Why a Silicon Valley RIA sought AI notetakers

Welcome to “Show Me Your Stack,” a series from Financial Planning in which we interview those who deliver financial advice to learn what tools they rely on to make it happen. Rising client expectations are driving the need for more powerful tech tools, and we’re digging deep to find out why advisors prefer certain solutions.

After nearly two decades in the wealth management industry, including a decade working at firms that were acquired, Tony Blagrove struck out on his own in 2023. Now the founder and CEO of Traveka Wealth, an independent RIA in the heart of Silicon Valley, he’s betting on emerging technology to give his firm an edge.

Blagrove began his career as a financial advisor in 2007 as a portfolio manager for Bedrock Capital Management, a “small boutique shop,” as he put it. In 2015, the firm was acquired by United Capital Financial Advisors, where he became a managing director. Then, in 2019, after that firm was acquired by Goldman Sachs and rebranded Personal Financial Management, Blagrove oversaw its Silicon Valley office.

In 2023 Blagrove left to found Traveka Wealth in Los Altos, California. The firm now has eight total employees, including three advisors, and manages around $640 million in assets for about 190 clients, many of whom are Silicon Valley technology workers.

True to the firm’s Silicon Valley tech focus, one of the first pieces of software Blagrove incorporated into Traveka’s tech stack was an AI meeting notetaker.

“Back in Q4 of 2023, there wasn’t a well-developed, industry-specific meeting notetaker,” he said. “So I settled on what was most compatible and popular with Zoom, and that was Fathom AI.”

READ MORE: How much time AI saves advisors — and how they spend it

And though he’s been relatively happy with the service he’s received with Fathom AI over the past year and a half, Blagrove said that hasn’t stopped him from keeping an eye on the ever-evolving notetaker marketplace.

“I started dabbling in the more industry-specific ones, like Zocks,” he said. “I’ve been more willing to be what I call an ‘early adopter’ here, just because of the efficiency, time savings and the ability to make my staff that much more productive.”

READ MORE: Using AI to write that client email? Think twice.

So far, Blagrove said his experimentation with Zocks has been “decent,” but he thinks the company may be a victim of its own success.

“Their onboarding of new clients is not the greatest because I think they’re just overwhelmed with so many people signing up,” he said. “It’s a good problem to have on their part, but I don’t think it’s what they want from a customer experience standpoint. It has taken two to two and a half months of dialing things in after we started paying to get things going. And that has been frustrating. Like, ‘Oh, I’m paying [for] something that doesn’t quite work yet. That’s great.'”

Despite the headaches of being on the front lines of new tech solutions, Blagrove said the end result is more than worth it.

“This is definitely an area where it’s well worth the expense and time commitment to get things dialed in,” he said. “Once you get things dialed in, they tend to work pretty nicely.”

Scroll down the slideshow to see what Blagrove feels are some of the most important pieces of Traveka Wealth’s tech stack: