Okay, I think we're gonna get started. So welcome. This is gonna be, I think, a fun and interesting talk. So let me introduce myself. I am Andrew Altfest, for those of you who don't know me. I am the founder of a software company called FP Alpha, and what FP Alpha does is it allows advisors to take their clients' documents, a will, a trust, a tax return, an insurance policy, upload them to our platform. Platform uses AI to read them, visualize them, find gaps in opportunities, give those back to advisors, and then allows advisors to model different scenarios like today's scenario versus a future scenario in which a planning is applied, or with tax projections, what do the tax projections look like into the future? So it's a complementary tool to today's traditional financial planning tools like a retirement planning tool or an investment tool. I am also a advisor, like everyone here. I'm a NAFA-registered advisor, president and principal advisor at a larger RA firm in Midtown Manhattan called Altfest Personal Wealth Management. We manage about $1.7 billion for high-net-worth individuals. I have a long history with NAFA. I'm a proud and happy NAFA member. My father, Lew Altfest, was one of the founding members of NAFA way back in 1983, and my mother, Karen Altfest, has been active in the organization for many years. And I lead the NAFA New York City chapter, and I've done that since 2016. So I'm very happy to be speaking to fellow NAFA members in the spirit of sharing. I'm gonna be talking today about how AI and being able to automate estate planning and other areas of advanced planning is a huge opportunity for us, how we at Altfest Personal Wealth Management, the RA firm, are using estate planning to drive business results. And I think that that's the most interesting thing today because we can talk about estate planning from a technical side, and there's plenty of content out there, but now that we have AI that can automate estate planning, what does that mean for us in our practices? How do we drive business results? And I feel like that today is not discussed a lot because it's new, and still very few people are actually using or identifying the use cases. So we have this powerful technology, but what are the use cases? What does this mean for us? How do I drive more clients to my firm? How can I charge differently for my services and uncover revenue opportunities? How can I serve another generation of clients that I haven't been able to serve profitably before? How do I connect with the next generation so that the clients that I am working with today, that that generation stays with me when those clients are no longer here? These are all the things that are powerful today being able to automate estate planning. So I'm gonna talk to you today about how I'm doing this at Altfest and how other advisors who are using FPL are also doing this. And I encourage everyone here to share in the spirit of NAFA, if you have something to add to some of the use cases that I go over today, the business results and how you're using estate planning strategically in your practice today, I encourage everyone here to share. And anything that would benefit the audience, I think would be welcomed by everyone. So let's talk about, first, let's talk about the challenge, the challenge historically. It's been a challenge of time. It's been a challenge of time. Why hasn't estate planning been provided and is there a demand for it? So there is a lot of demand from clients for estate planning. This is a survey done by the Spectrum Group that asks clients what do they want more of from their advisor? And as you see here, 92% want more help with estate planning. Only 21% are getting that help. I think it's really interesting also to look at trust services, but that's not talked as much about. 90% want more help with trust services from their advisor, and only 12% are getting that help. So the gap, what I call the gap, is the difference between what clients want from their advisors and what they're getting. So why hasn't this been provided? It's not that we don't care or we don't recognize that this is important. It's been a time problem. Where is the time to do all of this? Years ago, when I tried to roll out estate planning at our firm, I tried to roll it out in a very manual way using what I think anyone here would do or some of us are already doing, which is training our team. I have a great team of smart CFPs. They do great work. Try to train them to be able to read documents, help clients understand what they have, and identify all the ways that they can improve in their planning, all the gaps. And we had lawyers who created, helped us create very detailed processes. And the question that you get from an advisor when you roll out something new is, what am I gonna give up? You want me to do this, so what are you gonna tell me that I don't need to do as a result of doing this new thing for my clients? And it's like, well, I don't want you to give up anything. They're like, how the heck are you ever gonna get this done? So it's been a problem with time. And there's a great study that Michael Kitsis did, just looks at the time that we all spend with our clients. And you'll see the problem here. The problem is that the average advisor is spending 6.6 hours a week on planning analysis. Now, if you multiply that by 50 weeks, assuming that we get at least two weeks of vacation, you get 330 hours a year is being spent on planning analysis, behind the scenes planning work. So the average, let's say the average advisor is working with 100 clients. So the average client is getting 3.3 hours of financial planning work a year. Because we're all busy meeting with clients, we're busy implementing things that are coming out of the meetings. We're busy with prospective clients. I know I am. I know prospective clients take a lot of time. We're at CE events like we are today. We're trying to manage the investment side of the business. So there's just not time to do planning work. And so if there's not time to do planning work today, how do you add another task? How do you add another responsibility like helping clients review their estate plans and find all the problems? Maybe you can do it for your wealthiest clients. And that's traditionally how it's been done. And if you look at how it's done in the industry, I know we're in this fee-only space, but if you look at how the big financial institutions, the wire houses, how they serve their clients, they have these advanced planning teams. And these advanced planning teams of