The WealthStack Podcast
00:08:50 · Brad Johnson
[00:08:50] S1: I'll try to... There's a lot of directions you could go here, Shannon. So I'll just... The first one that comes to mind is regardless of where you grew up in finance, I feel like there's these... It's almost like religions. Where... What religion did you grow up in? I grew up in the Ed Jones religion, the Ameriprise religion, the insurance sales religion. So I think at the end of the day, all of that with AI, with technology, it's all converging. It's the general client out there in the market space right now that's a pre retiree retiree, which is what most of our members work in that space primarily. They don't wanna be sold anything. It's... That's like the nineteen eighties Wall Street movie, Stockbroker. Like, that's that... In my opinion, that era is over and technology is ending it very quickly. And so what they actually want is goal based planning that meets them where they're at. Here's where I am. I have uncertainty. I have anxiety because I don't have a plan. Here's where I wanna be. And so, if you can go into a conversation, you're curious, you start to understand, and then put the best options in front of them that get them most efficiently from where they are to where they wanna go, We've seen that work over and over. So one of the biggest things that we added that was not part of the original build, we call it operating by member obsession here, borrowed a bit from Amazon, they call it customer obsession. So why is it... Why does everybody buy stuff from Amazon? It's so easy. Click, it's there. No credit card, no address reentry, boom. It's there probably the same day. If you operate at Triad that way, it is what are the themes that we keep hearing from our member firms that's getting them stuck, that's overly complicated, that's a ton of data entry, that all of the stuff that bogs firms down and gets in the way of them serving clients, how do we fix that for them? And one of the big one of the big gaps was our distribution believes that both insurance and wealth management is the best way to accomplish retiree goals. Right? So it's put more tools in the toolbox, and then as a fiduciary, reach in, select best tool to solve problem most efficiently.
00:11:08 · Brad Johnson
The problem is when it comes to technology and distribution for advisors like insurance and wealth management, the tech doesn't work together, the data doesn't flow, there's a lot of disconnect there. And so we actually started by breaking down this kind of siloed build where it's insurance brokerage, wealth management, annuities, life, and we basically built a hub and spoke model that starts in the middle with advanced planning. So when I'm an adviser, I have a client with a million, 2,000,000, 5,000,000, we've served clients north of 50,000,000 on the platform. I can make one phone call to a team led by a c f... CFA, multiple CFPs on the team. I can start to have client focused conversations. Here's the goals. Here's the lack of planning in place to get them there. It starts there, and then we pull in the proper tools to solve the need where most of the industry sells the product, and there's... They truly don't actually deliver on the plan. So we start with the plan, and then pull the product into the plan and we've seen that create massive breakthroughs. Firms that weren't working with clients that had more than $1,000,000 of investable assets are now routinely working with $10.15, $20,000,000 investable asset clients because they've got the firepower and bench behind them to actually build the plans they deserve. So that's been one of the biggest breakthroughs.
00:12:35 · Shannon Rosic, Brad Johnson
[00:12:35] S0: Much sense. Honestly, that approaching it from that way, saying almost the tech comes second. Define your business model and who you wanna be and then build in from there because I wanna pull on that tech thread just for a minute here because you alluded to it that there's been this long standing belief in our industry. It feels like that the more sophisticated your tech stack, the more efficient your firm becomes. But I think we've all seen at this point that even firms with an impressive technology collection can still be incredibly inefficient, and maybe we're still even overestimating what technology can actually solve. And I know that Triad has made some significant investments in your own tech infrastructure. You brought in a CTO to help build those more connected systems and AI driven platform. So when you're evaluating technology for advisers in your ecosystem, what problems are you prioritizing? How do you distinguish between tech that genuinely creates capacity and tech that just introduces another layer of complexity for the sake of having it? [00:13:36] S1: Yeah. So recovering nerd alert. I'll admit it. I think he might be with me in that club. I'm not sure. [00:13:45] S0: But Are you too?
