions that advisors are looking for.
And you know, everything from, you know, we talked a little bit about the answer time with phone calls and just being able to provide that high level service, even from a service perspective and technology for advisors.
Derek Notman: You're taking some pretty big boxes there for both. Right. I mean, I remember being on hold for 45 minutes just to try to place a trade sometimes or other nonsense stuff back in my old broker dealer days.
H. Adam Holt: Times have changed.
Jon Patullo: I've talked to some advisors that they would call, you know, by the time that somebody would answer, they'd have a problem.
Derek Notman: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: Whoops. Couldn't get out of that trade. Yeah, I had that personally.
You know, we always give everybody an opportunity, you know, here we are in Nitrogen, we're in Nashville, you're in lots of music.
Derek Notman: Right in the background right now.
H. Adam Holt: Here in Nashville stays in Nashville. Is there anything you think that the industry is not talking about that they really should be.
Jon Patullo: Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, just I think AI is going to accelerate quickly, right? So, I mean, I think there's a lot of good conversations. There's vendors here, which is fantastic, right? Advisors are continuing to learn more. I think the pace of acceleration is going to happen quicker than folks think, right?
It's going to move fast and, you know, we don't want advisors to be left behind, right? We want them to be able to leverage that to automate a lot of things in there. You know, a lot of those non-business generating activities. Yeah, you want to sort of out, you know, off road and give you time to spend with your clients.
Derek Notman: How does your compliance department feel about AI?
Jon Patullo: So it's a good question. So, you know, we've got, you know, see what the SEC has said about AI, right? So obviously for investing, I think for certain things, right, automating tasks and people pushing buttons, it's good, right. So it still needs to be flushed out a little bit right around advice and those types of things.
So, you know, for us the use case is really about automating some of those, you know.
Derek Notman: It's nice to hear that. I mean, that makes sense because now you can empower the advisor to be the advisor that they should be, right. And spend more time with the clients.
Jon Patullo: Absolutely.
H. Adam Holt: You don't want to rely on it as a revenue producing activity.
Derek Notman: Exactly. Yep.
H. Adam Holt: Let's get them there. That's very cool. Thanks, John. We appreciate you being here.
Jon Patullo: Yeah, thank you guys. Appreciate it.
Derek Notman: That was a fun conversation. I don't know if anyone listened here or even you Adam, you tend to tune me out most of the time, but how many times did he talk about AI?
H. Adam Holt: I think the count was 17 times.
Derek Notman: At least.
H. Adam Holt: I don't know that he was talking about artificial intelligence though.
Derek Notman: Advisor intelligence?
H: Adam Holt: I think that's always what it's about.
No, I think that this is the first time I think we've heard somebody say more than just, I think AI is going to change the business, but is rather saying I'm using AI to change the business.
Derek Notman: Ooh, that's good.
H. Adam Holt: They are using, I had no idea when we took on this interview, I really wasn't clear what TradePMR was doing that was earning them such accolade, right. So they did just win Best User Experience at T3.
Derek Notman: Pretty awesome.
H. Adam Holt: And I'm thinking to myself, okay, you know, what did I miss? And it's not until you use these platforms that you start to realize. And it was interesting because John came from TD as we talked about.
Derek Notman: Yup.
H. Adam Holt: And TD had such a great reputation and loyalty with the independent space for those that were real truists. I want to use any open architecture platform. In fact, we integrated with them super early on at Asset-Map because they were so easy to work with and to learn that they're taking that same attitude to another level is cool.
Derek Notman: It's also telling about what's going on and it's refreshing actually.
He's bringing an open architecture mindset to growing the business and looking into the future, which I really find interesting. I mean, what did he say? They had 180 API vendors that their APIs were into. What I really liked, which I thought was cool, I think we're starting to see this a little bit more.
And actually my chat recently with Bill Harris, he said the same thing. What happened at TD when they opened up their API is that they had all these vendors, all these technology vendors, innovating on their behalf.
