I now want to turn our attention to someone else who shares our vision of expanding access to financial planning, our keynote speaker, Dr. Ajamu Loving. Dr. Loving serves as Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of North Texas at Dallas. He is responsible for teaching finance courses in the fields of investments, fundamentals of finance, financial liquidity, and financial markets and institutions. Prior to being at University of North Texas, Dr. Loving served as Director of Academic Partnerships at the American College of Financial Services. His responsibilities included creating and coordinating relationships between universities and the American College to expand the availability of financial services in academia. Before that, he was Assistant Professor of Finance at Texas A&M University Commerce, where he served as Chairman of the Learning and Teaching Committee and was responsible for coordinating business program academic assessments. And he also was responsible for redesigning the assessment process for the College of Business to successfully retain its accredited status. The committee also oversaw the management of curriculum and kept the academic programs current and challenging. Dr. Loving taught courses on personal finance, investments, derivatives, and corporate finance, and served as the departmental undergraduate advisor for students. He has published articles in the Review of Black Political Economy, the GSTF Business Review, and the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment. His research focuses primarily on building wealth in minority populations. Before academia, Dr. Loving was a financial consultant at LaSalle Bank, now Bank of America in Chicago. He worked at a bank branch and gave investment and insurance advice to bank clientele while also doing seminars for the community and surrounding businesses. He graduated cum laude with a BA from Morehouse College, where he majored in economics and minored in mathematics. He earned his PhD in personal financial planning from Texas Tech University, where he was an AT&T Chancellor's Fellow. And he is also a certified financial planner professional. Please help me in welcoming Dr. Loving to the stage. Thank you so much, Danielle, and thank you all for having me. Wow, this is a great group. I'm loving the size of this. I'm still, every time I get in front of a group of people, I'm excited about the fact that I have people around me. Instead of me just doing this on screens like I did all through COVID, it feels good to get the energy from the people. And it feels good to talk about this subject, the subject of the future. And when we are talking about the future of financial planning in terms of an inclusive future, it's going to have to be an efficient one. And so in the name of efficiency, I came up with this very inefficient title, which is absolutely huge for no reason. I can't even remember it. Preparing for the People-Centered Technology-Enabled Financial Planning Engagements of the Future. I considered shortening it, but I couldn't. I just couldn't leave out any of it. I just had to have the people-centered. I had to have the tech-enabled, and I had to have the future part. And I need the future part. I need the part that makes this the type of not just presentation, but the type of industry and the type of profession that thinks about what we are going to look like in the future. And that's important, because we ask our clients to do just that. We ask them to envision things. We ask them to trust us. We ask them to have confidence in themselves and the tools around them. And we ask them to recognize the importance of what it is that they bring to the process in a very sustainable way. That's the entire thing, if you think about it. But the other part of the entire thing is it's a changing thing. It's an evolving thing. And so not just our clients are evolving, but we're involving. The environment around us is evolving. And nothing, just like they say in economics, is fixed. And so when we think about what it is that we have to do, we have to think about all of these different elements. We have to think about the people. We have to think about the tools. We have to think about the future. We have to think about how we do this and make it profitable, but also how we keep it the type of profession that's the helping profession that we have grown to love and the impactful profession that has continued for years and years to be a blessing in people's lives. And I can attest to this, because I'm a second generation financial planner. I have to do this, because otherwise people might think that I pull myself up by my bootstraps and it's not the case. My dad's been a financial planner since 1987. And so all of my interest in the field was cultivated by someone who was out there doing it and then showing me that someone like me, very much like me, could get the job done. And I think that is where we have a lot of potential within our profession. And so today we're going to talk about how we leverage and amplify our reach. Danielle's introduction and topic when she came up here and talked about all of the charitable elements of what we're doing in the NAPFA financial planning space, I think, was a powerful one. Because there are so many people who don't have access to what it is that we bring to bear. Especially comprehensive financial planners who are actually looking at all of the elements of an individual's life as it pertains to their finances and using their resources properly in order to get what they want. And that's why, even though the CFP mark is becoming more recognizable and people understand that financial planning is big and available to more people than it used to be, so many people still think that it's just about investing. So many people miss out on all of the other elements that they could get from a relationship with a financial planner because they don't understand what it is that we do. Because we haven't done the greatest job of really showing people, besides the wealthy people who really interact with us on a frequent basis, what it is that we do. And so the general public thinks that we just sell stocks. Maybe they've gone a little beyond and said, well, they do stocks and insurance too. But very few of them