Women leaders in wealthtech – executive panel

Join this panel discussion to hear from three female executives paving the way in wealthtech and wealth management. Learn tangible steps to growing your business, improving your process, and elevating your overall client experience.

Transcript :

American Banker (Moderator) (00:07):

The senior editor at American Banker, I lead up to women's programs for American Banker and we have with us today our distinguished panelists, Sindhu Joseph, the CEO at CogniCor, Claudia Kane who is the president-elect, correct, of the Financial Planning Association. And Stacy Francis who's the president and CEO of Francis Financial. So welcome everyone and thank you for spending some time with us. I want to start first with you just because Claudia and Stacy are on the financial advisor side, so we know kind of what they do. I mean hopefully I know what they do, but because you're more the tech side, do you want to talk a little bit about what your company does and how your technology works a little bit?

Sindhu Joseph (00:50):

Sure. First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity and very exciting to be here. My name is Sindhu Joseph. I'm the CEO and founder at CogniCor. My background is in artificial intelligence. I'm sure in all of you are hearing a lot of Chat GPT and all of those. I have been in this field for 20 years. I have a PhD in AI and have invented several patterns in mission learning and natural language processing. So I'm baked in this technology and very passionate about not just people tell me about when I talk about AI, am I going to be replaced? I think it is. AI is not going to replace you, but people using AI is going to kind of replace you. So that is kind of the underlying focus with which I work or how can we augment human efficiency at scale? So CogniCor is an AI assistant platform, almost purpose-built for the wealth advisors and our focus is how can you increase productivity? So in a world where you know can buy from Amazon with a single click, hire an Uber with again one or two clicks, if you want to interact with wealth, which is so fundamental to our existence, it becomes really complex how to change beneficiaries for my client, it is hugely complex. So that's where CogniCor comes in. We are an AI assistant that sits on top of your CRM systems, your advisor platforms, and really provide contextual intelligence that as well as takeover most of the routine tasks that you can concentrate on engaging with your clients or expanding your portfolio. So every client servicing activity is powered from a conversational interface in the front and behind the scenes automated. So that's really, CogniCor is all about.

American Banker (Moderator) (02:45):

So we're all going to keep our jobs for a while, correct? We won't hold you to it.

American Banker (Moderator) (02:50):

Well let's, Claudia and Stacy, if one of you want to talk a little bit about what technological challenges you're facing today and what maybe what kind of software you're using or where you're at in the stage of interfacing with your clients and also trying to get some of that backbreaking work off of your plates?

Claudia Kane (03:13):

I will say one thing, the idea of plus one terrifies me. I started at Merrill Lynch back in 85 and it was T+5. And I remember my very first client, I actually drove to his office to pick up the check. I was so afraid it wouldn't make it a long time ago. So technology has definitely helped us being a woman in this industry, I raised kids, I can't even imagine how wonderful it would've been to have something, an automated assistant that could change the beneficiaries for me and do things like that. So I think that's really exciting.

Stacy Francis (03:46):

Well, we always are trying to get better and so for our challenges we are looking at using chat GPT. We've done tutorials for the whole firm to answer emails that we get for clients. A client sent me an email about how she's ready to sell her mom's home after she passed away and how difficult it has been for her to come to this place. And I put it into chat GPT and said, please give me a response. I had to give it about three more prompts, but it wrote this breathtakingly beautiful response and then I was able to customize it for us, saved me at least 15 minutes. So doing that, and there are a lot of things we're doing with chat GPT, but we also, the other pain point is as we grow, we have about 18 of us now. We're a fee only fiduciary firm down here in New York, but we have clients all over the US is capacity. And so we're moving CRMs from Tamarack to Salesforce so we can better integrate our workflows, add some automization to that. We also, on the marketing end, we're always wanting to grow and so we've added some fantastic software on that end to better streamline our events to also help us with creating questions for when I'm on podcasts, I'm on about 50 podcasts a year, plus I go live with my podcast twice a year. So we can use chat GPT to help us with some of those questions and even automatization of recording webinars and then having them go live for people to sign up and they think they're live and their answers are their questions are being answered during that webinar. So we have a lot of really cool stuff that we're doing a lot more that we want to learn. But we definitely, again, I would say the pain points that we're seeing are how to respond to clients in a customized way, how to create capacity for our staff members through workflows and automatization, and then also how we can continue to grow in a sustainable way that is less time intensive on our team.

