Considering cyrpto as an asset, not a currency

Ben Cruikshank, Head of Flourish, Flourish; Laura Varas, CEO and Founder, Hearts & Wallets

Transcription:

Justin L. Mack: (00:08)
Hello? Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. How's everybody doing so far enjoying invest 2022. All right. Well, I wanna thank you both for joining me for our next session focused on crypto and digital assets and that distinction that we talk about often considered an asset, not a currency. And I have an amazing panel of folks who have a lot to talk about related to this topic. I am joined today by Laura Varas, CEO and founder of Hearts & Wallets, as well as Ben Cruikshank, head of Flourish, quick round of applause for both of our guests for taking the time to join us today. And just because talking to strangers is something we should never do. I will have them go in depth more about the work that they're doing at the respective organizations and how it relates to this topic. Laura, let's start with you. What kind of work are you doing over at hearts and wallets and how does it relate to the world of cryptocurrency and digital assets? Great.

Laura Varas: (01:00)
Thanks a lot, Justin. And hello everybody, my name's Laura Varas. I'm the founder and CEO of Hearts and Wallets. We're an independent research and benchmarking firm and we love studying what investors do we leave, want and need. We have three proprietary data sets that innovators in advice and product and customer experience use to, advance their innovation. Looking forward to sharing my thoughts on some bad news about crypto and opportunity, and then some good news.

Justin L. Mack: (01:28)
Oh, the bad news. We'll get to that eventually, but more good news. Ben, tell me a little bit about the work you're doing with flourish and how it is, empowering advisors to do a little bit more of a crypto and digital assets

Ben Cruikshank: (01:39)
Only good news on this session. I thought that's the deal we had.

Justin L. Mack: (01:42)
well I didn't get the memo. Sorry about that.

Ben Cruikshank: (01:45)
Name is Ben Crookshank. I am the head of Flourish. At Flourish our mission is to provide advisors with innovative access to financial products that they can't easily access. Today. We launched about four years ago with a product called flourish cash, which is a cash management solution designed to help advisors offer their clients a higher yield on cash. That's otherwise sitting in checking and savings accounts while bringing that cash into their orbit. Great first product for us built relationships with around 400 RIAs launched integrations into firms like Investnet and Orion and e-money, and got a lot of experience compliantly and securely moving billions of dollars around nine months ago, based on overwhelming client demand. We launched flourish crypto, which is a turnkey cryptocurrency investing solution built with the flexibility that advisors need to bring crypto into their practice. Things around trading transfers, billing, compliance, integrations, you name it over the past nine months.

Ben Cruikshank: (02:40)
We've onboarded about 75 RAs average firm size of around a billion and a half dollars. So very successful by a number of, dimensions. I give that background to say, we are not a cryptocurrency startup or company we're really focused on advisors challenges and solutions and tools, but we found ourselves in the world of cryptocurrency with a client base overwhelmingly that came to us from our cash management solution. I E not crypto early adopters. So folks who probably like, some of you in this room are working and struggling to figure out how to incorporate crypto into their practice.

Justin L. Mack: (03:15)
All right. Awesome. Thank you so much for the background and let's jump right into it with the topic at hand, that distinction between asset and currency, Laura I'll have you start first. What does that distinction mean to you? And why is it important when advisors are approaching the conversation and really interested in your take? We know that hearts and Wallace do a lot of research that really looks at what kind of Americans are investing crypto at, what rate, all of that. So that distinction, what does it mean asset versus currency and why is it important that we kind of get it straight?

Laura Varas: (03:45)
Sure. Thanks Justin. So I see crypto as an investing conversation starter with young investors where success is measured, almost more in assets that don't go into it than assets that do. I've brought some show Intel first hands in the room. Anybody been in Soviet Moscow in the go department store, anyone Soviet Moscow. All right, there we go. One, how about someone? Have you been in east Berlin when the wall was opening?

Justin L. Mack: (04:17)
All Right. Well, we got one.