understand all of the personal elements that you weave into understanding what it is that your clients want and need, and then crafting the strategy to get there. So it's not just about advertising it, though. It's about doing it more effectively so that we can do it more frequently, we can do it better, and we can offer it to more people. It's about access. And so in order to facilitate that access, we're going to use what every other type of industry has used, and that's technology. Today we're going to talk about the current environment of financial technology heretofore, fintech, and the advantages of fintech integration into the process of working with a client, some of the best practices in order to weave that into your practice and help that happen on an institutional level within your firms, and then common mistakes. We should always have some element of understanding, OK, what is the risk associated with some of the things that we're doing? How do we make it pay off the right type of way? OK, well, this whole thing was brought about, interestingly, this topic in my mind because of an FPA event that we had. It was an FPA keynote. Does anybody here remember when Michio Kaku spoke at the FPA event? No hands? Nobody? Nobody remembers that? OK, yeah, all right. Michio Kaku, when he did that, I want to say that was 2006 or so, he talked about how the work world was changing. He talked about how doctors were going to be able to examine what was wrong with you and do so earlier and more accurately than we'd ever thought of before. And do you know which tool he said that we'd be using as the collection of all of this data? The toilet, right? He said, in your first use of the toilet in the morning, it would be examining all of the enzymes and all of the elements that would be indicators of your overall health. And I got to tell you, I didn't see that coming, right? I didn't see it coming. I didn't think of my toilet. You know, I've heard of smart toilets. I really do appreciate some of the things they're retrofitting on them to make you feel more comfortable throughout the day. But also, I didn't see it as a tool for analysis. And I think a lot of times when we think about the technology around us, it appears to be useless and, in many cases, annoying, a distraction, right? It's the same way that my Casio watch with the calculator in it. Did anybody have that watch, the Casio calculator watch? That thing was beautiful. No woman I've ever dated was ever impressed with the fact that I still had it. My ability to calculate on it, none of them, right? It's one more thing. But Michio Kaku is a futurist, right? And he recently had a Fox Business talk. And he was talking with this gentleman in the middle. I can't think of his name. But everyone was worried about AI and their jobs being replaced. And Dr. Kaku didn't really assuage these worries while he was on there because he said, well, yes, it's true. In 20 years, 85% of the jobs that are out there are going to be jobs that are not currently out here today. Which he left the question for the journalists and some of the other people in the room is, well, what happens to my job, right? And what was of particular interest within this presentation was a kid. I say a kid. It was a 22-year-old who had recently graduated college and was looking to buy his own practice, his own financial planning practice. Any of you, would you recommend that your 22-year-old start off and just go ahead and buy their own practice right out the gate? You're like, I don't know about that one. But that wasn't what Dr. Kaku was thinking about and worried about. The young graduate had the question of whether or not his purchasing a practice was a good investment given the rate of growth of technology and the fact that individuals seem to be more equipped to handle these things on their own. And Dr. Kaku said, within the realm of all of these changes that we are seeing in terms of technology and the new jobs that are out there, there are going to be three types of jobs that persist in terms of your ability to have them. The first one was blue-collar, non-repetitive work, right? You're plumbers. You're electricians, right? You're contractors. And if any of you have ever tried to do any of this work on your own, as I have, even with YouTube guiding me through the process and making it a lot better than it could have been, it was still a lot worse than it could have been if I had some level of skill associated with it, OK? The other elements that he said were going to be there, the other two were jobs that involve imagination, conceiving of something that wasn't there, right? And the last one was jobs that involve strategy, coming up with a way to do something from an amorphous set of facts and plotting a course. Now, you could argue that that first one has nothing to do with financial planning in terms of the tactile elements of doing blue-collar work, although I have talked to some financial planners that feel like they get into a whole bunch of blue-collar-type things in terms of running their practice. I'm sure you can regale me with some stories. But those last two domains, those last two domains are where we work. That is what we do. We help people strategize. We help people understand their own situations. We help them forge a way forward. We help them conceive of paths despite confusion and swirling information all around them that can take them off course. Now, if you've ever had a client that you explained something to in your mind and you thought it was perfect, and then they walked away with a completely different operational understanding of it, please raise your hand. Yes, OK, great. I'm in the right place. OK, good. This is good to know, right? These are the things that we worry about. How is it that I could tell you something, and you look me directly in my eyes while I'm telling it to you? And you nod your head yes. And then you sign things in the affirmative indicating that you understand precisely what it is that I've said. And then I give you a document along with it, just in case you need to refer to it too, to give you a reminder of what it is that you've done. And you walk out of my office. Help me, Lord. And you forget every single thing that I've told you and completely act as though the