In this episode, we talk with Deloitte’s Kendra Thompson, a veteran of the wealthtech space, who offers one of the clearest expressions we’ve heard about the value and benefits of data-driven insights and how they can productively be leveraged in the wealth management business.

Specifically, Kendra discusses data-driven insights that can help advisory businesses with performance management, client acquisition, sales, and retention, and even the advice provided to clients. These insights provide not only a powerful evidence-based tool for understanding what is working and what isn’t, but can also be used to anchor spending, coaching, and incentivizing the actions that actually change outcomes in the field.

On the advisor level, Kendra highlights how institutional information and insights can create opportunities for timely conversations with clients. For instance, changes in income sources or tax filings can create opportunities for advisors to reach out to clients in a moment of transition and offer valuable assistance. Data-driven insights are not always about complicated algorithms analyzing vast amounts of data – they can also simply be having a reliable information source alerting advisors to “money-in-motion” opportunities.

For more information about Kendra Thompson, you can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

‍For more information on Responsive AI’s solutions for advice providers, contact us.

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Day: Hello. Welcome to this week's Advice Architects episode titled Using Data to Power the Client Advisor Partnership. This is Day from Responsive. And today we are speaking with Kendra Thompson, partner at Deloitte Leading Future of Advice and Investment Practice. Kendra has been at the forefront of trends in health tech and in particular innovation and advisor capability and client engagement using data. I'm personally very excited for today's conversation as I feel like Kendra and I are very much facing in the same direction. On how to help wealth managers unlock scalable, personalized advice for a changing client base. Kendra, welcome to Advice Architects.

Kendra: Thank you. And thanks for having me today.

Day: Very excited. So at the top of the show, we kind of go through a Proust like questionnaire just to learn a little bit about you. So to start off, what's your job title and what do you actually do?

Kendra: I'm a partner at Deloitte, Canada and I have two primary roles. The first is my passion and my market facing role, which is leading our future of advice and investment practice focused on what investors and their families care about and how the industry is transforming to deliver that at scale for a profit. I work across all models and asset classes on both distribution and manufacturing issues, and in that role, I get to be on the frontlines of what's happening and advice, which is really where my heart lies. I also have a second role at Deloitte, which is running our financial services consulting business, which is a business serving all sectors and all parts of the Canadian financial services industry.

Day: Very cool. And how long have you been doing this for?

Kendra: I've been practicing as a management consulting capacity for 15 years now, and I did start off in industry at Merrill Lynch, HSBC and then Raymond James. So I've been on both sides of the fence. I've spent my entire career in brokerage.

Day: Okay, next question. When and where were you happiest in your wealthtech travels?

Kendra: You know, I'm a real live in the moment type of person, so I'm really happy right now. One of the reasons I'm excited and energized is I'm finally seeing, you know, the real execution of things we've been talking about for a long time. Spending is up on technology modernization across the entire value chain. And more and more of the experiences we've all imagined are coming into market. So I would pick now, but overall, I've always had a soft spot for the industry, so I've had a fun time along the way.

Day: I think I share your sentiment and your timing as well for the same reasons. Why do you care about Wealthtech?

Kendra: I think I care about it because it matters. Money and access to good advice around money and access to the upside of the markets really changes people's lives and the if you look across the world and you look across North America, certainly many people have not traditionally been able to access that wealth. And the democratization and the access to good advice at scale is something that I believe will really fundamentally improve the lives of individuals and families. I also think it really matters because we're coming up against a demographic shift and we need to do more to prepare for longer life and for more expensive living in retirement. And it's through teaching a new generation to access the markets and benefit and by making sure that no one gets left behind, that we as a society will be able to ensure that people are best served in their life and in their legacy.

Day: Thank you. Very clear. Okay. So something we both obviously believe is that data can be used to strengthen client advisor relationships and in turn drive better outcomes for the investor and for the wealth business. Today, I'd like to talk to you about some key value drivers in this space. What successes and challenges you've seen out there in the real world? And then from a thought leadership perspective where you see the market headed. So to start. What's the big high level idea of using data to strengthen client relationships? And how should advice- led businesses be thinking about this category?