Laura Varas: (04:18)
Cool all right. So the Berlin, you see the Berlin wall and the person who's been in Soviet Moscow will, recognize this Soviet ruble. Anybody that wants to come up can check it out. After I've spent a lot of time in markets around the world, observing how people buy things and decisions. They make a lot of fun at currency black markets in the Soviet block. And the thing about currency is it's, whatever we agree has value and it changes over time, right? So brought some show and tell French, Frank Argentina just prints new currencies whenever they want to. And, here's a Hong Kong dollar from before, it turned over to China. So trading currency as a retail investor is a fools errand, right? But as an asset like Rick Adelman said, there's real assets in terms of the technology. So I promise I share some stats and some ideas on the bad news the opportunity and the good news. So on the bad news, there are 25.1 million households in the U.S Who are trading crypto. That's not the bad news. The bad news is that most of them are doing it for the wrong reasons it's about 22% of households, one in four, it's up three times in the last year from 8%. So a lot of them are new to it, most of them are trading crypto. 78%, 34% are using crypto for payments. And about 12% are doing both. There's three reasons. They use crypto 26% say cuz traditional currencies are unreliable. That's down from 34% last year, 27% site anonymity. That's up a little bit from 25. There's only about 4% who say other. So the third reason is the main reason 72% of crypto users are trading crypto or using crypto because they say high volatility creates opportunities to make money trading.

Laura Varas: (06:15)
Now, I think what Rick Adelman said about dollar cost averaging is important and volatility. we don't wanna avoid volatile asset classes, but how many of these people are actually gonna make money trading? Kind of unlike it's 15 million households are specifically using crypto cuz they think they can make money trading currency. right, so again, let's not think of it as a currency. Let's think of it as an asset who are these people? They're young, they're lower asset and they're inexperienced. So only about 9% of crypto users. So about 2.2 million households are gen Z, right? There's not that many gen Z households that have their own money. 41% of gen Zs using crypto. Most millennials, most crypto users are millennials. It's about 11.7 million households. About 47% of crypto users are millennials. And about 38% of millennials use crypto. The rest are mostly gen Z 8.7 or gen X, my gen, the people that remember the Soviet union, we're they're about 8.7 million households.

Laura Varas: (07:18)
It's not a boomer thing, guys. It really isn't. It's, only about 5% of boomers use crypto it's about 2.6 million of the users are, boomers they're lower asset. Okay. 17.1 million of the 25 million households have less than a hundred thousand dollars really is this their best in introduction to investing, and they're inexperienced 9 million of the crypto users describe themselves as inexperienced investors now 11 or so million say that they're experienced investors and experienced investors are about twice as likely to be dabbling in crypto as people who describe themselves as inexperienced, but there aren't that many inexperienced investors. So the second thing which I can talk about more later, if we wanna talk about it is that crypto users don't use traditional investment products. They're less likely to use mutual funds, more likely to use robos and ETFs, but less likely to be using managed products. And the good news though, is that crypto users are super engaged in planning. They really believe in the power of planning. There are twice as likely to have written plans than non crypto users. They're more likely to be doing it on their own though, using tools much less likely than non crypto users to be doing it with their first or their second or their third firms. So they're not talking about it with anybody, that's the problem. And that's why it's a great conversation starter with young investors, to help them engage with other asset classes beyond crypto.

Justin L. Mack: (08:51)
Absolutely. And that brings me to a good point in being, I would love your thoughts as well on just that, how much does I guess messaging or how wealth management talks about crypto, maybe clash with how the crypto industry talks about crypto and what opportunity exists for advisors. Cuz as Laura said, a great opportunity with so many people having an interest in planning, those younger investors who might use crypto as a gateway to other classes what are your thoughts on, I guess, how wealth management talks about it and the understanding that those young investors are coming in with when they talk about crypto and does that sync up?

Ben Cruikshank: (09:27)
Sure. Lot of different elements, all those, all those statistics I think are certainly important, but where you can hear a lot of chaos noise, you can also hear a lot of opportunity for wealth managers to get into the space, to educate their clients, to have informed conversations, which I think would be squarely in line with your research. There's not enough wealth managers having the conversation today, whether they love it or they hate it, they tend to ignore it, recent surveys have found that 94% of financial advisors have at least been asked by their clients about crypto. That is an overwhelming number, but again, to Laura's point, they might not be really engaging in the solution. We think investors will be better off and advisors will be better off by finding a way to engage in the right way with our clients.