conversation never happened, right? These are the, this is the challenge that we deal with. I often tell people that the challenge that we deal with isn't like other advisors, other methods of investing, people. No, it's not the competition. It's the enemy from the never-ending story. It's the nothing, right? That's what we are, that's what we're against. We're against the nothing. And if you look at technology in its totality, and you think about it in our absence, in terms of its ability to do good things in the lives of our clients, it is very much like the nothing. It can be extraordinarily corrosive. You really have to do some hoping to end up with your client getting the right types of algorithms, giving them the right type of information, so that their messages that they're receiving are consistent with what it is they've told you that they want to accomplish. And that plan that you've designed that is now making certain that their coffee table has something on it, right? That's what it is that you're having to deal with, OK? And so when I thought about, OK, the takeover of technology is not really a takeover of technology. It's us, as an industry and profession, taking over technology and using it in a productive way to do what it is that we do in the lives of our clients. And so operationally, in terms of FinTech and what it is, well, computer programs and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services is your Oxford definition. But a more rich definition that also gives me the opportunity to use the term portmanteau is for financial technology. It's a catch-all term for any technology that's used to augment, streamline, digitize, or disrupt traditional financial services. FinTech refers to software, algorithms, and applications for both computer and mobile-based tools. So that sort of includes all of what's possible in terms of relating your financial goals into some level of execution. And this is not as new as we might think, right? When you think about it in that broader sense, you can recognize that the current financial technology environment is composed of all sorts of phases of new technology back in the day, giving people access to money and information to make financial decisions in ways that it hadn't prior to that, right? And so if you go back to the 1950s, that first piece of FinTech is the diner's club card, right? Long time ago, back before I was even young, as I try to clip my students, back in those days, credit was attached to any individual institution or company that was lending it out to you. The diner's club card in the 50s freed things up so that individuals could make decisions to use credit that was attached to them and freed them up from any one particular merchant. This is the battle that JCPenney has been fighting against since its inception and bringing us back to try to make us get that card every time that I go in there to buy something, because they're like, well, you get 10% off. I'll give you 50% off. Why are you trying to force me to come back to JCPenney again? I didn't want to come here in the first place. All right, from there, we start to think about things like the NASDAQ introducing electronic trading, all the way back in the 70s, online telebanking, PayPal in the late 90s. Incidentally, I thought that I had come up with the idea of PayPal in like 1998. And then one of my friends had to burst my bubble, thanks Kenji Yoshinari, and he looked it up and told me I hadn't. OK, he was like, there's a company called PayPal that's already doing it. Fine. OK, Google and Alibaba, all of this, look how long this timeline is. We have a pretty solid history of integrating this type of technology into what it is that we do in the financial services environment. And also, what we have is a pretty consistently upward trajectory in terms of investment in fintech globally. And so this just looks at a very short period between 2010 and 2014. But we can see the steep increase in terms of technology as a form of investment. And we can also see what it is that's happened in terms of growth in different places, Different fintech hubs. So it should be of no surprise to you that New York, Hong Kong, London, Sydney, like all of these places are the ones that tend to be hubs for financial technology because they're hubs for investment banking. That's sort of where the investment tends to go in the first place. But then you start to look at what all of that investment has done over time, and we can see that the current environment of fintech in terms of the rate of change, it's increasing, right? So before, we were looking at decades on that slide a couple of slides ago. Now we're looking at months when we talk about the introduction of artificial intelligence into the place, right? You have OpenAI's ChatGPT that came out in November, November 30th, right? I have to actually use dates here, right? Because things are happening so quickly, right? So you have these versions of artificial intelligence that were introduced in November of 2022, and we see that month by month, there are new things in terms of new releases that make this technology more powerful and more accessible. To the point that when you look at Salesforce's Einstein GPT, Anthropx, Claude, Bloomberg has LLM trained on financial data. Amazon announces Bedrock, a first fully managed service firm that makes models available via API for multiple providers. What you see is not just a steady stream, but an increasing stream of all of this available. Now, I think we understand what can happen when technology, the ability to access financial services, and the ability to do what it is that an individual thinks is right financially without any guidance or any level of objectivity from someone else doesn't always work as well as we'd like. Some of the worst mistakes that I have seen clients make and heard about clients making have happened to very well-informed people. It's not necessarily about not having the information or not knowing it. It's about the fact that you can't be objective in your own situation. And most times, another set of eyes is extremely helpful to you. And also, even though you know all of these things, it's really hard to know how they apply to you when you look at the universe of financial opportunity out there