H. Adam Holt: That's right.
Derek Notman: Talk about scale and moving. And so now the same thing can happen at all different levels whether you're insurance or wealth management company or a small RIA.
H. Adam Holt: Well, if you want to be a platform that everybody uses, you allow everybody, you know, store their luggage in your foyer, right?
Derek Notman: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: Connect their stuff to your world, right? Put them on your apps, on your phone. iPhone is a platform, right? Isn't iOS, isn't Google Android a platform, right?
So it makes perfect sense in today's world. If you want to basically bring everybody together. You make it easy to come to the party. And I think it's really interesting given the recent Robinhood acquisition of TradePMR, which happened just a couple of weeks after we had done this interview.
It's a real interesting statement and it can't go unnoticed that Robinhood of all. Very innovative, different way of doing share class, no commissions, has gone into the advisory space and we can't ignore it. So what do you think's going on there?
Derek Notman: Well, a couple of things come to mind. One is I love it because it shows the value of human advice.
You have a massive tech company with, what do they have 24 million customers, all digital, experience all of it, right? Beautiful digital experience. And what are they doing? They're doubling down on human advice.
H. Adam Holt: Interesting.
Derek Notman:That's pretty awesome.
H. Adam Holt: Why?
Derek Notman: Well, at the end of the day, and you've said this 101 times.
H. Adam Holt: Oh, I know the answer. I just want to know that, you know.
Derek Notman: Well, I'm going to hope, hopefully get it right here. We'll see. Where the price of being wrong is great is high. I want to run something by a human.
H. Adam Holt: That's right.
Derek Notman: I want my advisor intelligence. And that's what's happening. So I, yes, the average account size at Robinhood is relatively small.
They do have 140 billion or so assets, which is nuts. It's crazy. But the folks, we talked about this at Nitrogen, we've talked about this on different webinars, the folks that have those smaller account balances today are the same ones that will be inheriting this generational wealth transfer. The same ones that are going to start earning more and saving more, and they're going to need human advice.
So talk about preparing to skate where the puck is headed. Really cool situation.
H. Adam Holt: There's a couple of things that come to mind here. Yeah, you're right. 140 billion of assets under management with an average account size. What did you say? It was like, it's less than 10,000.
Derek Notman: I think less than 6,000 ish. And that's a rough number, but right. Right. It's not high.
H. Adam Holt: Okay. So entirely digital aspect. When they first came out, we thought of them as a robo advisor.
Derek Notman: Yep.
H. Adam Holt: Right? We thought I'm the easy access Alexis. We always talked about how the human advisor firms should just buy and utilize the robo advisor.
And integrate that easy technology for small accounts, easy accounts, low margin accounts, and also next gen engagement, right. Should go out and buy that. And instead here, you have a robo advisor come out and buy an advisory firm.
Derek Notman: Pretty awesome.
H. Adam Holt: So I think they're taking that recommendation, recognizing a couple of things.
Number one, TradePMR brings 40 billion in assets under management and somewhat three to 400 financial advisors that are well mature. Right. So they know the business. They know that they bring that advisor intelligence to the table. It's very clear that a lot of the people who have small accounts with Robinhood play accounts probably have more money elsewhere and probably will like that user experience and say, but I now need advice.
So they just basically, I got a plug and play. Well established independent community of financial advisors, they can now just pitch to, and there's probably more than 140 billion in that 23 million people. That's the irony behind it. The average wealth could be as high as 250, 500, a million dollars of net worth.
Derek Notman: There's over a trillion in that 24 million people. There's over a trillion of assets sitting there.
H. Adam Holt: Totally. How much do they need to capture to double their AUM? Not a lot. 10%.
Derek Notman: 10%.
H. Adam Holt: That's what I'm saying. This is interesting that you brought up Bill Harris, because in a sense, Robinhood is going the way of personal capital.
Derek Notman: Yes, it is. Yes.