00:13:46 · Brad Johnson
[00:13:46] S1: So I was this... I was a computer information systems major in college, so I actually took coding classes now. I remember nothing of that these days. But I learned how to build technology from a flowchart, if then statements, all of kind of the methodology behind. And then I thought I'd left that behind. And what's wild, it's coming full circle now when you're, I believe today, in finance, if you're not thinking like a technology company, you are going to get left behind. So we have invested heavily in that. We have back to member obsession, talk to our members, what... Where do they get stuck, what needs to work together to actually allow them to serve their clients. And AI right now, obviously very catchphrasey in everything, but specifically in finances, we record this Claude for financial advisors just came out a little over a month ago. And we have inside of Triad been running an AI mastermind for close to a year now. Here's been the biggest learning. Trigger alert. Sorry, financial advisers out there. You're not good at being technology people. And that's okay because you shouldn't be. Like, you're it's hard enough to be a financial adviser, serve your clients, build world class plans for you to be a CTO of your own firm, analyze all of the tech stack, make it talk, work together, and then, oh, by the way, as soon as you finish that out, five new AI tools rolled out yesterday. It's an impossible task. And so one of the biggest learnings in the AI mastermind is we have to build it on our members' behalf. They don't have the time. They don't have the bandwidth. They don't have the expertise. And quite honestly, they don't want to. And so when it comes to all of the AI tools, Claude for Financial Advisors, for example, super dangerous to just plug into that and start using it. You haven't vetted the connectors. You don't know where the PII is going. Even though it's enabled for financial advisers, doesn't mean you should plug in and start using it. And I strongly believe the SEC and this is leading technology, that there's gonna be some that get out over their skis here. They get a serious slap on the wrist or maybe more because they're putting client data in places where it should not go nor did they even know it. So the approach that Triad is taking is we are building right now. We have Triad AI. It's an AI enabled CRM.
00:16:07 · Brad Johnson, Shannon Rosic
So PII protected, SOC 2 compliant, and now our thought, instead of going external and connecting to all of these AI tools where you don't know where the data lives and you have to do a ton of diligence just to figure it out, We're building the fence data. We're bringing the AI tools inside of it to enable our members to actually still use the technology out there, but do it in a way that doesn't get them in trouble. So that's the simple version. There's a lot more behind it than that. But, philosophically, we're approaching the bill differently today. [00:16:41] S0: I think a lot of folks who are approaching it relatively cautiously because to your point, the SEC is still figuring out how to manage all this. So don't be that first use case folks where you do get your wrist slaps. Do this right. And to your point around AI, I actually thought your recent article on wealth management about treating AI like a new employee was a really interesting way to frame adoption because everyone's racing to deploy it. But you actually made the point that having access to a tool and being ready to use it are two different things. So what do you think advisers are underestimating about the operational and compliance changes required to make AI genuinely useful?
00:17:25 · Brad Johnson
[00:17:25] S1: So it is the future. I don't wanna take a pessimistic look at this. It is the future, and it's not going away anytime soon. And today is the worst it'll ever be. So it's... Look at the jumps we've seen over the last twelve to twenty four months. So I think understanding how to enable the usage in a way where you understand where your client's very important data is. In finance, it is the data every bad person in the world wants to get their hands on. So understanding it and taking it to that level of seriousness is key. And then I think the interesting thing with AI, because it's not just, hey, here's like a new Excel doc where it's a tool. You can't think about it like a tool that you just turn on or off. You have to think about it like an employee because at the agent level, it can go act like an employee. It can connect to things. It can pull data. It can push data. And so, just like you wouldn't invite a brand new intern into your firm and say, hey, here's everything, and they're now officially the CEO, you would have training. You would have basically a way for them to level up to get to a point to where you grant them more controls or more access to things that matter. Same thing with AI. Don't just turn it on and then unleash it. You have to start to integrate it the way you would a new employee. And I just think a lot of people just aren't thinking about it that way, so they're not intentionally doing things the wrong way. They just don't know any better. And so that was one of the points about the the podcast episode and the article the other day is, hey. Here's a new way to think about it that hopefully will help a few advisers out there.