when you confine it to the personal space. It's difficult. It is. And even among our best, most informed clients, we see how they can struggle with these things. And so when you think about what it is that the fintech categories are broken down into, well, you see some of it is coming out of the technology side specifically, the infrastructure providers like Onfido, FNZ, that are just back office heavy elements. And then you have large tech ecosystems like Apple and Tencent. And then you have financial services companies that are using this technology, SoFi, TransferWise, Lending Club, and then incumbent financials, large banks that are trying to integrate all of these elements into the way in which they serve their customers and clientele. And this not so busy element right here shows you the operations and infrastructure that are around the entire fintech organism. And so you have the banking elements, and you have the advisory elements, you have wealth management. On the retail side, you have payments, you have insurance, small and mid-sized enterprises, capital markets, everything from mobile payments, robo-advisory, next generational personal financial management. All of these things are the universe of fintech and many of the ways and new ways that are probably not on there in terms of what it is that is changing in our realm of financial services. So all this investment, all this action, all this stuff, all this rate of change brings me to the question that I'm sure you're all asking yourselves, is this big bucks or sticky baby ducks? I know what you're thinking. I've never heard of big bucks or sticky baby ducks. That's probably because you've never been a student in one of my classes. But I've been telling, I was telling a couple of people about what it is that I use this for, and it's to break the idealism that is inherent and possessed by every student that I have ever taught. When I ask them what that image on the right is, they say, it's a baby duck. It's covered in oil. And I ask them, how did that happen? Well, there was an environmental disaster. Something leaked. An ecosystem was ruined. And then I ask, well, should we fix that? Should we make it so that it doesn't happen? They say, I don't know if we can. And then I remind them that we've sent stuff to space with people in it, people we like. We sent William Shatner to space. We sent Michael Strahan to space. And we brought those people back alive. I think that we can make pipes that don't rupture and oil extraction platforms that don't rupture. What is it that's going to be the thing that makes that happen? It's going to be money, right? Yeah, it's going to take some investment. Should we make that investment? Does it surprise you that students say, yes, we should make that investment? Right, that's what young people do. Well, then I ask them, OK, great. So let's say somebody takes it on. Let's say that the company is called Sticky Baby Duck Oil. And Sticky Baby Duck Oil, SBD for short, decides that they are going to optimize the system by which to extract and transport oil so that we never have to worry about this again. And you recognize after SBD is out there, well, you need some gasoline in your car. So you're driving down the street. And on the right side is SBD. And right next to it is Quick Trip with those awesome burritos that I love, right? The SBD gasoline costs $5.75 a gallon. And the Quick Trip gas is $3.75 a gallon. Now, I've been teaching finance students since 2008. What percentage do you think was willing to pay a $2 per gallon difference to save the Sticky Baby Ducks? Zero. Man, you guys are good, right? You're financial professionals for real, right? Some of you ought to do some more investing in terms of just trying to guess how much stuff is, because you're great guessers, right? Zero students, none of them have. Now, when I get down to $1, still no. $0.50 difference, still no. $0.25 difference, mm-mm. It's usually right in the realm of $0.05 that I get someone to say, OK, I'm willing to do it. But the problem is, the person who's willing to do it is like the same student that cried when she saw the picture of the Sticky Baby Duck. And she wears Tevas, and she drives a moped. So she's not going to be able to make the difference that's necessary when you think about where it is that we're going, and you understand exactly where it is. Because what I explain to them, to destroy their idealism, is that that's the room that we have for something that is good, that can do great things, but is not necessarily profitable. We operate in an environment of competition. And for something to be sustainable, it's going to have to be profitable, and it's going to have to be set up in a way that the incentive structure associated with it makes it work going forward. And so then, once we break down the idealism, now we can start to actually solve problems. Because they recognize what happens as you continue to pass the Sticky Baby Duck-proof oil place and go to the quick trip, is not only does that individual business die, but oftentimes the idea of trying to Sticky Baby Duck-proof oil ends up dying. The stakes are high. And so when we think about technology, the stakes are high. And they're high because, guess what? There's money in it. There's productivity in it. In terms of robotic process automation, which is a means by which people use banking elements and allow them to talk with one another just to decrease the amount of back office, back and forth that you see, they've seen a 1.6 increase in productivity industry-wide, and then 2.4% increases in profitability based on those increases in productivity. So you got your answer there. What we see in terms of fintech and the way that it's implemented into the business world is big bucks. It's not Sticky Baby Ducks. It's not going anywhere. And it's important that we know that so that we can use it properly and integrate it into the way that we do business. So when we talk about robotic process automation, it's about computer coding programs that replace humans performing repetitive rules-based tasks and is cross-functional. Those elements that would otherwise be operational and completely manual. So these relatively simple things like opening emails, logging into web enterprise applications, moving