The WealthStack Podcast
00:15:35 · Mark Swan
[00:15:35] S2: Yeah. So let me explain, like, how Nevis works underneath the hood a little bit. There's two core products to Nevis. Right? And they solve, I would say, the two biggest problems that firms have. So the first part we have is what we call workflows, essentially agent builder product, and it allows firms to map their internal operational workflows. So say, a type opening or transacting on RMDs or reviewing compliance, these types of things allows them to build those building blocks, actually, essentially just using Nevis agents, we have connectors into many different systems, you can pull information, complete workflows, essentially build the building blocks of workflows, and actually help automate those steps end to end, right. So that's like part number one workflows, agent builder. And that's where firms are using that to map their internal operational processes, and help automate a lot of those steps using nevus solution. So that's the first part. The second is then you might have the best operational processes in the world, but you still need advisors to adopt those workflows. Okay. Now the problem exists today that advisors don't like going into take a Salesforce, an example to go and trigger a certain workflow, right? Why? Because it's typically seven clicks deep into triggering that workflow. At best, they might assign it to a team member, right, who then will do that work. But things get lost because where the context is happening, whether that's in a meeting or an email or even just in your head, it's like very difficult. The operational friction is too high to then trigger this back office processes. And so the second core part of what we build is an AI platform, right? And the AI platform is where advisors and their teams live all day, right? That is where they can see all their clients. That's where they can chat to the Nevis assistant and pull up any information they need on a client profile or create a task or trigger a workflow. That's where we have our own note taking solution. That's where we've got an email client where you can actually seal your emails and trigger tasks from email. And really, this is if you like the productivity platform for advisors, and really the value comes from having both. So how do you meet advisors where the context is really happening in email, in a meeting, and so on?
00:17:40 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
And how do you then link that to the operational process side, which is really running on nevus workflow, Pagenta product. The last thing I just mentioned also in terms of how we have helped firms, right? I'd say the platform is 90%, a lot of the value, right? So like the core kind of product, but the last mile is actually by far the most complex part, right? So account opening on one firm looks actually very different from account opening on another, right? Their custodians might be different. They're the way to simple things like should disclosures be in the same DocuSign, should it not, right? Like all these things. And with the workflow builder that you can customize the flows to be specific to certain firms. And for some of our enterprise clients, we actually are building out and have scaled out four deployed engineering teams who actually work with those big enterprise customers to to do those deployments. And so actually remap and help customize a lot of the work so that the the way that they're building the agent builders is actually specific to their firm. And that's been a big part of what we've been doing as well. [00:18:41] S1: I appreciate that. And I wanna pivot a little bit because this certainly piqued my interest when I saw the news. But you actually recently acquired Leader AI, which seems like a pretty strong signal that you believe voice is going to become a much bigger interface in adviser tech. So why was that acquisition strategically important, and what does voice unlock that maybe dashboards and menus just simply don't?
00:19:08 · Mark Swan
[00:19:08] S2: Yeah. Great question. So on Ledra, it's an incredible AI company, two... Founded by two smartest people. You can even imagine former Google DeepMind, highly published in in several AI journals and papers, just, like, incredible, incredibly smart people. And so just first and foremost, it's been incredible to have them also join the team and be part of the nevus' journey. The second thing on the ledger acquisition was really actually around our core thesis that we believe voice is going to be even more important in the frontier of how work actually gets done. How do I get work done today? I speak to people, right? Like, how are we having this conversation? We've been for a play chat to each other. I think it's the most natural. It's also where the most context really is. Even in my own personal use case, I use what's called whisper flow, right? It's like a... It was embedded in my keyboard. Now, when I'm hopping between meetings, what am I doing? I like literally between them, I'm dictating, if you like, you know, how the meeting went, right? This submitted, so forth. These are the follow ups I want to do. And then I have this like pipeline that then reviews that and then creates these tasks and so on. We just wanted to bring that functionality to advisors, right? And advisors can now go on to Nevis, they go into our assistant product, they press voice, and they just can talk to Nevis, they can ask for anything that they want, right, or anything that they would ask for a CSA. I've just had a meeting with Mark. And these are the three follow ups, assign one to Jane, the other to James, the other to Kevin, the date at the twenty ninth of the month. And you're able to like do all of that type of work in a way that's natural to advisors and how they would assign tasks today. Now, I actually think that it's called an uncanny valley, but basically where things feel a little bit weird, but then it just becomes normal. I think that note taking is currently in that valley, right? Some people are like, oh, like I feel like I'm do I like it? Do I not? We wouldn't be talking about note taking in two years time. Right? It's a default on, in my opinion, because the benefits are so good. And I think the voice will actually be very similar, right? And our kind of experience or thought process of voices like using Siri or Alexa and it sucks, right?
00:21:09 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
Like LMs are getting exceptionally good voice now, right? Understanding, following up, being able to actually converse with you in a way that feels much more natural. And I think as a result, it'll just feel much more natural to basically be talking to a system like Nevis to actually complete work and get things done. And so it's a large part of what we are building out, and voice will be a large component of that. [00:21:32] S1: And one of the more interesting ideas in that announcement too was the shift from software, people clicking through to switch to software, and people can simply tell what they want done. So how close are we really to advisers being able to operate more by intent, maybe more so than by just workflow?
00:21:50 · Mark Swan
[00:21:50] S2: Yeah. So this is where I think, like, the distinction to the two products really matters. So there are certain processes where actually having a distinct operational process that's repeatable all the time is very important. Right? And that's where our workflows agent builders really important, right? You want to onboard a client almost the same way every single time, right? You want to do a trade every typically the same way every time. But there are certain things, particularly on the advisor workflow productivity side, where actually you want the interface to constantly change. So I think one of the best examples of this is actually business analytics, right, or business intelligence. As an advisor, I want to know things like, in the last three months, you show me all of the clients that I had a initial sales call with, what's their eight and plot that in a chart like where they are in the pipeline, right? Like today, you might have to go in onto a business intelligence tool, connect it to your CRM, you know, click 20 buttons to set up. Most people won't do it, right? Things change all the time. And what you actually want as an advisor is you want that simple question and you want the response straight back, right? And so I think we're going to move towards a much bigger shift away from like rigid user interfaces, where there's like more like kind of CRM, like this is like how it looks to much more dynamic interfaces, build me a dashboard, which shows me everything I need to know about sales. And in that moment, Nevis will actually go and look at okay, what does a good sales pipeline look for an advisor? Okay, is goes these five metrics, okay, and then I'll chat back to the advisor. Do you want these five metrics to show them it should be a line chart? Should it be a dashboard? Yep, that's looks great. And you're like, you're literally interacting with Nevis and building the front end as you speak. And then you have your dashboard, which you can then save. And so a process that might have taken a week or consultant to go and do, you're able to do in a couple of minutes by interacting with Nevis. And I think that we're gonna move much more toward that where the actual front end user interface is much much more dynamic. I think analytics is probably the best example of that, but then there's others as well.
00:23:49 · Shannon Rosic
[00:23:49] S1: And something that stood out to me when I was just doing some research on Nevis and things like that was really the origin story behind it because you talked about growing up without access to a financial adviser because of cost and how that actually shaped your thinking. So if Nevis actually succeeds at reducing cost to serve and increasing adviser capacity, does this industry start to look fundamentally different, and do we move toward a world where high quality advice becomes accessible to millions more people? I think that's really always been the hope and mission in wealth management.