American Banker (Moderator) (05:56):

I think one of the things, especially financial planning and wealth management is very personal, relational kind of experience. I went through this recently where I started working with a financial planner and I had to transfer. It was actually pretty laborious. I was kind of shocked and I had to get paper checks and then send paper checks to them and I was like, what year? I mean, I'm not that young and it's like I thought that'd be a little more automated. But the reason I'm working with them is because a friend of mine and her husband are using them. And so there's this trust because I think people will talk about all kinds of things very openly as we know, but it comes to money. It's like, don't ask me any questions. And so how important is that as you implement these new technologies to also keep that customer client relationship?

Claudia Kane (06:43):

I personally, I think that's the most important. I was talking to a client the other day and she said, this is not a relationship. And I thought, wow, that's pretty insightful. But I went to a doctor one time and the whole time I was talking to him about very personal stuff. He was on his laptop typing it in and staring at the monitor and I was not comfortable. I'm like, I'm talking about my body and my health. So I still take notes on a yellow pad and I put the data in after the client leaves, which actually for me works really well. I get to double think it. Yes, I'm paying attention to the client, I'm manually writing. I have proven that manual writing.

American Banker (Moderator) (07:21):

Wow there she is.

Claudia Kane (07:23):

She's helps you retain more. So I'm still pretty old school and I think the relationship that we have, technology's wonderful, but we've got to keep that human touch when we're managing people's money. There's your family, your faith and your money.

Sindhu Joseph (07:42):

Yeah, I just wanted to kind of add on to that. People always think either technology or personal relationship, it is financial planning is we acknowledge that it is a relationship based business. But I think what the missing link is how technology can enable this personalization. So if you are really focused on getting all the client context, imagine you're walking into a client review meeting and you don't have the name of the pet that household has. So one of our product is a meeting assistant which really provides the information to prepare for you for the meeting. So you are not really interfacing or kind of interjecting the technology in between the meeting, but providing all the necessary components to allow you to perform better at the meeting to create that personal relationship. So I think we have to kind of think both to both of these in terms of how can one complement the other and how can that scale be enabled because scale is what we want to really achieve when we are growing and how can technology support that scale at the same time retain all of those personal relationship.

Stacy Francis (09:07):

My husband actually works for one of our competitors, but they're one of the behemoths. So you can't really, it's Goldman Sachs, but I love their approach to their wealth management. They describe themselves as a technology firm that offers wealth management to clients. But what I would say for us is to take that one step further that we need to be technology firms that offer wealth management and unbelievable boutique experience and handholding and flipping this on our head, it's not between what you're doing now and technology, it's using technology to give yourself the space in the day to make that phone call. How we use technology recently, one of the things we do is I take out all my clients on my sailboat now you think that I have a very big sailboat to take all the clients. I do about 20 sales over a four week period. And how do we do this? We have this fantastic software called Ticket Tailor where all the sales are there, there's a limit. I can only take 10 people if we go over that. Then it goes to the waiting list. If someone takes their name off, they can't go. That person on the waiting list is notified. All of the updates on the location are also automatically given. So this is a great example of a software we're using to give them this unbelievable experience of going on a sailboat out to the Statue of Liberty and having wine in hors d'oeuvres amount of time we spend on this. So it's taken us eight years to get here just so you know. But the first year would, it was hundreds of hours that we put towards this. Now with automatization and the planning that we have from my staff, it's still a good amount of time. It's probably 15 hours, but what a difference. So this is a great way of, again, embrace this technology. It allows you then to have the time to have that very bespoke, very deep relationship with your clients. Yeah, the only thing we haven't figured out is how to get the software to dock the sailboat perfectly. We have not figured that one out yet. That's always a little exciting.