files and folders, copying and pasting, filling in forms, reading and writing to databases, scraping data from the web, all of these simple things end up saving so much money that they make these overall processes that feel capital-intensive. They make them worth it. And they make them sustainable. So much so that, and it's evidenced by what you see in terms of within some of those environments, 20% increases in productivity, not company-wide, but within those operational realms. So we're talking about transformative numbers in terms of the way in which they do things and what are largely cost centers within the banking and financial realm. All of this is just done by setting it up so that you have partners other than just the customer in each of the individual banks, but these intermediaries that not only talk to the banks, but talk to one another and share data in a way that makes it so that information is more rich and that decisions can be improved. Now you'd think that the United States would be the place that's leading all of the elements of integrating these things. Even though we push hard in terms of the technology itself, we do have work to do in terms of the regulation around that technology. We are one of the last groups in terms of the initial stages of understanding how to regulate all these elements of technology. That is important because if we are going to make certain that the tools are used in the right way, this increases the importance of our engagement as professionals in using them and directing them. And I think this is a pretty good use case, and I really thought that this would come off better in terms of a large slide. So what's happening here is just an artificial intelligence use case in terms of fintech, okay? So bear with me. Step number one, you have a client that logs into an account using face ID via mobile and asks for a balance using voice. Step two, voice used as a second layer of security to confirm that ID. Three, along with the balance, the recommendation engine offers insurance for next week's trip, purchases via a chat bot. Four, calamity. Sunglasses get damaged on the trip away, right? Text a photo of them to the chat bot, cost of the sunglasses transferred the same day. Step five, back at home, a personal finance app pings a notification highlighting ways of saving money on future trips. Now, how much human interaction happened here? None. Is this a process that could be useful for financial planners in terms of what we do? Absolutely. Is this something that could be extraordinarily useful in making sure that we meet the needs of individuals who are technology adaptive, but don't necessarily have the level of assets necessary to be able to purchase the highest level of service that groups like NAPFA offers? Absolutely too, right? And so the important thing to recognize in technology is that the benefits exist, not just for you in terms of making life easy for you, but also for your clientele too. And this is where we start to break down the elements that are out there. And so I figured I'd start with the one that people didn't like the least when it comes to the financial planning rooms that I'm in, because it's the robo-advisors, right? People, I still remember when I started talking about technology, when robo-advisors first came out and the emotion that I was confronted with the most was fear, right? We are going to be replaced. And all I can say is, what you mean we? Like if all you do is what a robo-advisor does, no, you, me, not same, right? We're not, we aren't going to be anything. I don't know when you decided to start speaking French, but the robo-advisors, they leverage algorithms. They do one thing that we can do as individuals for our clients, right? But they can't give themselves, and that's lend objectivity. For those individuals who can't afford our services, lending objectivity from some other source besides them, obviously, is a necessary thing. And then overcoming things like overconfidence, which research shows is very common among men who are advisors, and my experience in the advisor space has indicated that that research sort of hits the nail on the head there, right? Familiarity bias, where the only things that are good in terms of investments are the ones that I know of. And that's interesting, right? When you start to think about the enemies of the rational in the world, they break down into these behavioral biases that we see, that otherwise smart people make, myself included, we all do. We are all subject to these because we have brains, right? And then emotional decision-making. Robo-advisors can all help in that these things are programmed in terms of the level of diversification that is out there and the information that an individual client can get. All of those things are elements that can help them make better decisions within certain arenas and in certain ways. Can you also see how you can use these same tools to make extraordinarily horrible mistakes? Yeah, ask the good folks over there in Robin Hood, right? It's like there's all sorts of mistakes that are available and easily made too. The technology is not the secret, right? The technology is a part of what makes things accessible and elevates and amplifies effect so that it can be much more far-reaching. But what it is that is needed is what it is that you provide, which is wisdom, which is an understanding of the client, which is the ability to tie these things together and come up with a cohesive strategy to take them from where they are to where it is that they're going. The individual elements of it are the important parts. The next thing, well, behavioral biometrics. In terms of fintech tools, security is always an issue for us, right? Security is always an issue for us. Confidentiality is always an issue for us. So things like biological attributes like fingerprints, facial recognition, and all of those elements, guess what? They can start to alleviate things like trust-related biases that keep them from accepting help from outside people that will offer them objectivity. Fraud prevention, privacy is enhanced when you have these elements, and there's less friction for the users when you have these elements. I love the fact that I can just look at something and it recognizes my