I’ve been in the space almost 40 years and have worked at some major organizations. We always had huge technology companies. But my own experience was that we never truly gave the advisors the tools to go out and really make a difference. You had to work with what you had. My vision when I came here about nine years ago was to give advisors a different kind of technology stack. If you build it, they will come.
I knew I had something when my tech team said, “This does not exist anywhere else. Nobody else has this.” Today, I think we have the broadest technology stack of anybody in the RIA space. We have spent millions of dollars on people and research.
Summit Financial is not a creator of technology. We are the integrators of the best technology. We have spent a tremendous amount of time, effort and money canvassing the market to find the best tool for advisors and their clients and ensure it’s synchronized and works.
CRM: Salesforce Enterprise, Redtail (Orion) and Wealthbox
My biggest concern with the CRM is data protection. The last thing you want as an advisor is your client’s information to somehow get hacked and be sitting out there on the web. You need to have real data security, and you need to have real cybersecurity protection. That’s a big piece for us.
When you look at a CRM, it is really a repository of information that you have access to, and you can compile information in different ways. Another way of putting it is: It doesn’t cure cancer. It shows you the blood results.
Salesforce, in my opinion, has one of the strongest chassis out there, with the biggest money behind it, and so forth. Redtail was the cheapest option out there. Now, it has become so popular that it’s more like Salesforce pricing.
We’re here to give our advisors the best. We don’t take bribes from companies to go use their technology. We assess and then bring things into our ecosystem and protect it with our cybersecurity; we ring fence it.
Reporting & Portfolio Management: Addepar, RPAG (Great Gray Group)
You have three major players in performance reporting: Orion, Black Diamond and Addepar. When you look at those three chassis, all of them do basic services. We just happen to cater to a higher net worth client base. We have clients that are billionaires. We have clients that are worth 10s of millions of dollars. But you don’t need to be a $200 million client to get the services that the billionaire would get, because that’s all part of the Summit ecosystem. You can’t do that with retailish technology.
With Addepar, the way I would assess it is that it’s almost like a Ferrari with a rocket ship attached to it. You may not need the afterburner for most clients, right? You know the Ferrari is fine. But when you do need to go deep, complex, broad and with detail, like a multi-family office or a family office of an uber-high-net-worth client, they seem to have those capabilities.
Financial Planning: eMoney Advisor / Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
eMoney does a very good, simple cash flow analysis and financial planning oversight. We have our in-house financial planning team, and we have our in-house financial planning attorneys, so we utilize eMoney, really, as the intro to gathering the data, so when our attorneys and planners sit down with the advisors, they can make the proper assessment.
That’s how we view a lot of this technology. The data is being input, corralled, summarized, and then we’re having our experts take that data and come up with assessments and recommendations. When you look at the tools like MoneyGuidePro, we use that probably the least amount, and eMoney probably the most. Then we’re adding, with the estate side, Wealth.com.
Primary/Secondary Custodians: Fidelity / Schwab / Goldman Sachs / BNY Pershing / SEI
I decided to have multiple custodial options, not based on costs or challenges, but on my experience running Wells and Wachovia. We had many billion-dollar clients who wanted to have the freedom to have some money at different custody shops and trust companies. I wanted to create a model that would service those clients in totality, rather than with just a slice of the pie.
To have technology now that reads all those different data feeds from Fidelity, Schwab, Pershing, SEI and Goldman Sachs, it’s super expensive. But it does position the advisor in a role that says: “Look, I’m custodial, agnostic. Wherever you want, we can service you. And you’re not coming to me, Mr. Client, because I’m at Fidelity or Schwab or Goldman. You’re coming to me because of the value Summit brings, and I have to manage your net worth and your estate.”
I don’t know of another player that’s five custodians deep. But I also wanted to be respectful of where an advisor’s business is. There’s nothing here of forcing anybody to go a proprietary route. We don’t have a proprietary route. We have a proprietary model, which is that we want you to win.
Direct Indexing: Parametric (Morgan Stanley)
When it comes to direct indexing, look at the history. Go back to the 1940s, and you’ll see that more than 90% of professionals can’t even meet the index. If somebody told me that you have a 92% chance of failing, I’m going to do something else, right? Why would I make it difficult for my advisors and give them this delusion that they’re that 8% or so? Now I can show my team that they can look like that 8% and you can have the results of that 8% but not have to have the brain damage to get there.
If the index is up 10% and you’re up 9.99%, guess what? You met the index. I mean, you’re there. We want to help the advisors truly create portfolios for their clients. We want them to position themselves to meet the index on a year-by-year basis, and then supplement that strategy with other alternative approaches that get true alpha. That is so much harder to get than just an index.
A.I. Services: Copilot and Teams Premium (Microsoft) / WealthFeed / Jump AI / Aidentified
We are currently spending a lot of time on this whole AI piece and how it can help with lead generation, better performance reporting, real-time data, and the broader scrubbing of knowledge, information and news. I think there are 14 technologies that we are looking at this quarter alone. We’re going to cull it down and see what makes the cut.
It’s about more than just note-taking. It’s lead generation. It’s analyzing existing portfolios at Summit or elsewhere. Instead of sitting there three days analyzing, you can come up with a real quick understanding of what the portfolio looks like. It’s also proposal generation tools, like looking at what somebody has, their risk scores, and all of that, and giving some recommendations. There’s also document assessment review. We have in-house attorneys who review wills and trust documents, which could take five or six days just to analyze 200 pages of a trust document. Now we’re looking at technology that can cut that to two hours and then give you an assessment and summary. So it’s all of the above, and it’s amazing to see what can be done today from just 24 months ago.
Client 401(k) Management: Absolute Capital, Pontera
When you look at a client’s net worth, especially before they retire, there’s a significant portion of their net worth sitting in retirement plans that are probably still at the institutions that they’re working for. The decision makers on a 401(k) are more concerned about being sued. They kind of give the plain vanilla option. Most people are working for 40 to 50 years, right? One of your biggest potential assets is the most grossly mismanaged. We looked at it from the perspective of, “how can we help our clients that are in those positions until they retire? How do we help them manage those assets?”
Now we, as advisors, can advise and oversee assets that are sitting at current 401(k) providers. They’re still employed, working for Google or Apple or wherever, but we now have that fiduciary oversight where we can help them. That’s just an example of completing the pie. If you’re truly stating you are the client’s financial advocate, it’s not just the money that you manage, it’s all their money and assets.
All of this technology, today, is giving us data and access so that an advisor can bring it together and say, “Mr. Jones, anything with a dollar sign in front of it is what we want to help you protect, manage and grow. That’s why we’re here.”
As told to senior reporter Alex Ortolani and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what’s in your wealthstack? Contact Alex Ortolani at [email protected].