American Banker (Moderator) (11:37):

Still need a deckhand I guess. So what are some tools maybe that you're using that we might, because this is really interesting, you think it's like, yeah, it's not, it's related to your business but it's related to a different part of your business.

Stacy Francis (11:49):

I mean I'll go through our tech stack from the typical that you think of. So our, right now our CRM is Tamarack, we're, we'll be moving to Salesforce. We're a month in our overlay on sale on and we'll be done in about three and a half years, or sorry, three and a half months feels like three and a half years, but three and a half months it's taking us a little longer because we have 20 years of data. We have a lot of data that has to be mapped for our advisor view, Tamarack, you know what you pull up to see what a client's doing, how everything looks, our performance reports also through that. And then we use what used to be TRX for rebalancing and now it's through Morningstar. We actually hired a fantastic company called Cornerstone Portfolio Resource CPR. I know that CPR doesn't sound so good, but they have been CPR. They've, they've been fantastic for us and they're actually going through and streamlining our portfolios and our portfolios were unwieldy where it would take us weeks to make a trade across all of our portfolios and they're helping us with that and actually have even provided a trader on the other front we use Microsoft 360, all of those softwares. I spoke a little bit about Ticket Tailor. We also do a lot of videos and we use Adobe Premier Pro to edit those videos. We also use Canva for a lot of our image image creation webinar jam. If you don't know about this, you should. It takes any webinar that you've done and again, people sign up once a month and it's as if it is live for them. So it's a fantastic way to leverage what you're doing and you can do many different programs through it. ActiveCampaign is your typical newsletter except that it has many more filters so that people can be in buckets so that they're getting an email once a week or every other week that's tailored just for them because they're a potential client who's a widow versus a potential client who is thinking about or going through a divorce. And the other one is Outlook email Merge Pro. Have you ever reached out to your clients and you wanted it to be custom? So you put John thinking of you Dear John, now we have that. But it takes five minutes and you can change certain pieces to be customized directly based on what you want it to say for them. So again, we're learning all these things, we're trying to get better. If you know more resources, I mean I hope there's a opportunity for you to share too, but it's again helping us give time back in our day to take on more clients and try and be more intentional and close with our clients.

Claudia Kane (14:58):

So my situation's a little different. I am actually an advisor with Raymond James and any of you out there with broker dealers probably know we're very compliance heavy. So the only software and technology I use is Raymond James. Every now and again they say, oh you can do this, but the process isn't worth it. And to be honest, Raymond James technology platform is great. It's got everything I need. The only you mentioned challenges, the only challenge I ever have is the learning curve to get up and running on it and use all the features that are there. But I'm glad we have a good platform because I couldn't go through the compliance issue.

American Banker (Moderator) (15:36):

Well Sindu as you're CEO obviously and you're running your own company. So what do you use to help? You've got multifaceted marketing, employee, everything, what helps you?

Sindhu Joseph (15:48):

Yeah, I think it may not be fully relevant for your business, but we are a technology forward company as you can imagine. So we use everything from marketing automation to, and if you ever receive a, I'm sure many of you will receive messages from LinkedIn, none of that is actually coming directly from me. Everything is automated to sales process, including generating profiles, recommending this is the right client. I think that is something that could be very well used for financial advisors looking at your client profile, an AI system can generate, okay, I'm looking at this kind of a client profile, maybe high net worth individuals having practicing doctors or physicians so I can personalize all of this and then say, okay, can you generate three leads for me which are one degree away from my existing client base so I can get recommendations. So all of these are tools that we use internally to kind of grow our business because simply because we have to be optimized to provide our service for the lowest cost. So we don't have, I have three member sales plus marketing team in internally and we are running this show with that, a full-fledged automation behind the scene. One thing that I have challenge both in our technology and what we are seeing in developed industry is that there are a huge number of platforms out there, but every platform somebody has to interact and then connect those platforms together. So what CogniCor and our company is trying to do is really interconnect these platforms to provide that glue between them so that you know, don't have to go into 10 or 20 different platforms and then try and you interact with it personally. You know, just want to get things done. So those are the kind of technologies that I wish we have that more so that kind of a chat GPT kind of experience, get me these things and somebody does that for you. So if we can connect these technologies together, that's how an ideal state for me would be.