H. Adam Holt: I say we can create a digital engagement experience that is demanded by X Gen and millennial. And now we can engage, we can start them with the easy onboarding and then expand. And I think that's really interesting because in this generational wealth transfer or great wealth transfer, those parents are going to give the money to the kids who have a $10,000 account in Robinhood
And they're going to be like, oh my god, what do I do? I'm not going to call mom and dad's advisor. I'm going to call my Robinhood expanded advisor.
Derek Notman: And they're not even going to call them. They're going to open up their app and click on a button that says may I speak with an advisor
H. Adam Holt: Or transfer. They're just going to say, transfer to my Robinhood account.
Derek Notman: Yeah, done simple. That's it's that easy. So that's what's happening. So really, you know, John's talking about, especially with this product background about using AI, which they're already doing. And we've talked about this other guest recently too, about increasing operational efficiencies and all of that.
I mean, think about it. You just got access at TradePMR to over 20 million potential customers. Talk about, you know, drinking from a fire hose. We better have great tech that can increase our efficiency so we can deal with this new inflow.
H. Adam Holt: This is, this is going to be amazing. Look, we saw, we saw Morgan Stanley do this with E-Trade and they crushed it with this. Just like Fidelity decided to go after the qualified accounts for 401Ks so that they could earn all the rollovers when people had to retire.
Did that work for them? It worked. Did it work for Vanguard? Yes. Did it work for Morgan Stanley? Do you know that Morgan Stanley is destroying everybody on organic growth right now? What did they get when they bought E-Trade when they, when the E-Trade was the largest stockholder transaction service on the planet?
So everyone who gets stock options and they get mega wealth, guess what they bought? They bought a feeder system from effectively a low cost near robo environment. And Morgan Stanley absorbed them and got the stock option and stock shareholder administration. Where'd you go? You go to your default provider.
There's a real interesting move here. And I think it's going to start showing that we need to match up tech. And I think if TradePMR was not as tech forward as they are, I don't know that they could pull this off because they're going to have to integrate deeply.
Derek Notman: Probably not. And also the other key point that I really liked him talking about.
So there's all this talk about service to the client, which is extremely important, but they're also doubling down on service to the advisor.
H. Adam Holt: Talk about that.
Derek Notman: Also make my life easier as an advisor. And I'm going to be loyal. I'm going to give you my business. I'm going to be able to grow more. Everyone wins. And what do you say their average response time was? It was like seconds.
H. Adam Holt: Seconds,
Derek Notman: Seconds. I mean, that’s crazy for a phone call. That's amazing.
H. Adam Holt: For a phone call. Yeah, it's not like my other service. Comcast is like after 30 minutes of being on hold, they're like, we’ll call you back. I'm like, you couldn't have done that earlier.
Derek Notman: Yeah. Right. Thanks.
H. Adam Holt: 13 seconds. That's amazing. I think so. So what else did we take from this? This was besides the service, besides the AI, besides the tech forward. Now, you know, he did close with. AI, and I'm curious what you think advisors should be taken from this.
Derek Notman: You know, he kind of drew a line in the sand. Don't get left behind.
H. Adam Holt: Yeah.
Derek Notman: He's right. AI specifically is growing exponentially. Applications, what it can do exponentially. I mean, it's only been a couple of years since ChatGPT even came out and look at what's happening already. And so is it a little scary? Yeah. Do you have questions from compliance department? Probably, but push, investigate, educate, learn about what's out there. As he says, kick the tires because if you don't, you will be left behind.
H. Adam Holt: I wrote down a list of some of the stuff he said, he said, AI supported repapering of accounts. Thanks.
Derek Notman: Love it.
H. Adam Holt: Intelligent rebalancing, tax harvesting, client meeting notes. Okay. That's an obvious one, right? Content building and managing the vendor community. That's just what I wrote down.
Derek Notman: I'll add to that. One thing he said something about pre, during and post meeting. You can use AI to help with getting ready during the meeting, after the meeting, which they're doing.
H. Adam Holt: Look, operational efficiency, this thing's moving fast, but so did the dot com. Some people made a lot of money. Some people lost a lot of money. The question on this one is this a table stake thing? You can't not do this. I know both you and I are using AI to support this podcast.