experts will do this work. They'll do it manually, but they'll do it for a very wealthy audience. And so our competition is doing this, but only for the wealthiest. So that's all changing now. It's changing because now you can automate this with AI. So AI is our greatest growth driver today. We're in our industry today, we're hearing at every conference now is how do you grow organically? Because in the industry today, it's slower growth. So every conference is how do you grow organically? Then we have AI and we're starting to talk about efficiencies. Certainly AI helps with efficiencies, but AI is our number one growth driver in our industry today. Because now we're able to provide value to our clients that we've never been able to before, and that's creating opportunities to bring in new clients, to serve clients we've never been able to serve before, and to change how we're pricing. So I'm gonna talk more about that in a minute. So the first business case that we're going to start with is serving the next gen, okay? We have a very large issue that we're all facing. The large issue is that there's a lot of money that's gonna be moving from one generation to the next generation. Here are some stats. You have millennials. 55% of millennials are expected to inherit money in the next five years. And then you look at gens, I guess that makes sense, right? I mean, they're about middle age now. But then you look at Gen Z. Gen Z is actually, Gen Z populations, 41% is expected to inherit money in the next five years. And then if you look at how much money, if you look at Gen X, 30 trillion, millennials, 27 trillion, and Gen Z, 11 trillion. A lot of money is moving. Now that money is going to move from us as advisors to someone else, unless we do a lot of things differently. This came from a study that Suruli did. 87% of clients are not gonna use their parent's advisor. 87%, and of that 87%, 88% never even considered using their parent's advisor. We have a real problem that we're facing, and we have to do something about it. So estate planning, estate planning is a big part of being able to change that equation, to change those numbers. So let me give you a story of a client that I work with at AltBest. These are two happy clients, probably worked with them for about 20 years. We've done planning for them through different life events, and they're in their early 80s right now. They're not ultra high net worth. They don't live in a state with state estate taxes. We spoke to them. We said, do you want us to look at your estate planning? They said, sure, of course. Have a look at it. We did it with our attorney a number of years ago. Have a look at it. So we took a look at it, and we ran their documents through FB Alpha and created a visualization of them, and I'll show you that in a minute. Their family status, they have a child. They have a daughter who's married, and she has two children, twins. Their daughter has a financial advisor. So once they're not in the picture, without doing anything differently, we're gonna lose a client. We're gonna lose valuable clients, and they're in their 80s, so it won't be in 30 years. It'll be in the coming years, in all likelihood. So through this process, not only are we trying to help our clients, but we're trying to build a relationship with the next gen in a difficult situation. She doesn't have a need for an advisor, already has one. All right, so what we did was we ran their situation through FB Alpha. FB Alpha creates a visualization just by uploading a will and a revocable trust, and any irrevocable trust, which there weren't any in this case. And what you see here in the visualization is the grantor, the trustees, the executors, where they live. Often, when you're doing this for someone in their 80s, you're gonna be finding problems with who they're using, because they use people who are also in their 80s as their key people. And are those people gonna be in the best position to be able to serve in those roles? Now, you get a family snapshot, who the family people are. This is great education for all of us, because often we're not even meeting these people. We don't even know who they are. This is great education for us. And if you do nothing else than just present what's in the documents to a client, you've done a service. You've done a valuable service. You do nothing else. You don't have to comment on what will be better, because people don't understand what they, our clients don't understand what they have in their plans. They have no idea. Attorneys do not draw up visualizations. They do not create flow charts in most cases. And the clients have some like vague recollection of what's going on. It's like an anxiety, hidden anxiety that they have, not knowing what's going on in their estate plans. So you share with them what they have, and they come to these meetings, conversations, saying, already thinking about, what do I wanna do differently? So these clients came to this meeting concerned about their daughter. And what we often find for a lot of people is that they don't wanna leave money outright to their children. They wanna leave it in trust. In this case, their daughter is a stay-at-home mom, and is a musician, and the breadwinner in the family, in the household is the husband. The husband has, they have a financial advisor, but the relationship is really with the husband. And what the parents are concerned about is what happens if this relationship with my daughter does not work out? She'll be all on her own. She doesn't bring in money. She's taking care of the kids. And so they see their nest egg, which will survive them, as for their daughter. And so we're talking to them about, okay, how do you wanna leave money to your daughter? Do you wanna leave it outright or potentially in trust to better protect in the event that the marriage doesn't work out? And the next step is, how do you want us to be, do you want us to be involved? They see the relationship with the financial advisor, the daughter's financial advisor is with the husband. Do they want a relationship for their daughter with us in particular? And the answer is yes. They want us to be in charge of managing the assets because they don't want it all lumped in with the husband, the advisor that they see as with the husband. Now, you can formally create this process. You can formally create the structure. And this is more of what we're doing with clients these days. And this is through having a corporate trustee relationship. And years ago, we would have clients who would come