face, doesn't tell me I'm ugly, but even further, opens up access to my bank account. It's a great thing for me, okay? The other thing that you see out there is gamification. Now, it's easy to get addicted to games. It is. We have any candy crushers out there? We have any candy crushers? Nobody wants to admit it. Okay, that's fine. I've met very few games introduced to me on Facebook that I can't look at it, figure out a way to enjoy way longer than I should. All right? Think about the ability to take those same elements and put them into the financial planning process, right? Where the challenges that you see for a client can be depicted within the app itself. And you can break down moving past those challenges into small steps, right? Where you can actually celebrate achievements as they occur instead of waiting for quarterly meetings in order to have these milestones celebrated. So, all right, I'm a bigger guy, but I used to be an even bigger, bigger guy, okay? I was 70 pounds bigger than I am now. And the thing that helped me lose weight, that helped me a lot, was this app called Lose It. All you did was record all of the food that you ate, and it gave you the amount of calories associated with it, and you had your caloric budget. It helped a lot. I'd use that to monitor my calorie intake, and then I used Facebook. I used Facebook? I used Facebook. Here's what I did. I started taking pictures of myself after every workout. At first, it was a very depressing process, okay? But as I got more and more fit, not only did it have the effect of continuing to motivate me to do my workout every morning because I knew people would be expecting a photo with my description of the workout that I did, right? And so it helps me, but the interesting thing is it started inspiring some of my friends to start working out too. They're like, geez, you're doing this every day? Makes me feel bad when I see a sweaty picture of you up here at a tank top, and not just because you're unattractive, but also because it makes me feel bad that I'm not working out, okay? And so the achievements that you have and integrating them into the technology around you, sometimes we don't think about how frequently we could be rewarding people, and they could be receiving feedback from folks who aren't us, but it's sanctioned by us, right? Competition and leaderboards, rewards, all of these things help to help to make you less sensitive to elements like loss aversion bias, right? And then myopia. Why? Because so many times when you look at a long-term goal, it seems impossible, and so what do you do instead? You just think about all of the short-term stuff, and you weight that more heavily, and you're like, because the future, who knows, right? And so now you can break down the elements of a financial plan into steps that you can celebrate throughout the process, and give these individuals a little bit of fuel, even on a daily basis, to know that they're doing things that are breaking them one step closer to their overall goal. Virtual reality, right? To the extent that you can have, and these headsets are out there. My daughter has one. Does she use it? I think sometimes that she's just like punking me and making me buy stuff sometimes. I feel like I'm in a fraternity pledge process as a dad, but like virtual reality, it's immersive. So individuals who learn by seeing, right? Now they can visualize what their retirement looks like. They can visualize what that second home looks like, what their business looks like. They can visualize not just stuff, but they can visualize goals. You combine that with the gamification elements, and the fact that a goal has to have a timeline and a dollar sign, and now you can take concrete steps to move from where they are to where it is they're trying to go, and again you can be a part of the overall process. This increases the level of engagement among the clients, and it can also simplify the complex or make the things that look or feel impossible feel more possible, right? This helps to address some of the short-term biases that we see among clientele and some of the narrow framing that exists that, once again, myopia. This next one is here for us. I remember when I first got into the industry, I spent a lot of time talking with software providers who spent all their time trying to convince financial advisors to move away from yellow pads and start using financial planning software, right? What were they talking about? Well, what do you get with that? You get data analytics that you wouldn't otherwise get from your yellow pad, unless you're one heck of a whiz when it comes to using those in your financial calculator, right? You get things like AI and machine learning. You get consensus best practices, which is a large part of the reason why I'm even up here, right? Consensus best practices is why the CFP board gave Texas Tech a grant in 2002 to start the PhD in financial planning, because they wanted to be able to look at what was going on in the financial world and say, hey, what are the best ways in which to handle these things and to assess the value of what it is that we do in financial planning? Anchoring bias. The first thing I saw and the way that I learned this is the only way to do it. Those things were present among financial planners and they still are among them, because they're psychological biases that have to be addressed, right? Confirmation bias, where an individual holds on so tightly to previous knowledge that new knowledge is not easily introduced. Again, the fact that you can have these platforms makes an easy entree to bring new ideas that were not prevalent within your overall practice, but now you started to learn, okay, I can use this. I can see how this can be effective. Doesn't surprise me that 64% of advisors think that AI can improve decision-making processes even within the financial planning process, okay? So there's not just the tools for the clients and their interaction, but it's the tools for us to eliminate some of the biases that we possess on our own. And then finally, financial education apps. Growth. This is one of the things that is difficult to do when you're a busy financial planner, to see to the educational and mental growth of your clients, their understanding of the financial world