American Banker (Moderator) (18:13):

So one of the things I want to ask, so what is helping currently to improve your client experience and what is hindering your client's experience?

Stacy Francis (18:26):

I can go sure, yeah. With all these technologies, it sounds great. We all know that there's a learning curve. Something that is very well documented is that when firms change technology in a big way, whether it's your portfolio reporting or CRM, I'm not just talking about using a new newsletter, I'm talking about the big technology those firms actually underperform for typically about a year, sometimes even more from a growth and financial perspective. Why is it? It's because it takes a while for your individuals, your employees, yourself to get up to speed on that technology. So I would say when you're thinking about making a change, we had a thought about do we add money guide Pro in addition to E-money? E-money is great, it's cashflow based but it's a lot of data input and we are working with some of our client's children where they don't really need that. It's a goals based would be fine. And so originally we were looking at some other softwares, but then we got the brave idea, why don't we ask you money? Maybe they have a goals base and funny enough they do fundamentals. We just did a introduction to it. And again, the reason we did this because we know that changing softwares, it hurts the firm financially growth perspective and also it can be hellacious on the staff members. So trying to also make the technology you have work and on earth everything you can about it before you then decide to get rid of it. And for Tamarack, CRM and what we wanted to do, we spent about four years trying to make it happen. It, okay, so we're moving on, but we on earth and got the flashlight out to see if there were any other services and ways we could use it. They do and thank God because fundamentals automatically flows into the advanced planning so that someone can go from fundamentals dray into advanced planning at cashflow based anytime we want without a hiccup. So I would say just be careful when you're very thoughtful about when you change technology, when you add technology.

Claudia Kane (20:54):

So I know a lot of my clients, partly because I've been in the business for such a long time are in their eighties and when Covid first hit and we had to go to Zoom meetings, it was really pretty funny. I'd get the top of their head. I said, okay, no, you need to adjust the camera a little bit just so I can see you. But they're all pretty good at it now, but we're back to in-person meetings. But I do find having older clients, especially since now I'm working with some of the second and third generation, their kids, the kids are really tech savvy and they love the fact that they can text and be responsive. Of course Raymond James hates it when you text, so that's another issue. But the younger kids are into it. So I'm trying to work with them to work with their older parents to make it easy so that they don't get stressed and they don't get anxious. That I said the learning curve is always challenging, but it certainly is helping with the younger people that really like that access and the investor access and all that sort of stuff.

American Banker (Moderator) (21:50):

That kind of leads into one of my questions was that obviously the younger generations have certain expectations about technology. How do you think that's going to transform the business and the next 10 years?

Claudia Kane (22:00):

It will be faster.

Stacy Francis (22:05):

So from the meeting perspective, we've seen a big change in three years. We've had two clients come in the office, most people look at me, are you kidding me? But that's actually true. Almost everybody has loved Zoom. It's also allowed us so that our staff members come into the office one time a month, that's it, one time a month. And actually during the summer we don't even come in. So for some people that's a little too far in that direction, that's totally fine. We will be there if someone wants to meet in person and we are seeing new clients, potential clients wanting to do more in person for that first initial meeting, which is great. But I do see that in our field there's going to be continued flexibility of how you meet with clients and also quite frankly how far you might live from the office if there is even an office. For us, we are committed to having an office because we love to, around Easter we do an Easter egg hunt that's very competitive. We would never want to give that up the, there's no place that will let us do an Easter egg hunt of that level. But I do see it, it definitely allows better service and also flexibility of how we give service. And I think giving flexibility to people in the profession and where they want to live and how they want to live. And even the time period. I have one person who lives in England, she works different hours. That's fine, not a problem.