to us, as I imagine they come to everyone here asking, can you be my executive? Can you be my trustee? And the answer for us is no. As for many of us, it's no. But we would just turn them away. And then I was meeting with an advisor, not just a few days ago, he turned away a client who was a good friend of his who sold the business and he needed a trust company. And so he said, his client was a good friend, said, can you be my trustee? He said, no. And then the client became a client of Bessemer and because Bessemer will gladly do that work. So what we were talking about and what we've done at Altfest is we've developed relationships with trust companies. And these trust companies serve as administrative trustees where we continue to be the investment advisor and we unbundle everything. So we continue to use the low cost custodian. And just like we love to do at NAFA, we love to be on the same side of the table as our clients. We don't wanna be with the service providers, right? We don't wanna be attached to a trust company. We don't wanna be attached to a brokerage firm. We wanna be able to pick whatever trust company we want. We wanna negotiate and squeeze them on behalf of our client. That's what we do here. And I'll show you what that service looks like in a minute. But they wanted a relationship with a trustee for this trust that they're setting up for their daughter with Altfest, the advisor, working with serving that into the future and have that written into their estate plan. And that is literally now written into their estate plan. So now that relationship will continue on into the future. So we started with a visualization and I'll take you, the visualization continues. You can see what happens with their personal effects. You can see details of their estate plan. We get what happens during their lifetime, after their lifetime, all distributions that come from trust and there's no work that's required. Again, just upload the document and this comes out, something that our planning tools are not doing. Now, the way that we connect with the children and what we are doing with clients is to have a family meeting. A family meeting is, okay, this is what your estate plan looks like. Your kids, often you're the kids, but it could be other heirs. Often the kids are the people who are gonna play the biggest role in the family's estate plan. So we asked the first generation, our clients, do you want us to meet with your children, with your heirs and educate them about the roles that they're gonna play in your estate plan? And the answer very often is yes, because no one wants a crash course, their kids or heirs to have a crash course in this at their demise, right? A lot of people, a lot of us, even us have been there where being an executor, being a trustee is like a second job and it's not at a fun time. They want people to understand their, wanna make sure everything is buttoned up and that their kids understand what's gonna happen. So we asked them, do you want us to meet with your children and explain the plan? And these are people, like in the case of the client that I mentioned, we have no relationship with. So now we are building a relationship where we're starting to build trust with the client. It's not, we don't meet them when the client has passed away and are trying to build a relationship at that point. Hey, you know, I loved your dad, your mom and dad. They're such great people. I'd love to continue to work with you. The relationship starts when everyone is still in the picture. So we are meeting with the kids and showing them what the wealth distribution plan looks like the roles that they're gonna play. Often what happens is the kid becomes a client directly because they have no advisor. And they're like, oh, this would be great. I'm gonna hear, maybe I should talk to you about my finances. And you're meeting with someone who's 80 years old. Their kids could very well be great clients already. In other cases, they are Henry's or they're, you know, next gen clients you wanna build a relationship with. And I will talk in a minute about how we do that as well. What you see here is beyond a document summary, the document summary is very helpful. I just showed you a document summary before this. The document summary is helpful. This shows what's going on in the estate plan with the documents, but also what's going on contractually beneficiaries, beneficiaries of retirement accounts, of life insurance policies, what's going on with account titling. Accounts are titled a certain way, and all the values that someone has is there. So this is the full wealth distribution plan beyond the documents with values. Now, some parents want to share this with their kids. Some parents don't want to share their values with the asset values with their kids. But at the very least, the documents, sharing the documents is very popular. Beyond what's here, beyond just showing a client what's going on in their estate plan, you can also run, and this is a screen from FP Alpha, you can also run alternative scenarios. So if someone is subject to state-to-state tax, like we're in New York and we have a nasty cliff tax, you can show how do you get rid of those taxes and reduce them to zero. Federal tax, the same thing. Or what happens after the sunset expires and state taxes are back at a much lower exemption level. Here's a, just so you can see a little closer. All right, so the trust offering, I described it a minute ago. The trust offering is what we call an unbundled trust offering. It's one, it's offered by what are called advisor-friendly trust companies. This was originally brought to us by one of the estate attorneys we've long used at Altfest who said, you know, your clients are, I meet with your clients, they're asking you if you want to be, if you can be the trustee and you're saying no, and then they have to go find a bank. He's like, you guys should just work with one of these trust companies and you can meet their need. And so we have developed relationships with a couple of trust companies and what you see on the left is the traditional relationship this could be with a big bank, any big bank. It's a bundled offering. Trust services, investment management, custody. What you see on the right is what we've put together which is an unbundled offering which is us as the advisor, an administrative trust company. You can have a trust protector if you want and then you also have a low-cost custodian. Now the big banks, they don't, they want to get out of this business more and more, they