Ben Cruikshank: (10:11)
We often try to break it down from a pure practice management perspective. As an advisor, you can start with the most simple distinction of all you've got existing clients, prospects, and next gen clients from an existing client perspective. We heard about 25% of American households investing in crypto to put that in context about 23% of American households hold bank CDs. So if you're an advisor, you certainly can't afford to ignore CDs. Similarly, you cannot afford to ignore, crypto. And there's probably a few more of your clients engaging than you might think in terms of the kind of average age and demographic. Our average client age is 48 years old, which is certainly not the average age of a client of an advisor in America, but is certainly not all young millennials that definitely goes to show, certainly from our own data, the firms that we're engaging with, that there's an opportunity to talk to probably a broader range of the client base and there's interest from a broader range of the client base.

Ben Cruikshank: (11:07)
I think you also have to ask the question when you think about existing clients, if I'm not facilitating that conversation, who is, it's going to be a large retail exchange or a startup trading platform or a robo advisor entities that are all competitors to financial advisors. So whether it is because you find it interesting yourself or whether, because you think it is important to help existing clients with financial planning, tax planning, estate planning, holistic investment management, you need to be able to have a holistic conversation with your clients. And that certainly could involve the world of crypto. When you move down from existing clients to prospective clients, crypto definitely skews young. Once that all add CNBC found that 83% of millennial millionaires are invested in crypto. So millennials adopt crypto, in overwhelming numbers, millennial millionaires, 83%, that is a staggering figure.

Ben Cruikshank: (11:55)
And if you talk to advisory firms in America, what type of clients would you like to win to make sure your business is here in the decades to come really affluent folks who are between, in the accumulator stage of their, life is absolutely the core demographic. And so again, you're an advisory firm thinking about how does crypto relate to our prospective clients. If they're walking in the door with hold, holding some form of digital assets, your best case scenario is you win the client, believe some of their assets outside your orbit, which can certainly have an impact on your growth rates, your trajectory, your worst case scenario is you look out of touch with something that feels pretty experiential and important to their clients. It might only be a couple percent of their assets, but if you can't have the conversation, what is the likelihood you win that client at all. And then again, you move down the age spectrum next gen clients, crypto skews, young unquestionably Surely finds that between 70 and 80% of next gen clients fire their parents, financial advisors. Once again, crypto's probably not the thing that is going to change that conversation, but how are you engaging with that 25 year old heir standing to inherit a lot of money knowing that overwhelmingly that demographic is interested in crypto, you at least have to be able to have the conversation

Justin L. Mack: (13:06)
A great point. And, I'd love to have you elaborate more on both you and Laura, what wealth management, the industry wealth managers stand to lose if we're not engaging in the conversation, because like you pointed out with the statistic, the conversation is going to happen. That many people, 94% have been at least asked. So if there's not a greater, at least willingness or ability to engage in a way that's meaningful, it sounds like the folks who are interested, it's almost an inevitability it's going to happen, but you would, we would prefer that it's being done with sound fiduciary, financial planners involved in the process because that's good for everybody. And it probably saves people, a lot of headaches and heartaches, especially with the week we've been having, if people are making bad decisions related to it, but we've had enough bad news for one day, fix Laura stats, so a little bit about what will manage it stands to lose if we don't engage properly and do so now, because if anything, the press that comes with the drop gets more people interested who might not have been before, because as your stats also pointed out, volatility is appealing to some of the folks who are investing in crypto because it presents the opportunity to make some money. So just thoughts on the stakes for wealth management, if we don't get in the game.

Laura Varas: (14:17)
Well, I think Ben, you said a lot of important things and Justin, that's a really great question. And the point is people are gonna do it anyway, right? If we don't talk about it, if their advisors aren't talking about it with them, they're gonna be doing it anyway. We were playing around with our software, right? I don't remember the exact stat, but it was, I think 40% of Americans who consider their usual source of financial advice are already playing around with crypto. So I think when I was asked a few weeks ago about the fidelity products and the 401k and things like that, I said it then, and I stand by it now you've gotta have the conversations about it. Right. And it doesn't mean you have a 0% allocation I don't know. Rick says 1%. Okay, fine. Two, I don't know what you, if you guys have a view, but have an allocation, but not too big of an allocation. So I think to your point about what can get lost is if we're not having the conversations, the clients are gonna be doing it anyway. They're gonna be in other platforms. And everybody loses. If we don't talk about things like this.

Ben Cruikshank: (15:22)
Absolutely Yeah, I'd say probably two ways of thinking about it. What do advisory firms stand to lose? here you start to think about growth rates and retention of assets and things like that from a pure, what does my business look like? I'm not someone who's gonna say. If you don't do crypto you're going outta business tomorrow the demise of the RA has been anticipated with every major investing revolution. It's wrong. It's not gonna happen. But again, you start to think about that 10 year horizon. Are we a firm that's growing or are a firm that's shrinking? Are we a firm that's adding clients or losing clients and with all of the M and A activity in the space, generally speaking, you want to be on the growth side of the house.

