The West Coast Conference Tour
Our team spent a little time out on the West Coast travelling to our Third Future Proof conference and visiting our California clients, followed by an exclusive invitation to the Baird High Performing Teams conference.
Since we spent some time away and our team had time to catch up on the trips, we wanted to share with you some of the trends, topics and takeaways.
Future Proof, Huntington Beach CA
Future Proof is the “Summerfest” of Wealth Management; you have an ocean front venue packed with stages of speakers and tents of technology vendors, investment firms and 5,000+ attendees.
This isn’t your typical conference of suits and ties; it’s startups and up and coming investment products and solutions we’ll see in the industry.
Our team divides and conquers this event by seeing speakers and visiting with vendors that apply to our roles and when we have a can to reconvene, we get to share notes. Here are some of those notes:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) firms and new technology is rolling out fast and furiously in our industry with the focus of streamlining our practices. This includes managing workflows and providing initial analysis in the areas of tax, estate planning and investment analysis. While technology is helping those areas, a consistent theme from the speakers focused on the importance of the human element in our business. Firms embrace AI but stay hyper focused on an experience that keeps the clients and human experience at the forefront and will continue to see growth.
- Industry Regulation changes in the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) space has opened the door to an explosion of new funds this year. It was noted that over 1,000 new funds launched as of Sept 1st. This fast-changing landscape can create a lot of options and opportunities in invest in a wide variety of “products,” however the challenge will be to know exactly what you are investing in and how it works.
Baird’s High Performing Teams Conference
Shortly after Future Proof we head to Scottsdale for the Baird’s High Performing Teams Conference where we had a chance to connect with 24 of the other top teams at Baird. Baird has over 400 established teams at Baird, so we felt honored to be invited to this event.
During this 72-hour conference we were able to able to join small group sessions to discuss our practices with other teams around the country that are similar to ours and share how we are utilizing the Baird tools to the best of our ability. Here are a few of the take aways that we had from the conference:
- Baird’s investment in technology has moved the conversation beyond investments into tax planning, estate consideration and detailed cash flow and income planning. These tools include programs called Holistiplan, which is a tax review and scenario planner, Vanilla – and estate planning software tool and Wealth Studios which is a cash flow and legacy planning tool. Each of these tools either separately or together can reshape the conversation from “Will I run out of Money” to “how can I effectively retire by tax efficiently accessing my investments for retirement”.
- All of the team are using AI in some capacity by taking notes, writing summaries, craft documents and providing very high-level analysis being the focus. Baird and our team use Copilot, which is a Microsoft interface, and it maps over Baird’s other Microsoft tools like CRM and Teams. By using this system, we can stay “within” the Baird system for some tasks that might require more security and privacy. We also felt comfortable with Baird’s thoughtful approach to AI to ensure that security and privacy is the priority for our clients, followed by functionality that keeps the Advisor/Client relationship at the center.
- Teams (like ours) are building for the future and planning for succession long before it happens. Baird’s team structure allows us to bring on several roles into our team as we grow. These include Client Specialists, Senior Client Specialists, Associate Financial Advisors and Financial Advisors. These teams tend to have multigenerational members of the team, varying backgrounds, experiences and truly collaborate with a team. (Many teams operate as silos, meaning while they might look like a team they truly don’t work together).
At the end of the day, these conferences reinforce all the great work our team does at Baird when it comes to the depth of planning and discussion we try to have with clients. The biggest opportunities will lie in utilizing the tools rolled out to our teams to make our practice more efficient, allowing us to have deeper financial discussions that expand into areas beyond solely investments.