The annual Wealth Management EDGE conference last week in Florida was a whirlwind. Despite the steamy humidity outside our beautiful new venue at The Boca Raton resort, it was rapid-fire, fast-paced action inside.
For all of us on the editorial staff, it was a busy event.
I found myself, in chronological order, leading our first ever kayaking activity (we plan to do it again next year), a fireside chat with TradePMR’s Robb Baldwin and Robinhood’s Steve Quirk, one of several tech tours on the exhibit floor, and a phenomenal panel discussion on how advisors can support organic growth by adding some very much needed and fiduciary retirement-specific tools.
I cannot say enough about how well received this last session was by advisors, several of whom came up later to say thanks. It was the same case for the panelists, who included Sheryl O’Connor, the CEO of IncomeConductor, Christine Simone, a partner at Move Health, and Lauren Clough, co-founder and CEO of bQuest.
Each discussed how providing a more holistic approach to distribution-phase planning in their practices can amp up organic growth for advisory firms. The services they offer are great differentiators and help make advisors a go-to resource for navigating the intricacies of retirement income planning (which is very complex), healthcare-cost planning (a too often overlooked major expense), and as an end-of-life services guide (in the case of bQuest).
Beyond my hosting and moderating duties, I did find time to meet many folks and sit in on different sessions along the tech tracks at the conference. I jotted down quite a few notes that I think are worthy of sharing.
“Make sure you own your data … take ownership of your own data,” those words were said by Advyzon’s John Mackowiak, whom I’ve known for years, during a panel on implementing targeted technology. He reminded attendees that saving their data, their daily downloads, can serve as an insurance policy of sorts for their performance data, a good reminder in light of Morningstar’s February announcement that it is shutting down Office and its consequences for many advisors.
Mackowiak’s thoughts provide a good segue into a deeper discussion of data, during which I found myself taking a lot of notes.
Rob Nance, CEO and co-founder of Dispatch, a self-described data orchestration firm that helps advisory shops manage their data, talked with Chris Cook, the founder of a technology consultancy called Obsydian, who had spent almost nine years as a systems engineer at Mariner.
“Data lakes are an important part of the foundational infrastructure of a firm that is growing, especially for a firm that is acquiring,” said Cook.
He said that the most surprising thing he had learned over the years was that the most important thing about getting a handle on data is ensuring data quality, naming a single source of truth.
“Sure, we could see some stuff, it was kind of like a box of Legos, you build anything you want … we had the talent to get the data in but there was no one to do anything with it, no data scientists … data quality, consistency, was the problem, like having a lot on a client but lacking their designated email address,” he said, talking about his early years with Mariner.
“I’ve been in long meetings trying to determine which email address is the right one to send a note to,” to emphasize his points about data quality and a single source of truth, he said.
“Understanding quality [data] … and then [data] governance … can be like fixing holes in a bucket, if you don’t get a handle on it early,” said Cook.
During a session on mastering post-merger integration, Stacy Orff, who heads up platform marketing at Mercer Advisors, made a couple of observations that stuck with me. Acquisitions can be a long haul, taking between a year and 16 months to accomplish. She noted that while everyone has their own technology already, “there is a power to having a single chassis.”
“Estate planning is one of the things that advisors [repeatedly] tell us that they found immediate value in [post-merger] because it is part of the turnkey [Mercer] offering and does not mean referring a client outside the firm,” said Orff.
I also got to catch up with many technologists, like Kanishk Parashar and Dominic Tully of Powder.
I’ve known Kanishk a few years and he has been around the block when it comes to the developer world, having sold his first startup to Fitbit (which is now owned by Google) and his second to Addepar, where he met Tully.
Their current startup, Powder, is all about helping firms build operational efficiency. Now, two years in, it has built AI agents to automate document processing. Today, firms are using it to quickly build proposal decks and help advisors consolidate held-away assets. There are some interesting features on the roadmap that I cannot talk about, but stay tuned.
I also sat in on the keynote address of someone I’d not yet heard of, Dr. Naomi Win, a behavioral finance analyst at Orion, titled “Aligning Lives and Portfolios: Meeting the Moment for Modern Investors.”
Given the title, I was at first worried, but her talk was fascinating. She began with an analogy tying in the television show CSI and how it portrayed technology that could pick up data points the human eye could not, but without interpretation from a human, the case could not be solved.
“The human element, without it we can end up with a big distortion of data,” Win said, going on to describe distortions and hallucinations she has seen occur in her world of clinical psychology, when humans with schizophrenia have relied on self-treatment using generative AI.
“Tech is a tool but cannot be used without wisdom, what is not seen is as important as what is seen [by the tech],” she said, in simpler form, “tech for growth = tool + wisdom.”
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