Ben Cruikshank: (16:06)
So you start to think if we don't engage in crypto and those clients do just go open an account at Coinbase and take money off of our books, or we don't win a few of those prospective clients. What does that do? Organic growth is a challenge enough in this industry while accepting that maybe a couple percent of assets walk off the books, potentially a pretty big problem. And maybe it's a couple percent of assets. Maybe it's a couple percent of clients as each of those clients. Somebody else is facilitating. The conversation mentioned a minute ago. It could be a robo advisor, a startup trading platform or retail exchange, or virtually every major warehouse, which has rolled out a crypto solution of some kind in the last year or two. So it's an attention starter that from a pure practice management perspective, do you want to allow that with your clients or do you wanna make sure that they know you can have the conversation?

Ben Cruikshank: (16:53)
We work with a multi-billion dollar firm in the west coast and effectively they ran a survey on their clients. They were take a long story short. They were shocked at the percentage of their clients that were already investing in crypto outside of their books. And the thing that really jumped out at them when they surveyed some of those clients or followed with some of those clients, personally, is a number of those clients were embarrassed to talk to their advisor about crypto. They were embarrassed to talk about the position that is pretty much the worst news you can hear as an advisor for a piece of your client's financial lives. So again, from that pure, practice management perspective it's pretty important. And it has the potential to change growth rates one way or another. Then you can also flip over and say, just what does it do to the fiduciary relationship? What does it do to the overall holistic planning relationship? And again, mention a minute ago, that's either $20,000 of assets or whatever the number might be that you can incorporate in investment management, tax, planning, estate planning, you name it, it can be part of the conversation or is assets leaving your book entirely where the client is, doing God knows what, and you cannot help. And so even just from a pure relationship perspective, being able to have that conversation we think is important for the overall advisory relationship.

Justin L. Mack: (18:05)
Absolutely.

Laura Varas: (18:07)
I wanted to add to that. I think that's a good point and there's as much to learn from working with the young investors who are using crypto for advisors as there's an opportunity to maybe help them channel with more productive strategies, just on the second point of the opportunity that crypto users haven't been using managed products, just to give a couple more stats, about 5% of crypto users have 25% or more of their assets in mutual funds, that's compared to about 15% of non-users, but they're way more likely to be using ETFs, right? 45% of crypto traders use ETFs that's compared to, about 10% overall. So they're crypto users are a lot more likely to be using robos, but one of the things that's happening in this period that we're having the last couple weeks, right.

Laura Varas: (19:02)
We've been on a great market for, for the last 10 plus years. So the volatility that hopefully we'll see what happens, right. It could get a little rough, rough air here for a little bit. And so the, benefit of managed products is they really do, especially with mutual funds, more than robos or ETFs have an impact on reducing difficulty handling market volatility emotionally. So I think there's a really big opportunity to have that conversation with the young investors who are dabbling in crypto, but almost more importantly, learn how to change the service model to engage them. And I mentioned before, they are big believers in the power of planning, but they're not having the conversations, right. They're doing tools online and they're not talking with their advisors. And so I think working with crypto users is an important way to learn about how to get involved in what's gonna become the biggest category of advice in terms of households, it's gonna be 45 million households. And that is what we call a level two. So a moderate scope of advice delivered in a so-called hybrid. So kind of a mid service model there's as much to learn about working with them and serving them and pricing these new service models for them as there is to help them channel more productive asset classes.

Ben Cruikshank: (20:24)
Absolutely, and if I can just to drill it down to our client base, so independent RA's average firm around a billion and a half AUM from the allocation perspective, it doesn't necessarily look like the wild, wild west of crypto markets and people having 25% of their wealth. Our average balance is around 15 or $20,000 in a, in an account that's holding Bitcoin or Ethereum. That is a healthy number. That is a real number. Also our average client is the average client of advisors. Usually one to 2 million in investible, net worth. You're talking about a one to 2% allocation is what we are actually seeing in practice. One to 2%. I think sometimes, or 15 to $20,000 I think is helpful. We, again, we're not an investment advisor or manager. We're not advising people to hold that much. That's just what we see coming out of the more fiduciary relationship, the advisory relationship, it's a real dollar. It is also not a terrifying dollar like crypto has to take over portfolios. It might only take a little bit for the client to feel like they've got exposure to this exciting new space. Sometimes they just want something to talk about with their friend or, their grandson who told them to invest at the dinner table. It's not the market has gone up or down one or 2%. It feels like half the trading days in this year, it is relatively small exposure, for advisors and their clients to feel like they are part of the crypto movement, if you will.

