The WealthStack Podcast
00:00:00 · S0, Shannon Rosic, Mark Swan
[00:00:00] S0: Don't let busy work crowd out what matters most. Serve your clients better and grow AUM with help from Valet's US based client services assistants who bring real financial industry experience and handle the day to day details. And they're offering a free resource, 15 ways to deliver more value to your clients. Text stack, s t a c k, to 55123 to get your guide from Belay. [00:00:28] S1: Welcome to the Wealth Stack podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Racic, the director of Wealth Stack content solutions. Everyone in wealth management is talking about AI, but their bigger story is whether AI can become something more foundational, not just a feature, but truly an operating layer that helps firms scale adviser capacity, reduce that operational drag, and make disparate tech stacks feel a little less fragmented. Isn't that the utopia we're all looking for? And that's exactly where today's conversation is headed. So to unpack what the future could actually look like and what's really happening when it comes to AI and what it means for advisers who are trying to build up their firms right now, I'm joined by Mark Swan, CEO and cofounder of Nevis. Mark, welcome to the show. [00:01:12] S2: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
00:01:12 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
[00:01:12] S2: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. [00:01:15] S1: Absolutely. I have been very much looking forward to this conversation, getting under the hood a little bit. But I do want to start with what will probably be the most challenging and maybe the hardest question you'll get this entire conversation because I wanna know, listeners wanna know, what makes Mark... Well, Mark, both personally and professionally? [00:01:34] S2: Yeah. Professionally, I'm the CEO of Nevis. And personally, he actually grew up in Scotland, hence the slightly strange accent. I would say my Scottish family and friends think I'm kind of American. My Americans definitely think I'm Scottish. I'm somewhere probably in between. But, yeah, I'm incredibly proud and excited to be on the show and excited to talk with you today. [00:01:54] S1: Alright. So outside of being CEO and Scottish, though, what else do you do to fill your time? Unless it's all work, which I would understand at this point. [00:02:01] S2: There's a lot of work. There's... I have to say there's a lot of work. Hours are pretty full on, full days and weekends. But outside of work, I actually got married just at the end of last year. And that is spending time with my wife, and we just relocated to New York. And, yeah, we like to explore the city and see some of the the new parts in New York, which is awesome.
00:02:01 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
[00:02:01] S2: There's a lot of work. There's... I have to say there's a lot of work. Hours are pretty full on, full days and weekends. But outside of work, I actually got married just at the end of last year. And that is spending time with my wife, and we just relocated to New York. And, yeah, we like to explore the city and see some of the the new parts in New York, which is awesome. [00:02:20] S1: Love it. Yes. I'm originally from there. I will say I do miss the food scene every now and then. It's it's hard to come by good at pizza and bagels out here in Colorado, but we're getting there. So enjoy that, and congratulations, obviously. It's a very exciting time. So you got a lot going on. New marriage. New company. So for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with Nevis yet, give us the high level overview. What... Who are you building for, and what problem are you most obsessed with solving?
00:02:47 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
[00:02:47] S2: Yeah, absolutely. So Nevis is an AI platform for wealth management. And so what we do is we think of AI as really solving the most important problem within wealth management companies, which we believe is the administrative burden for advisors and their teams. Right? And so we believe that where AI can actually help wealth management firms the most is help to streamline processes all the way from what advisors doing on a day to day basis to help them save more time to help scale a business, but actually more importantly, on how to re orchestrate and automate a lot of the middle and back office of wealth management firms. So account opening trade processing, and all the things that actually allow a firm to grow. And the biggest problem that we want to solve is 80% of advisors are spending their day or week on admin, right? And that means less time for their clients, less time for growth, less time for being able to actually give that experience more for what they really wanted to come to the industry for, which is that being close to clients and delivering best in class service. And so by freeing that up, give those advisors that time back, help them scale, help them grow, help them better serve their clients. [00:03:55] S1: And one thing that actually stood out to me is that Nevis is not positioning itself as just another AI add on. You're talking about a truly unified AI platform for wealth management. So when you say that, what do you mean, and how should RIAs think about the difference between a feature and truly a real platform?
00:04:13 · Mark Swan
[00:04:13] S2: Yeah. So I... The way I think about it is you have two types of AI. Right? You have horizontal AI, which essentially is typically point solutions. So think of that as a notetaker or document parser, or even lead generation tool. They solve a point solution, right? They solve a step in the process. My view is what firms really want is a more vertical AI solution. So something that is much more deeply integrated into their workflows and into their firm. So what does it mean to be vertical? Number one, it needs to be industry specific. Understand the nuances of what it means to be running a wealth management business. They need to be fine tuned and tweak to those processes. So being able to parse a tax document is actually quite a specific workflow, which then might get triggered with multiple steps. Again, at enterprise, you can throw in a chat GPT, but actually that's not what the structure should actually be from a security and kind of guardrails perspective. And she's been something much more deeply vertically integrated. The second vertical, the vertical AIPs is on workflow. So really going into, into firms and actually remapping their middle and back office workflows onto more agentic processes that help in orchestrate and automate those. And really, the vertical side could be a combination of point solutions as features, right? So Nevis, we have a notetaker, right? We have a document parsing solution. We have an AI assistant product. We have prep tools, parsing tools. We have proposal generation. We have all of these features, but they're all just features of a larger platform. And the thing that we like to say is that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, right, in the sense that one plus one doesn't equal three, it should equal 10. And I think actually having your CRM plus an AI note taking plus a trading platform plus custody, all in one place is actually much more valuable than having kind of this fragmented point solution that you have to then manage as the manager of the technology as an RIA or wealth management.
00:06:15 · Shannon Rosic
[00:06:15] S1: And look. And I'm sure you're aware of this being in the space now, but the wealth management industry has a tendency to lag behind a little bit. So I have been encouraged to see how much adoption we've seen when it comes to AI. Just... I'm always curious when I... Especially when I talk to CEOs and founders. Obviously, you have a very unique background. You were at Revolut and founded Nevis. So I'm curious, what did those experiences teach you about operational complexity scale, and where do you see us still maybe lagging behind a little bit outside of other industries?