around them. When you're busy putting out fires, it's tough to get into the depth necessary to really teach them. Now, what things are we using to amplify our reach? Things like social media, LinkedIn, all of those elements are helping, right? But there are also financial planning, financial education apps that are interactive, that are educational, that are self-paced, that you can sanction yourself and weave with into your overall practice to ensure that not only you as a professional are growing, but also that your clientele has access to elements that can help them grow. Now, you can weave those into gamification and leaderboards, see, because people think about everything based on the individual assets, but you can have them racing, for lack of, I don't know that racing to learn is probably the best way to do it. We can come up with something else, but going through these overall processes and being the individual on the leaderboard, like I'm the number one learner within this practice, right? Those are the type of things that people like. You can see that, I know you're like, I can see this in some of my clients. They'd be like, yep, number one, still, right? And you can run these types of contests. You can't do it with assets, you can't do it with product, you can't do with anything like that, but with financial education, yeah, you can, right? Self-paced, informed decision-making, framing effects are minimized. Why? Because now you're introducing knowledge that expands their overall frontier, and what you are creating when a person feels like they have grown is an increased sense of well-being, which makes you more valuable. Well-being, of all the other things that we can look at is metrics. This is the one that excites me the most, right? Because it's the thing that I attach with what it is that we bring to our clients. It's not always about just building the biggest balance. In fact, we might need that client to spend so that they can enjoy themselves, right? It's not about having the most to pass on to the next generation, because that might not be the client's goal. It's about their wellness, and what it is that they want, and how we have helped facilitate that utility function for them. That's our magic, which is also our science in certain ways. All right, well, I wouldn't talk to you about this without again talking to you about some of the best practices that are necessary for you to do it well, right? First of all, I'm gonna say this, don't do it all at once, right? It's like, if these are good ideas individually, then it must be a great idea to do them all at once. No, okay? Learn them one thing at a time, okay? So the first thing is evaluate your current business processes before you get into this, right? You need to be able to walk through what it is that your clients experience, right? And what it is that you all do, and when I say you all, I mean all of the elements of your overall practice from the individuals who are actually seeing clients to the operational elements of the overall practice, and see where you can start to potentially weave some of these things in. You're gonna notice like a slight tether to the financial planning process in that sound processes tend to go right along the same line in terms of what it is that you're doing. So initial evaluation makes sense, right? In gathering data. Then we have to define some firm objectives. What it is that we want to do as a firm. What's important to us, right? Is it growth targets? Is it client acquisition? Is it operational efficiency and the savings from it? Is it regulatory compliance? All of those elements and start to prioritize what it is that we want to do, and that's going to lead us to the type of technology that's going to be most impactful for us initially. Then we have to understand our clients needs. Of course it is a part of what you're doing the entire time, right? But these are institutional things that you're doing, and now of course you're trying to decide the way in which you prioritize and on-ramp these things, right? So you have to have an understanding of your client preferences, their expectations, their levels of facility with technology, and all of those things, right? To see what's going to work best. Then you have to consider integration and compatibility. Depending on how old your systems are or how closed off your systems are, some of these things may be more easily integrated than others. So again, when we start to look at this overall matrix of how it is that we make the decision on what to go with first and how to implement these things, of course the integration and compatibility is going to be a huge part of deciding what we do next. Evaluate vendor reputation and support. I don't want to insult any of these people that were at all of these nice tables that were out here, all around here, but I can guarantee you one thing. You heard almost completely unanimous positivity about what it is that their offerings bring, right? Yes, they're not going to, the people who are selling it aren't going to tell you all of the stuff that people are complaining about. The nice thing about the internet is it's out there, right? So you can look these things up and actually see what the reputation of the actual vendors that you're considering working with is and what the problems have tended to be in the past. Which brings me to my next point, conducting a cost-benefit analysis. Cost is not just the dollar cost of the overall product, but also time cost and feeding back to that evaluation of reputation and support. Some of the other reputational costs that could hit you if you select the wrong vendors that have your clients going crazy because they're sending the messages that aren't consistent with what it is that their financial situation is or the economic situation in general, right? There's a lot of trust that has to happen in order for you to let people into your book, right? Then you have to pilot and test, right? You have to, it's much better to take this within the groups that are best able to use it. And so my dad, as much as I love him, is not going to be in a pilot group. He's not. He goes to the internet the same way every time. HTTP colon slash slash WWW. Dad, you know you don't have to put all, no son. Every time