Justin L. Mack: (21:43)
Absolutely. And, as we are coming near the end, I wanna save some time for some potential Q and A, but kind of last question, just to sum things up and goes very much with the topic at hand asset versus currency. How do we still have the confusion then? Because as we've talked throughout this session, I'm sure it's pretty clear that yes, we understand this should be treated as an asset approached as such. And that clarification made as advisors are having this conversation with clients. However, we understand this is currency, and there's plenty of folks who think that cryptocurrency no it's currency and will argue you down. That it is. So what is it? Is it the fact that currency is in the word? Is it the fact that we've got athletes taking their contracts in Bitcoin? Is it the fact that people are using it to buy GPUs so that I can't afford one? What is it that is leading to the confusion and advisors are gonna be the ones that have to kind of write the ship a little bit. as that millennial millionaire, they start going from using robos and digital tools perhaps as their lives evolve. And now they wanna work with a planner and they're walking in like, yeah, this is currency. What are you talking about?

Ben Cruikshank: (22:41)
I'll take the boring side. And I think currency in the word doesn't help. I'd actually say currency in the word is one of the more detrimental facts for advisors understanding the space in getting involved. We still have advisors today saying, well, until I can buy a Starbucks coffee with a Bitcoin in a practical sense, I don't understand how this stuff is ever gonna get adoption. The reality is there is something on the order of 15,000 different types of cryptocurrencies. Only a few of them can actually, or were ever intended to be used as currencies. And there are many, many, many other flavors of crypto that was never even the point let alone how they're used today. So I think overwhelmingly it is an asset, not a currency, but also overwhelmingly what advisors need to do is get educated on the space to have that conversation, to go past what is literally in the title and to understand, I don't think you need to be a crypto expert and you're on, Reddit or YouTube late at night, like diving into videos, but just have a basic nomenclature and understanding of what a blockchain is. What is Bitcoin? What is Ethereum, some of these very, very basic building blocks. And they're, we will definitely help advisor with that. There are organizations like Rick Edelmans deck, Pete that'll help advisor with that, but ultimately comes back to having a baseline level of understanding of the space and education of the space. And to do that, you need to probably take off the blinders, recognize that your clients are doing this. Your prospects are doing this, your next gen clients are doing this. And whether or not you think it's appropriate for your clients, whether or not the entire space is a turnoff. And trust me, when we see athletes getting paid in Bitcoin or in crypto, and there's a commercial with zero disclosure around anything involving that financial relationship, that turns off quite a bit too. But I think ultimately advisors as advisors you need to put that outta your mind in recognizing if this is a place that your clients want to go, it's really important that you're able to go there as well.

Justin L. Mack: (24:35)
Laura, your thoughts?

Laura Varas: (24:35)
I like your answer. I knew you were gonna say the cryptocurrency, cuz you had said that on the prep call, I'm gonna leave it at that. It's too bad. I got named that, good answer.

Justin L. Mack: (24:44)
Awesome. Well, any questions gentlemen right here in the front.

Speaker 5: (25:10)
You found out and then out of this 20,000 I think is it 19,800 something out of those 200, more than 200 are stable coins. Stable coins, They are currencies. Okay. We have a lot of a inside the digital asset. They're not obvious, they're not, currency, they're more, asset. So I'm just there quick, comment on the title that maybe not there are just too many varieties of cryptocurrencies out there. So we kind of like give some basic kind of categorizations of distance and some of are currencies. Majority are not just like the latest they send the bill or the proposal Lamies or Gilly brand they're proposing. They're saying that the majority of the cryptocurrencies are ancient asset, something like that. So I'm just for the majority. Yes, no problem. Your title is no problem. Perfect. It's majority of our crypto currency digital asset, not currencies, but we do have some, some things out there.