American Banker (Moderator) (23:34):

I want to, I mean that brings another question up. It's like this is going to be one of the largest wealth transfers in history, so how is that going to change the wealth tech industry?

Claudia Kane (23:46):

I think part of that, the convenience of technology is helping me connect better with the second and third generation and that's where the money's going to be going. So it's going to be coming from my 80 and 90 year old clients and going to their kids and their grandkids. I have much better retention of those second and third generation clients now because of technology, because of accessibility. Doesn't matter where they're living. I'm working with a client that recently is having health issues and I'm dealing with their three children who are all in different places and because of technology I'm able to connect with them. So I think that's actually really going to help our business retain those relationships down the generations.

Stacy Francis (24:26):

A hundred percent agree. I would say also one of our biggest challenges is being able to service clients profitably. Right now we have a $2 million minimum. So the minimum amount we're getting from a client is about $25,000 a year. My dream, my hope is that as we continue to look at efficiencies bringing in technology, I, I'd love to bring it down to a million right now, I can't do that because my staff would be overwhelmed and we just can't hire enough to have the right people. And the training, which is really important, it's bringing a family member into the family. You can't just show them where the bedroom is and not invite 'em for meals. So my hope is that we can bring really wonderful financial planning and wealth management to individuals that maybe are priced out of the market that desperately need this even more being able to bring down the cost of the services we provide.

Sindhu Joseph (25:30):

Yeah, I also wanted to, given this is a woman's forum, these wealth transfer is also going to the women around 30 trillion wealth transfer is getting in the hands of women. What I'm like this, I'm fully an outsider in the industry, but still what I'm hearing from some of the investors, retail investors is that can I get a recommendations for a woman advisor or can I get a firm a recommendation for a firm that cater to certain specific needs of these? So even for millionaires or people who are traditionally not thought of as the main client, I think the industry somehow has left them out in the process of capturing how do you customize these services for them? How do you even find the right advisor for them? So I think these questions are still open questions that is out there and I wish there are better answers for these.

American Banker (Moderator) (26:37):

Yeah, I think the part of the question too is diversity. I think as we know it's still a for women and people of color in financial, in the wealth advisor, financial industry, not unlike other industries. I'm not pointing a finger. So what can we do? I mean I know it's a broad picture, but what do you think needs to be done? I mean obviously it helps to have somebody that mirrors you. If you have somebody that looks like you, you're probably more inclined to work with that person, but we've got to get people in through at the to start that kind of journey. So who wants to fix this problem for us forever? Not really.

Claudia Kane (27:18):

So when I started at Merrill Lynch, there were about a hundred of us, I think they sent here to New York, stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel, never forget it, and there was a sea of black suits. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, God, I've gone to New York, I'm going to speak, what should I wish? He goes, well, if everybody in New York wears black. So you see, I'm still not compliant when it comes to that. And I wasn't then either. I was in a bright red suit, but I was a single mom of a six year old and I didn't know my checkbook from my credit card from anything When I started, the good news was Merrill Lynch was great training. They were fabulous for that and it really enabled me. I remember telling my boss when he hired me, I'll work harder than anybody else in this office from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM but I will not work nights and I will not work weekends, I can't. And I mean we didn't even have technology back then. I mean we had books that we wrote down our trades in and everything, but it still is the type of business that I just wish more women would understand the flexibility it gives you and then when you add the technology feature on it also for diversity, like you say, it enables you to reach into communities that you maybe wouldn't otherwise be able to. So I think the opportunities are just amazing that are out there right now.