want to get out of the trust business. It's not a very profitable business. The service has gone way down. The investments we know can be very bad, the investment management. So this is a very big opportunity for us to be part of, to keep opportunities, to capture new opportunities but also be part of a client's estate plan into the future and literally formally be written into their estate plan. And while you can do this, most of us probably, maybe some of us are doing this today but we're doing it reactively. I would argue that we should do this proactively and review every client's estate plan, talk to them about when a professional trust company makes sense to be part of the estate plan. There's some cases when it makes sense, like it's just a no-brainer. Clients who don't have children, I have a client that I started working with a couple years ago and unfortunately she had an early Alzheimer's diagnosis in her early 60s and she has a partner, partner is in worse shape than she is, older and ill unfortunately. And she has no children. And so she came to us and said, look, I love you guys but I'm thinking of working with a trust company because I need to figure out who's gonna take care of me when I'm not able to take care of myself. And we said, okay, actually we can do this, we can help you. And so we talked to her about how we would be partnering with a trust company to handle the distributions. And we put together as good planners as we all are, we put together a plan that would meet her needs and as she goes through the next part of her life. And that plan includes finding a bookkeeper, some people call it daily money manager who will pay the bills and coordinating someone who will coordinate the medical care. And then of course we're doing projections to give her peace of mind that she can afford the medical expenses that are coming up. And then the estate planning that she had in heaven, the estate plan, so putting that together along with the trust company, working with the trust company and then she just retired. So they're interesting tax planning opportunities like Roth conversions. And she actually consolidated her money. We had a relationship with her and she had an account that she self-managed. And she said, I'm going to actually consolidate that with you because I don't think I can care for this anymore and I want to simplify my life. So this became where we would have lost a client, we actually gained a client and using this offering. Yeah, you can ask a question, please. I'm just curious, how does the trust company pay for it? Is there a way to find out the benefits of it? Because I think those documents, the benefits of those documents, that's sort of the cherry on the top. And the trust company has to find, is there an asset to it that gets paid to the team? And then what would be the burden on the building? You're being paid, all this is being paid, how does the trust company get paid? The trust company also primarily gets a fee as a percentage of the assets that they manage. There are some like additional ancillary fees depending on what they're doing, like tax reporting, et cetera. But they are getting a basis point fee on assets that they manage. And that's how most of them are, that's how they're getting paid, really. What is that basis point fee? Is that paid, or is it a $1,000,000, $1,000,000, $1,000,000, $1,000,000 basis point fee? Yeah, it starts, it's like our normal advisory fees. It's a tiered fee, starts at one percentage, and depending on how big the trust is, and how much they're, how big the trust is, and how much they're billing on that trust, it goes down. So often it will start at something like 50 basis points, and then it will go down based on the size of the relationship. And you can negotiate with them, too. So if you're bringing a big client to them, you know, big might be $10,000,000 or more, then you can negotiate significantly as well. Yeah. Is that the case, is he missing the balance points for the exact same financial year? What type of person does that? There really are people who just coordinate medical care out there. And so all the doctor visits, and we see this with our elderly clients. We just created a service for our elderly clients where this is one of those people that we're pulling into the relationship. It's like, well, how do I line up the doctor visits? How do I find the doctor? There are medical care coordinators who do that work. Is that the title, medical care coordinator? I don't know if that, I. Yeah. So you just like break it down, like what can't they do now? And that's why bill pay was another one of those. Because, you know, how do the bills get paid? Okay. So, oh, please. Yes, yes, sorry. So just to be clear, FB Alpha is a completely separate company from the wealth management firm that AltaFest Personal Wealth Management. And it's available to all advisors. And we have actually a lot of NAFA members who are using it, and we have a discount in place for NAFA members. So, yeah, happy to, if you'd like to learn more about that, then happy to connect with you. Our chief revenue officer, Charlie, is here as well at the conference areas. Raise your hand. We have a table. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because you're bringing in more people to the unbundled option, you have a custodian, and you have an investment advisor, an independent investment advisor, us, and then you have a trust company, are costs higher than they would be with just a traditional bank. I think it's a good question. It's gonna depend. So some of these banks don't even want, so for a smaller trust, which probably we're all seeing more of, some of these banks don't want the business and are charging incredible fees to small relationships, where it's just like, really, you're charging this, people are paying? So if you have a million dollar trust, I've seen fees at traditional banks be very, very high. You know, if a bank wants a huge amount of business badly enough, it's gonna depend on how, I guess, how we all negotiate our fees as well, because they might just say, I want a $20 million relationship, and they can cut their costs significantly to make that relationship. I think so, yeah, that's from what I've seen. It's been more case by case. But I think costs are one part of it, but I don't know, I think that model is not a great model compared to the model that we all have for the reasons we know. We, as NAFA advisors, are fee-only and not conflicted, and we provide a lot of service and holistic service that these