Derek Notman: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: We're using it where we can to save ourselves time. So we could focus on more intelligent effort, right? Higher revenue producing activity. And I think it's probably creating a better quality outcome. So at the end of the day, I think that this is enabling us to be more authentic, more ourselves, better advisors, give more time with clients.
Even Abby Salome said it on the prior, she says, you know, you got to find ways to create more revenue producing effort. If you want it to create organic growth and you've got, look, you've got CouplerAI, right? You've got your own platform. That's literally just making human connections. Let's not be afraid of this thing.
And then I think John is right. As I said, we have to start, not just dabbling. We have to start investing. And I think that's an important aspect of this.
Derek Notman: Definitely, or we'll get left behind. So I think that takes us to like some of what are the things that you can do and yes, get comfortable with AI and maybe a good starting point is maybe just get a note taker or get something that has nothing to do with client facing anything.
So you don't have a compliance headache initially and just start playing with it. Try it, see what happens. Like even like Gemini is free or get the free ChatGPT and just do something with it. Try it. Right. And get comfortable, and all of a sudden like, oh wow, I see the power of what this can do.
H. Adam Holt: Yeah ask yourself, how could this, how could you help this use this to help you leverage?
Derek Notman: Ask AI.
H: Adam Holt: What should I do with it?
Derek Notman: What should I do with you?
H: Adam Holt: Bad idea, right? I mean, gosh, it's all about the power of questions. I think one thing I have learned, Derek, from the AI is literally the prompts as they're called, basically. What's the question you're asking? The AI bot is the most important part.
Guess what? The most important part in fact, finding and advice delivery is
Derek Notman: Questions.
H. Adam Holt: It's the questions. The quality of your questions dictates the quality of the answers, which dictates the quality of your life. I'm talking about it, even the questions you ask yourself in the morning. Oh, why did you do that?
Why are you such an idiot versus, huh, how can I do that? Better two completely different questions. And I think if we get better at asking questions, we'll make better usage of AI and also be better advisors. And I think that's the real key to this. I hope you see that and that irony behind that.
Derek Notman: I do. It's interesting. I want something else that came to mind was asking questions is extremely important, human questions.
H. Adam Holt: Yeah.
Derek Notman: It's the human asking the question. AI isn't asking us a question. AI doesn't like, knock on you. Hey, Adam, I want to ask you a question. It's the other way around.
H. Adam Holt: That's right. Yeah that’s too funny cause we don't have the answers. We just have the questions. right
Derek Notman: That's it.
H. Adam Holt: I have it.
Derek Notman: That's why we're advisors.
H. Adam Holt: That's right. Knowing which question to ask at what point in time.
Derek Notman: Yeah.
H. Adam Holt: That's, that's really the key. That's really interesting. So this has been great.
So I appreciate John taking the time to go on this. I know you've had further conversations with him and you've been really impressed with what you've seen there. I think it's been really curious, Derek, what's gonna happen with this new announced merger, assuming it goes through, I think it could be really exciting times.
Derek Notman: Yeah, exciting times. It'll be cool to see, but just, you know, it's refreshing. I think that if I'm an executive at an insurance and wealth management company, or even just an advisor, pay attention. Look what people are doing. And this is a wonderful example of technology and human advice, mashing together and making something awesome happen.
H. Adam Holt: Yeah
Derek Notman: So yeah, super awesome to talk to John. Learned a lot, really appreciate it. And definitely check them out on social, we'll see what they're doing. Pay attention.
H. Adam Holt: Yes, definitely pay attention with that. Let's thank all of our listeners. And of course, remind you to subscribe, share this with a friend and of course, interact with us.
You know, we're on LinkedIn, ask us a question. You have some idea or topic you want to talk about. Let us know what that is. We will try to fit it in. We are back and we are ready to go. So we appreciate your patience over the summer. Again, Derek, thank you my friend for taking all the time to do this stuff.
That's always a fun conversation. I'll look forward to seeing you on the next one.
Derek Notman: Likewise, brother. Take care.