Stacy Francis (28:36):

So we have a pretty amazing team. There's 18 of us, 16 are women and all different ages and backgrounds. And what I find is a lot of the people who have come to us have been career changers, which actually are fantastic. And then we also have a really important internship program where we have individuals who come, men and women that are thinking about the field during their college years. And it's a wonderful way to introduce them to what I think is the best fricking field in the world. I have two kids that I raised while starting Francis Financial and I actually started a charity before called Savvy Ladies. I founded Savvy Ladies. So I actually ran both and I will tell you I worked my little socks off, but I see the benefits of that and just explaining that this is an amazing field where you can have a family, you can have a life, you have a lot of flexibility and it's also one of financially one of the most rewarding fields that you could ever get into. And so the sky's really the limit. So just introducing people through internships, through having conversations and letting them know how great this field really is.

Sindhu Joseph (30:03):

I just have two suggestions. I wish I had known about this field before, so maybe I would've had a different career. But one of my suggestion is that I'm in the part of a investor who is completely illiterate about financial, anything to do with wealth. So I wish in the elementary school when I started there is just math that we give a lot of importance to mathematics. I wish there was a subject that is core that is financial literacy. So if we start from there, I think things would be completely different. So that is my one suggestion, anybody who's kind of making policies around it, you start from elementary school because this is one of the things that at the end of the day makes your life completely different. And second is I think especially for women and people who are focused on relationship, this is a great place. What I have seen from the outside because my advisor seems more like a kind of therapist or someone who's a counselor who is helping you through different problems. As a business owner, my job could be very, very lonely. I have a lot of, I could use some of these counseling conversations, especially on the financial side. So I look at financial advisor as somebody who your doctor who's intimately knows you and understands your greatest wishes, your vision and your life goals and try to gear you towards that. Not necessarily a person who is everything about financial planning because for that you have a lot of softwares. So if that part is solved by technology, then how do you deliver that and understand that in the context of the customer. I think it's a great job for women and others who really value the relationship part of it.

American Banker (Moderator) (32:18):

I think that's a really good point, the financial literacy piece because I think there's obviously a need to democratize financial literacy and to have people start earlier that those that might not be as wealthy and that work in other industries can figure out a path because as we know that will really change their lives and their children's lives. So I guess the question is how do we do institutions? I mean I've seen banks start to do a lot more of this where that they were like community banks or credit unions will do set up something for high school. Because I think what's so important is with my parents there, I'm one of eight and my parents are just like, go raise yourself. We're too busy. Figure out how to balance a checkbook, which is not the ideal way to learn how to manage your money. But are there things that you can do with the younger generation? I mean obviously technology helps a lot, but you've got to understand what it's doing before you get there.

Claudia Kane (33:15):

So pitch for the Financial Planning Association. We are big on two things. We're big on diversity but we're also huge on financial literacy. In fact, I leave this afternoon and I'm going to Washington DC for our advocacy day and we're going to have meetings with the Department of Labor, with the SEC and with different legislative bodies and set and banking and stuff like that. And one of our big things is we're always pushing for financial literacy in our schools. We understand how important it is. The problem, it always goes down to the money. I've run into walls talking to the legislators in, I'm from California and they basically say teacher's unions too strong, they're not going to go for it. So we do a lot of pro bono work and I would just encourage that as much as possible. If you want to get involved in pro bono, it's incredibly rewarding and you know, just keep hoping and you just keep pressing forward and you keep talking to people about it and talking to people about it. But it, it's a big upward climb because of the money.

Stacy Francis (34:15):