other, so I don't know if it just comes down to price. And I think a lot of people just wanna work with their, if anything, this is a retention tool, as well as one that can help bring in some more business, but it's like, they wanna already work with us, and it's not gonna come down to like, you're slightly more than the local bank or something. Another piece of this, we work with a lot of young minds, right, kids, families, adolescents, young adults, and they get a great deal of these minds when they get their big plans, and like you said, it's like a big relationship with these NAVs and NAFAs. Yep. But 99% of the employees are similar to that. Like, that's not what they're working for. It's what they're working for. They know the things we wanna work for them now, but I think their kids, if something happens to them, Interesting. It really is a final step of getting them what we really want, and making them what we want them to want. Yeah, I think that's really well said, yeah. I mean, this is like the word, I mean, parents worry about their kids. I mean, some kids probably more than others. All right, well, Ashley gets good transitions to working with the next gen. So, building a relationship with the next, building a relationship with the kids through estate planning is one thing. Taking them on as clients is, of course, the best way to continue to work with someone. The problem is, is like, how do you do that profitably? They're gonna be paying a lot less money than the ideal client, let's say, if that's not your ideal client. And what you see here is that they actually want a lot. There was some feeling like some years ago, you just stick the kids, the next generation into a robo, and you're doing them a great service by doing that. And they're so lucky to have to work with you because normally your minimum is a million dollars. That's not, you know, that's a good way of losing, they're not gonna stay, right? They have a lot of needs. And what you see here is what we all know. This is a life cycle approach. Look at everything that happens between 20 and 40. There's a lot more life changes between 20 and 40 than there is 50, 60, 70, 80. And you have to be, we all have to be part of those life changes and help them plan for those life changes. And that's time-consuming work. Traditionally, that's time-consuming work. So you have great expectations from a group of people who don't wanna pay a lot, who can't pay a lot of money to us. So what do you do? Well, that's really where technology comes in. Everything that's happening now in our industry, I was at the CFP board conference a couple weeks ago. The CFP board knows, is encouraging us to automate the financial planning process. We have to automate the financial planning process so that something that used to take many hours is not taking much time anymore. And we can now do a lot of that today. And we, I'm working on that and doing that with FB Alpha and the state tax insurance. There are other tools out there that will do that on the investment side and allow you to read investment statements and do automated proposals. And there are more, there are planning tools that are now coming out that are allowing you to automate the retirement planning and cashflow planning process and having a genius assistant that will actually tell you what to do. And it's all about squeezing time out so that we can help clients who can't pay much money through this process. And now the advice that we normally would provide to our wealthiest clients, we now provide it to everyone. We don't tier our advice anymore, where it's bronze, silver, gold. Advice goes to everyone that we're giving to our wealthiest clients. The relationship is different. So with the wealthier clients, we're providing services that we can't provide to others. Like I have a physician client I'm working with now. They were having trouble selling their medical practice and they were gonna close it. So we stepped in and we actually started a market that we started marketing their medical practice for them. And now they have, they got three offers and they have something under contract with a buyer. So that's work we can't do for every, can't do that. That's very time consuming work. You can't do that for everyone. But the advice part, the advice and being able to help with the basic blocking and tackling that we all do as financial planners, that we can now do for everyone. And we have to do that for everyone. We have to do it profitably using technology. If we look at our clients, our best clients today, some of our best clients, we've been in business for over 40 years. Some of our best clients came to us with nothing. Now they have eight figures with us. We have to have a pipeline of depositors, of people who are gonna grow with us. Because if not, then we get the, we've landed some great 75 year old clients this year and we're very happy to have them. But those are people who are gonna withdraw money going forward and we need people who are gonna deposit money. So we need people who are early in their careers and are gonna be depositing. And then we also need the next gen. So we go to every client of our, every child of our clients and we try to begin relationships with them. And particularly those that are older and wealthier, of course, those are the ones that are the priority, our clients who are older and wealthier. But we have to have relationships with their children. Because if not, then, you know, it's that 87% likelihood that they're not gonna continue is going to bite us. All right, estate planning. Working with affluent clients. Estate planning is, if you're doing this for the one to five million, you're providing estate planning to the one to five million, you are providing a service that no one else is providing. If you're working with a wealthier client and you're not providing estate planning, you're not gonna get anywhere. So estate planning is, as we all know, it becomes more important the wealthier you get. It becomes a big priority issue. How am I leaving money to the next gen? I have an estate tax problem. How can I solve it? And the people who are serving these clients are solving those problems. And if we wanna be in that conversation, we also have to provide that. Now, the old way of doing this was to hire an attorney. And at Altest, we do have an estate attorney. However, that person's time is not well spent on administrative stuff like reviewing documents and it's gonna be limited and expensive to provide to if it's just provided on a manual basis. So