I've done this, it works this way. He's a procedural person. Now some of you have individuals like this in your practices, right? Some of you are this individual in your practice. You should not, you should probably not be the individual who's piloting and testing this if your first question is, where's the manual? If that's your first question, because that's my dad's first question for everything. Where's the manual? I don't want an online one either. I want to, I like to, I like to hold the manual book. Oh, he's gonna be so mad at me when he knows I'm making fun of him, but it's true though. Like he knows it's true. Okay, so the pilot and testing part, you have to have the right advisors, but you also have to have the right subsets of clientele, right? And so one of the special places that I'm thinking of, hey, this is a great way for you to empower your junior advisor on your team to start to do some of these elements of working with these and doing a little bit of this with clientele that's more used to technology, that has lower balances, and has less complicated problems, right? They're used to interacting with technology, they're younger, those individuals. Pilot and test and keep the data from that, and then plan for training and adoption. That's because eventually it's gonna have to get to my dad too, right? So he's gonna have to use it, and that's when the trainers earn their money, right? When you can get the manual guy to understand how to use these things and integrate it into their overall process, that's where the trainers make their money. And then, much like the financial planning process after we've launched it, what do we have to do? We have to monitor and adapt. The future is not a static thing, right? It's a moving target. We want to be in the general correct direction, and we want to have as much accuracy and precision as we possibly can, but we understand that we aren't focusing just on one point. We have to be able to get to a place and then focus on the new point that is arriving even as we are moving towards our point, right? That is the flexibility that we have to be able to exhibit as professionals in this industry. And so, the other thing that we have to do is recognize that tools can be dangerous in the wrong hands, right? A screwdriver is wonderful when you use it to screw in a screw. It can be catastrophic when you use it in an electric socket. I found that out when I was seven, all right? It's not a good idea. Tools can be very useful, but they can also be destructive in the wrong hands, okay? And so, lack of strategic alignment. That's a great way to end up spending a whole bunch of money on something that does your firm no good and wastes a lot of time for you. Insufficient planning and evaluation. Again, another great way for you to have come up with a wonderful idea that doesn't resemble anything that's going to be useful for your particular firm. Neglecting training and support. That's a way to alienate some of your most productive and helpful employees and colleagues, right? And potentially lose clients, right? Ignoring compliance and security. Well, that's just a great way to be out of business, okay? Right? Like you can't ignore compliance and security. And then overlooking integration challenges. I like to set an aggressive timeline as much as the next person, right? But for you to go through all of this stuff that I have introduced and talked about here and try to do all of this in a year, it's bananas, okay? You can't do it, okay? And then failing to communicate and involve stakeholders. You need to use the technology that's available, you know, emails, calls, talking to people, right? To let them know what it is that you're doing and why. And here's the powerful part about this. Your clients are going to appreciate that. They know that technology is where our future is going, where our economy is going, and they recognize these elements in their lives. Integrating them into what it is that you do so that you can be more efficient and effective at it and also leverage and amplify so that you can bring those services and that wisdom to more people is something that we can all get behind and appreciate, okay? Neglecting data quality and governance, of course, a huge issue because garbage in, garbage out, and then long-term nothing is fixed, right? Lack of continuous evaluation and optimization. That's not something that you want to do, right? You want to actually continue to reiterate this process and similar to the way in which we reiterate the process with our clients on at least an annual basis and financial planning. So, in the effort of making sure that I get out of the way in time so that we can enjoy drinks and music, I just want to briefly talk about what it is that we've done here. We've talked about the current fintech environment and then some of the advantages associated with fintech integration in terms of how it helps us relate to our clientele and alleviate some of the behavioral biases that make it difficult to execute high-quality financial planning and run our businesses in the most efficient manner. And then we talked about some of the fintech tools best practices in order to integrate this into your practice in the way that's going to be least intrusive and most helpful to your clients. And then, of course, we talked about common mistakes to avoid so that we leave people with the best overall feeling about this and the most optimized use of it and, most importantly, use it in a way that it actually positively impacts our clientele, our colleagues, our profession, our country, and the world. Thank you for coming. Remember, the future is now. So, come on up, Daphne. I just, I want to thank you all for having me out here. This is my first time delivering this presentation in a person environment, so thank you so much for being patient with me. And I'd like for you to be patient with me for a couple more minutes while Daphne comes and gives us some information about what's going to be happening for the rest of the evening and the rest of the conference. Thanks again.

financial technology

fintech

financial planning

client experiences

streamline operations

personalized services

robo-advisors

virtual reality

financial education apps

implementation planning