So my solution, when I was 26, I had the solution. Now granted it was a lot more than I realized I was getting into. So I launched Savvy Ladies when I was 26 and I launched it. I mean it's not typically what a 26 year old would do, but I had watched my grandmother, she was a victim of domestic violence. I grew up watching the abuse and I really struggled with being able to save her. And it's because I didn't understand what was really going on that there's a lot more to domestic violence besides just being able to leave. That's actually why I stayed, why I started Savvy Ladies and we work with all different types of women. Yes, some of those women are in financially, emotionally and physically abusive relationships, but the fastest growing segment of women coming to Savvy Ladies is actually 18 to 30, which is fantastic. And so from a technology point of view we are able to give them a lot of fantastic opportunities. There's 250 FINRA approved courses, self-paced courses with questionnaires at the end. Also in Spanish. There's also hundreds of TED Talk like videos that over the last 20 years we have every financial topic. We're always looking for more volunteers as well. And then we have this fantastic swish helpline. All of this again is free of charge where they can come to the website and essentially now also on their phone via an app. So NASDAQ gave us a $50,000 nice cart blanche check to build. It just went live and they're connected with one of our 225 volunteers. Most of them are CFPs CPAs and they can work one-on-one free of charge. We do a lot of work with FPA pro bono with NAPFA Foundation for financial planning and it's been fantastic from the financial point of view, how do we afford it? I personally bankrolled it the first decade. That's why I started Francis Financial the next year. I knew I needed to make some money for the charity. But over these two decades we now get fantastic foundational grants, private grants, public and addition. We get very large checks from probably many of the companies that you work at. So thank you very, very much. And so that's how we've addressed it. But the piece that we don't focus on is we don't do high school and below, so we're really kind of the college and above. And so that's kind of our slice of what we're doing. But there's many more we touch about 30,000 women each year, 5,000 of them, women who are financially vulnerable are being matched with the financial advisor to work with each year. That's great. That's 5,000. But we do know that it's really a drop in the bucket.

American Banker (Moderator) (37:19):

I want to talk about the kind of challenging economic landscape we might be headed into. I mean there's all this talk, well will there be a recession? Will there not be interest rates are still up inflation. How does that affect you as a business owner and obviously trying to get investor money and then also what your clients are expecting because we all get a little bit nervous, especially with our own money, like oh what's going on with the stock markets? And also for you it's challenging as we know for women to raise money still. I mean the percentage is abysmally small, it's like embarrassing. So Sindhu do you want to start?

Sindhu Joseph (38:01):

Yeah, I think as a business owner we always kind of plan ahead in terms of how do you go through these kind of turbulence situations. So I am somebody who bootstrapped my business with pretty much no investment at all. We have raised is a $1 million from Angels seed investors and so on. And we are a pretty successful business today and making sure that our customers are able to fund our business is my way of doing business. Probably not the, I come from Silicon Valley, not the Silicon Valley way of how you grow the company, but I kind of really focus on sustainable, operationally efficient business and make sure that I have a business that is growing and acquiring more customers and we have a fantastic pipeline and so I'm not so worried what the situation is. And in fact we kind of thrive in this kind of challenging situations where customers really need to reduce cost and create efficiencies. I think it's a huge opportunity for whenever we are in a crisis that's when we think about what is the priority, what is needed. And I think that's the best time for business to both create efficiencies within us. So I'm very brutally prioritizing and if there is something else that somebody else brings to my attention, I'm like no, we are not looking at that. So when you have very few resources, you kind of really look at prioritizing. So the same with our clients. We can really see that they are looking at efficiency, operational cost reduction and so on. And that is great for our business. So I think while there are challenges across, I think we have gone through such situations and we would be fine.

Claudia Kane (40:13):

So Mary Ellen, I know this, we've been through tough times. Especially going back to 1985, one of the things that I've developed over the years when I talked to my clients, and it also goes to what you said is goals-based planning. So I call it benchmarking to the benchmarking to the beach house, tumbled a little bit the idea of being what is your client's focus and really trying to keep them focused on that. My daughter was an executive producer at a news station in Reno and she told me flat out if it bleeds, it leads. And so the media is not our friend. The media is not going to say, Hey, go talk to your financial planner, they're going to give you the good advice and help you. No, they're going to say the Dow's going to go down to 2000 or somebody else is going to say, Gold's going to go to 20,000 or more. Crypto the news is not our friend. And so we have to keep our relationships with our clients and we have to keep them focused. And yes there are challenging times and sometimes we have to pivot depending on what those times are bringing and how we allocate their resources. But staying in touch with our clients I think and staying in touch with their goals using technology to help them.