we're helping to automate that time. This is what the service model for an ultra high net worth client looks like. You'll see on the right, wealth transfer, philanthropy. You'll see investments, of course. But you'll also see, you're seeing estate planning, you're seeing family governance planning. If there's an operating business, there's helping provided there. I just started working with the three children of a billionaire. And those three children, the billionaire, his goal for them is for them to be responsible adults. These children are middle-aged. So he wants them to be financially responsible. So we're called in to help them first understand their needs. They're transitioning from, two of them are in the operating business. They're transitioning to being in a government, in roles as board of director members, and also roles working on the foundation. And they need, he wants, the business is not, it's not going well with them in the business. And he wants to understand what their needs are, because he doesn't want them to spend unlimitedly. And we're coming in and helping them to identify their needs, and we're educating them about what they have, especially what they have in trust. Most of these next generation people, they don't understand their, the trust. The trusts are like a black box. And so they're trying to be responsible as well, but they have no idea what they have or what they own. And so it's like, and it creates a lot of frustration, and it's uncomfortable. Do the parents want them to know? So we're helping them to understand what they own, which is in trust, and also what is illiquid, since they have ownership of illiquid assets. And so estate planning and family governance planning, if we didn't, if we're not able to do this, if we're not able to actually help them understand what they have, then we're not gonna be able to work with them. And we're trying to, of course, build relationships with extremely high potential next-gen clients who might have so much today, but they're going to inherit and be in charge of a family fortune one day. So this is the, if today, previously you couldn't do that work unless you had an estate attorney on staff. And that person's time was spent in a very administrative manner as well as in a strategic manner. Today, we have technology that will allow us to do, I don't, everything I just said, I don't need an estate attorney to help me with. We can do all of this on our own. We have the technology now to review their structures that are in place and educate them as well as, of course, do the budgeting that we're being asked to do. All right, the next opportunity is working more with estate attorneys. Estate attorneys, if you look at our industry and which of us are growing the fastest, traditionally the difference between those of us who are growing and those who are growing even faster has been how many of us can get, could do a great job building relationships with attorneys and accountants to get referrals. And those of us who could are growing very fast. The best referrers historically are attorneys, estate attorneys, because they work with wealthy people. And they send someone and it's like, okay, well I just worked very hard to develop relationships with this $2 million client, $3 million, and then an estate attorney will send you a $10 million client. And you're like, well, I mean, I'm glad I have this relationship. So the problem is that estate attorneys, everyone knows, the word is out, everyone knows that estate attorneys are great sources of referrals. And every wire house advisor is going and knocking on their door and trying to build a relationship. And some of them, like Bernstein, would require them to meet with 20 COIs a week, some crazy number. And here we are trying to differentiate. So how do you, what's important to these people? If you speak to them, what's important to them is making their lives easier. So they get people in two different situations, new clients in two different situations. One is buttoned up and organized and the information is easy for them to deal with, the financial information. They can come in, look at it, and then help the client, reorganize things basically, help the client understand what they have, reorganize things within a new estate plan. The second type of person that comes to them dumps a bunch of statements on them in some chaotic manner and they're in like an administrative nightmare, which they don't want to be in. So what we can do is, and what we do do, is make their lives a lot easier. This is a network statement that comes from FP Alpha and we show what they have inside the estate, outside the estate. So the attorney, the attorney is not going to evaluate us on investment performance. How much, what was your return versus another person's return? That's not what they do. They look and say, did you make my life easier and is the client's financial situation buttoned up? Have you done planning for them? It looks good, it looks organized. I can see you working with more of my clients. Now, of course, the second part of this in working with attorneys and having great relationships is to send them business. You know, referrals are a currency in our business. Of course they are. And the more that you look at a client's estate plan and shake things up, you find lots of problems. And then it's more business for the client's attorney. So you refer business, you make their lives easier, and that you will get business back has been our experience. Okay, the next case in terms of using estate planning to drive growth and business results has to do with pricing. Our industry is priced that 1% fee is based on investment management. And so we were talking this morning, Dave, at breakfast, and you were using your fingers and saying, you know, the way I win business is by saying that most advisors in our industry will do investments, but there are four other fingers that include at the areas of financial planning. And I'm doing all of this. Well, that one finger is 1%. And then the other things haven't been priced into the service. So if you're doing more for clients, you can charge more. You can get, if you're helping with estate planning, the things that we're talking about today, no one's getting. That's the gap in the market. If you start providing that, you can charge, you provide more value, you can charge a higher fee for that value. Now how you charge depends on your business model. What we did at Altvest is we increased our fees on all of our clients. We got almost no attrition