Ben Cruikshank: (26:25)
Yeah. I think that's a fair point. There are cryptocurrencies that are intended to be used as currencies without getting wilding. The weeds still, you have problems with names, stable coins, class of cryptocurrencies intended to be more used as dollars, but that's not how they're built there. Some that truly are pretty interchangeable with a dollar. And I'm gonna say that as a very, very broad spectrum they're well reserved against well disclosed. And then there are stable coins like Luna and Terra, which exploded spectacularly a month ago that actually turned out was a wild economic experiment was not stable at all. So again, you think the power of names, it is a mistake to look at even the world of stable coins and says those are dollars. Those are currencies. Some are, some are risky, economic experiments promising 20% yield per year that lose 60 billion in market cap in the course of a day, that's not how currencies are really supposed to function. So to us, that's just a plug for good regulation and good disclosure and good conversations. Also plug for advisors to get educated about the space. And if a client asks about that, you don't have to say, I know the answer, but at least it's a conversation we're willing to have.

Speaker 6: (27:34)
Anyone else. Yep. I have a more basic question on the derived value of this asset. So other than supply and demand, which is NFTs, that's what they're, it's a supply and demand game. What are the drivers of value for crypto as an asset.

Ben Cruikshank: (27:58)
Supply and demand?

Speaker 6: (27:59)
That's it right.

Ben Cruikshank: (28:00)
Supply and demand. And that's a bit tongue and cheek obviously, but there are plenty of people looking to find interesting, valuable applications using blockchain technology. And there absolutely are some out there. There are also not what is driving the overwhelming value of crypto today. There are exciting experiments, early experience. There are things around security settlement on the blockchain. There are things around taking real assets, putting them into blockchain based applications. We're a team of technologists. We think that's exciting also that is not what is driving multi-trillion dollar market cap. It is supply and demand, but so is the price of gold. So is the price of art and trading cards and any number of other things that advisors have certainly felt comfortable talking to their clients about without willfully turning a blind eye crypto is growing faster than the internet in terms of adoption. It is that supply and demand meets network effects meets some promise of future applications. But I think we, anyone would be lying if you didn't say it's people are investing because other people are investing and it goes as a social movement. That is the biggest driver. And for some advisors, that's a turnoff and I don't want to engage in the conversation for others maybe related to some other assets that you've, you've actually had no problem talking to your clients about for years.

Laura Varas: (29:17)
I think about your question a lot and I worry about it, right I mean all of these currencies and the many other ones I have at home are defunct, and so I think about the underlying value and the technologies and the things that you've said, but then I worry tulips in Holland once had a high price too I do. I worry about that. So, momentum is powerful, but also scary, so I think you're asking a smart question. And at the same time, I believe that there are exciting technologies that are underlying these. I just, I really feel that for people who are literally trading currencies and then the power of the government to come in and regulate it was interesting to hear Rick's thoughts this morning on, just the past couple weeks, some of the discussions that are going on in Washington three or four of these bills are some of the Astras and the paces from Argentina. Like I mentioned quickly, they just print new bills anytime they wanna have a new currency. So I think when you're dealing with something that is a currency and to this speaker's point, there are definitely some that are currencies. Government can come in and just change things at any moment. So it's important to focus like Ben saying on the ones that are more at backed by technology assets and like real innovations.

Ben Cruikshank: (30:38)
And, to approach it as a speculative asset class mostly again, we're not an advisor ourselves, but a lot of advisor are looking at more like a venture capital like that, a one to 2% allocation. If it goes to zero, can the client bear the risk of complete economic loss of those assets start there can they afford, can they mentally manage it from a risk tolerance perspective, recognize it may have asymmetric upside potential. And that certainly attracts a lot of people that space, that one to 2%, does it go to 10 or 20%, but you go back to basics of kind of financial advising and management and planning. And does, is this a fit for this client recognizing though that crypto very uniquely, all the stats lawyers shared is a very retail driven, personal driven experience. And so there are a lot of clients who may be coming to you asking questions about crypto. You would not ordinarily put into a VC like instrument yet they're asking anyway. And so the ability to have that conversation at least is so important.

Laura Varas: (31:32)
I hope they're asking right, Yes. And that's why it's important that it be part of 401k platforms because that's where the conversations can start, with the youngest least experienced investors.

Justin L. Mack: (31:44)
Yeah. All right. And with that, we are running up against our time. So I want to, again, thank our guests. Another round of applause for Ben crook tank, Laura Rivers, and for this conversation. Thank you both.