Stacy Francis (41:25):

So yeah, I a hundred percent agree. And from a technology perspective, we have put some pieces place. So we use one hub, it's a competitor to Calendly. And what's wonderful is that it has increased the number of clients making appointments for meetings and it also actually has helped our conversion ratio when you send out to a potential client of actually making a meeting with you and we're able to then track who's had a meeting yet this year who has not, and then quickly send them an email saying, notice you didn't make a check-in meeting, we're sending this to you again. What's great about those, you can do it for 15 minutes for 30 minutes for an hour. And they're all categorized but depending on who's their team, they get a different link. It might be with Natalie and Al or if their team is Peter and Shada, it might be that and it goes directly onto their calendars. So that's been great. It's helped staying in contact with people before they get worried. Second thing, when they are worried you can jump on the phone, but often what we're trying to do is preempt that. So I will then make a literally five minute video about that topic. So debt ceiling is one of them. War in Ukraine, anything that comes up that we know people are going to worry about, we do a quiet five minute video before we start to get the emails and try and get it out as quickly as possible. And then the other thing is of course use the tools that you have. So if you're using E-money and there's a dashboard, make sure all of your clients have their dashboard so that they can go and check in once a month just to see kind of where they're at versus just seeing the headlines because often it's not as bad as maybe they think it is. So for us, we're trying to use this technology to stay more in contact with clients before they worry and get stressed out.

American Banker (Moderator) (43:33):

We have a few minutes, do we want to, are there any questions anyone would like to ask besides what time is lunch?

Audience Member 1 (43:44):

I'm curious how you stay on top of it. Maybe this is to your list. So many, how do you stay on top of the trends, your due diligence?

Stacy Francis (43:57):

Great question. How do you stay on top of the trends? So I'm a member of Michael Kitsis, so I love it because what they do is they synthesize all of the major articles of what's important, what's not. I also subscribe to Bob Veris and I love it. He is a Tech Guru and that helps as well. And then my advisory, I have a marketing team and they go to, I'm forgetting the of it, but it's for content providers in financial services. If anyone knows it, yell out the conference name. T three, yes, T three they'll go to T three. And these are all things that help us and then also be part of a study group. If you're not get similar type sized firms, possibly similar group of people you serve. I'm on a study group and then three of my advisors have their own study group as well. I have another advisor in marketing that has her own study group and what's wonderful is that then you're like beta testing. And so one of the individuals, they were the first one to move to Salesforce from Tamarack CRM two years ago and I just watched them. It was actually Dave Mosan who is the FPA president and I was, he's part of my study group. So I was just watching him and it was brilliant. I'm like, okay, Dave did it, it's perfect. We're going. So those, that's what I would say because it's overwhelming, right? And there's always something new. But with that communication with your other team members that are part of your study group, you're going to be able to kind of cut through some of the noise, get some good ideas.

Audience Member 2 (45:55):

What are your comment though that media's not own threat I have to take issue with has nothing to do with the fact of who's sponsoring us. I was just wondering for clarification, I think we have to take the position that the media has to be our friend and we have to act accordingly. So when you say the media's not our friend, are you talking about input and also output? Because where else would we go except the media in order to communicate our views?

Claudia Kane (46:24):

So I guess that was maybe a little too off the rails we have to take. There's so much noise out there because we have 24 hour news, we have all the publications, we've got so much noise out there that our clients are being exposed to. So I think it's more helping our clients understand. I get them asking me, well who do you listen to? And so I'll tell them they're like kitties and various and people like that. There's some brilliant minds out there who are certainly very supportive of the financial planning industry. They are our friends, we need them desperately. So I shouldn't have made it such a blanket statement for that. I apologize. I'm thinking about more the pretty talking heads that have no idea what they're talking about and say things that are inflammatory for the purposes of just getting people to pay attention. So my apologies.

American Banker (Moderator) (47:18):

Are you talking to me there or I don't know enough to be dangerous. Trust me. We just have a couple minutes left if anybody else has a question. Otherwise we'll be breaking for lunch. I want to thank you all for your time and your intelligence and your thoughtfulness and thank you all for being here as well.