from that. We had a significant increase in our profit margins, but we have never provided as much value as we are today. So we had a 5 percentage point increase in our profit margins. So you can just do the math. If you increase your fees by 20 basis points based on the AUM that you have, how much more in profits are there for you? Or if you charge a retainer fee, you can have a higher retainer fee. If you charge by hour, you'll have more hourly work. However you're doing it, this is just, this is from Bob Veras' recent fee study. I had a webinar with him a couple months ago, and this is what we see in the industry. Fees are all over the place. What's not here is that some of the biggest firms in our industry, the biggest names, they've already figured out that there's a big opportunity around pricing, and they will price higher. This is really looking at all of us and how we're pricing. It's not just charging more for your services by providing more value. The next part of this fee conversation allows you to work with different clients. This is what we're doing and talking about today at Altfest. And Stephen, we were talking about this a minute ago outside. There is, as I've grown up in this business, there's the different clients that we all hear about. There are the delegators, there are the validators, and then there are the self-directed clients. Those are the three types of clients. Now we all want delegators. Turn it over to you, I'm appreciative, I don't want to do this, I want you to help me. Those are the delegators. Then there are the validators, and they might be very cheap. They might say, I want to do more of this. I'm okay managing my investments, but I want to pay for advice when I need it. And they might want to work with us in an hourly way. If I look at our business historically, we get clients that we used to charge hourly, and we're considering it, as I just mentioned, we're considering doing this again. But we will have people come to us today who say, I met with you 10 years ago when you used to charge this way, and now I've had a change in my circumstances. They couldn't work with us in meeting our minimums, or that they didn't want to turn everything over to us years ago. But something has changed, and that's why people come to us today who are closer to retirement and say, I need an advisor and don't have one. It's because they look at things in their life and say, today I didn't want an advisor before, but now the stakes are higher. I'm getting close to retirement. I don't want to manage my money on my own for whether I run out of money. Things have changed. Maybe they inherited money. So you create, even if you don't want an hourly practice, the hourly practice allows you to get a pipeline of traditional clients into your firm. So that is, and what we're seeing from the fee study, from Bob Barris' fee study, is that, first of all, most of us are not, the vast majority of the industry is just charging AUM. People are mixing things up, and increasingly so. And we're seeing a big growth in subscription fees meant to work with the less affluent population, people who can't be great clients yet, but we're hoping will grow to be great clients over time. And so the subscription fee is coming up more these days. Now, prospecting. This is the easiest thing. And this is how we're getting our business today. We've had our best year this year in terms of new clients at Altvest. The industry is not, clients today are not well served in any area other than investments because it hasn't been possible. Now we just have AI. Now we have the ability to automate all these areas of planning, all the other areas of the CFP process. What we do at Altvest is we show people what we will do for them. We show people that it won't just be an investment relationship, and we give out free advice. We're very generous. I just give out free advice. And if you show them what you will do for them, and everyone else they're meeting with is just talking to them about investments, or saying, yeah, I'll do something. If you actually show them what you'll do for them, I'll show you your health score in tax. I'll show you your health score in estate. And you can do more. And this is at FP Alpha's service scope. You can look at all areas of personal insurance. You can even look at their property taxes. Why would they not want to work with someone who is not just going to advantage their investments, but is going to help them with all other areas of planning? Why? I mean, we can all try to differentiate based on our personalities and form close relationships, and you have to do that. You have to be able to connect with clients. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and there's some great salespeople in our industry. So where we've been able to have a lot of success is to compete in areas where there is no competition, which is all of this advanced planning stuff. Estate planning is one of those really, really high-impact areas where people want help. And if you're going to provide it, why would they not work with you when the other person is not going to do this? Because this is new. This is why we can get to the use cases of AI before everyone else gets there. All right, so I just want to, before turning it over to everyone for questions, I just want to summarize. We have technology today that we've never had before. We have artificial intelligence that is automating things, the whole CFP process, including estate planning. We have tools that are coming out, but we don't know how to use them. The business cases are not well-known at this point because we have this new technology, and it's too early. If you get to those business cases earlier than other people, you will have an advantage, and that advantage includes everything from connecting with the next gen and keeping those assets, bringing in a less affluent population who can meet more of their needs like estate planning, repricing your services, building more relationships with the estate attorneys and getting referrals from them. These are all things that come with getting to those use cases first. So I now want to turn it over to anyone for their questions. You said you thought that all of these things were going to happen, and that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about all that and all that, and we're not going to talk about what we're talking about and what we're going to do. So if we wanted to do one, do this, do that, that, that, that, but two, we're going to go down and we're going to talk about one, we're going to reach out to people, and we're going to do that. How do you reach out to us? Yeah, so how do I figure out who to reach out to? Yeah, so this is all done automated through our tool, FP Alpha, which is available for all advisors. It is offered starting at $2,000 a year, and it depends on usage, how much you're going to use and how many advisors. And we have a lot of training for advisors so that you can get started and get on board so you can start using the tool the way you want to use it. It really, though, is a pretty simple process. You start with just getting your client's documents and uploading them, getting their estate documents and uploading them. But we have people who just train advisors in how to use the tool so that it's part of your process. So really, we're relying, at AltFest, I'm just showing you how we at AltFest are using FP Alpha to support us to get all these business cases. FP Alpha is available. My goal is to make it available and allow all advisors to use it to have success so that we have a premium service that we're able to provide to clients that is beyond what a robo-advisor is offering on the investment side. Yes. Those are great questions. So first question is we do sell. So FP Alpha, the scope of it is tax, estate, and insurance. And it's all included. So we do the same thing with taxes. You can upload your client's tax return. You get a visualization, all these insights, and you can model different scenarios. You do tax projections. It's a very elegant deliverable that comes out of it. So that is available as well as we do the same thing with homeowner and auto insurance. But if you just, so that's all included in that fee that I mentioned. If you just want estate, though, we also just sell estate separately. The data, a big part of this is the data comes in. So we integrate, you can get the retirement data from your tool into FP Alpha. So whether you're using MoneyGuide or eMoney, that data comes in. Also, the balance sheet, estate planning, it's really, you know, balance sheet is so key so you can just avoid duplicating efforts. You can get the financial balance sheet data into FP Alpha through Orion as well. We have an integration with Orion. We have integration with Nitrogen, and we have integrations with all the big CRMs that are out there for advisors. So we make it easy for that data to come into FP Alpha. It's just to, you know, save some time in avoiding duplicate data entry. And, of course, you just take your legal documents and upload them or tax documents. So AI comes in and does this at one level or another. How does that situation between AI1, AI2, AI3, Okay. So just so I want to make sure I understand the question, I'll tell you first how we're using AI. So we use, we have, there's no tool that will allow you to read legal documents. We use ChatGPT for this. Or there's nothing, at least at a reliable rate. So we had to build our own language model over many years, learning from attorneys who are doing this work. And so we actually have manual attorney review of the documents, and then we've been automating that legal document review by training the AI. And so now a lot of the cases are automated, you know, especially the simple cases. And increasingly we're automating all cases. And so it's available very soon after the document is uploaded. The most complex, we'll read any case, a grat, an idgit, anything you upload we will read. The most complex cases we have AI-assisted, and the attorneys will turn that around in three to five days. But increasingly everything is being automated. That's how we're using AI today. And the reading of the national language processing and the reading of the documents, but we're increasingly automating more and more within our platform. So I hope that answers your question. Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean, certainly it gives more cost flexibility the more that we automate it and the less attorney reviews have to be part of it. We changed our pricing model about a year ago. I don't know at what point you looked at it, but I'm happy to connect with you or Charlie here, connect and just take you back through the pricing. But the pricing is, I mean, compared to doing this manually, like we have someone who's literally, we have a very large deal right now in which the work is done manually and you're paying, the hourly time is crazy. And so if you look at the economics of doing this manually, which as I mentioned before and I try to do this, it's impossible to do this manually for every client. But even if you were to hire someone just to do this, I mean, you're going to have an immediate cost savings. I mean, our pricing is very favorable if you do it per case. And so it's going to be an immediate time savings. Okay. Yeah. Safety is very, very important when you're conservative people. I wouldn't have turned any data over to our, to FB Alpha until I knew it was safe from our clients. So we have, so we're SOC 2, which is, that's the gold standard here, SOC 2 compliant. We have regular penetration tests. We have paid companies to try to break into our tool and show any type of weakness anywhere is identified. We've never had, we've been on the market for over four years, have no hacks or anything like that. We spend a lot of time and money on security. Beyond that, we have no, we just don't keep the documents. We don't want the documents. You upload a tax return, it's never, I've never understood why keep that tax return. I don't see any plus to it. We just take the data that's on the tax return that we need. Taking someone's taxable income or AGI, that's what you need, right, to help in the planning process. We don't keep a tax return, so, you know, something with a social security number on it. We don't keep it. So God forbid, while we have spent a lot of money on security and never had any problems, God forbid something were to happen in the future, I don't, you know, you're not finding the holy grail here of social security and legal documents because those are being deleted. And we've gone through, we're approved by a number of large financial institutions. We've gone through their due diligence processes and they've approved us. Hopefully that gives you some more comfort. Okay, well, it was a pleasure speaking to everyone today and hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.

Andrew Altfest

FP Alpha

estate planning

AI automation

financial advisors

client documents

actionable insights

wealth management

next-generation clients

strategic relationships