Kendra: So when I'm working with clients, I really prefer to use the word insight because data is a raw material. And in general, we have spent a long time talking about data without generating the ROI. It's extremely complicated to get data right and to get data centralized and to get data to the moment that matters in decision making or conversation with clients. And the reason I like the word insights is because it doesn't have to be perfect to know 1 or 2 things that will change the outcome of a conversation. You only need part of the data to be perfect. So one of the biggest things that's happening now is that we aren't putting multiyear sort of best practice, textbook data journeys in between us. And those insights. And a lot of what we're doing is making those insights just part of how we prepare for and we navigate client and advisor conversations. So why does that matter? Why does that word difference matter? It's a lot less intimidating. And other than what advisors have always done or what advice led businesses are trying to digitize, it's essentially the bread and butter. How do you read a situation? Take a look at someone's financial life and provide them the advice that matters most. You don't need to know every single transaction they've ever made with their debit card to know that they may be overspending.

Kendra: And you don't need to know absolutely everything going on in their personal life to see a pattern that indicates that they might need to change the way they're thinking about their future. So that's the first thing I would say is we've really shifted around a technology. First data is everywhere. Data must be perfect data, single view of data view to getting that insight to the point that matters. The second thing I would say is much more sophisticated feedback around what insights change the outcome and which insights do not. So for a long time it was so difficult to get an insight to create the business rules, to get it out to either an advisor or someone sitting in a contact center or into a digital experience. It would take months to know if that worked and then it would take months further to improve it if it did not. What we have the benefit of now is much more rapid testing of and much faster feedback on what is working and what is not. And I'm seeing use cases now that are just blowing open the doors on what we can do with those insights as a result.

Day: Very cool. So specifically in wealth now I'd like to run through a few categories and opportunities that have kind of lifted from a Deloitte piece here on exactly how insight can help. So I've got about six here and maybe we can speak to some or all of them, but I'll just start listing them off and we'll go from there. So the first one is business performance management. How can insight help here?

Kendra: Right. So imagine you're a field leader, a branch manager, a regional director, or the head of sales at any traditional wealth management firm, or you're sitting on top of a contact center for a virtual advice hybrid business, understanding what is working, what is not working, and how to systematize and scale in order to make that work more of the time with more of the advisors or more of the client families is so powerful and for a long time we really were reliant on the notes that were taken or the feedback that we'd hear at like a national conference, for instance, to know what worked and what didn't. We call that design by noise. When you have to listen to what advisors complain about in order to know what to spend money on and fix. The greatest thing about having insights on business performance management is it anchors your spending, your coaching and your incentivizing on the things that actually are changing the outcomes in the field.

Day: Got it. Got it. Continuous improvement through actual science. Next up, client acquisition. How can insight help here?

Kendra: So we used to cast very wide nets. You know, you live in a community, you'd get the names and numbers of all the wealthy postal codes and you'd just blast out or you'd put up billboards. And some of that still happens and is still valuable from a brand perspective. But what we see is that most of the time when you're trying to build a business or build a book, it's extremely predictable. You take a look at the clients that are most profitable and most well suited, the best fit for you and the business you're running as an advisor or for you and the channel offering you're providing in a hybrid model. And then you go to find more individuals that look and feel and have similar needs to them. And instead of going based on instinct, like this person likes me or I, you know, I know this person through my network. You're actually able to predict and see the types of new relationships that are most likely not only to result in a new client, but actually result in a client that sticks and is profitable. This is also really important when you start to think about where not to spend time.

Kendra: So when you see a pattern of, Hey, I've had, you know, six events in the community and they have not resulted in the right acquisition numbers, have not resulted in clients that have fully funded or fully maximized their relationship with our business. So I'm not going to do that anymore. I can actually learn from what works and what doesn't. Even more powerful is when you direct that analysis and empower referrals using that analysis. And that's really the frontier right now is explaining to advisors, to field leadership and to channel owners. This is what works and this is how you can replicate that through referral, because we know that relationships earned through referral or earned through introduction are more likely to stick. So that's where we're going there and we're getting much more sophisticated on the concept of fit analytics and who actually would be a good acquisition target. It's not just blast demographics like these are people of a certain age and a certain life stage with a certain amount of potential wealth. It's also about the patterns of who are high potential and who are likely to be a good fit.

Day: Okay. Next, we'll do client sales. And I'm going to just let you know, we're going to also talk about client retention and client advice, which is, I think at the heart of this idea of the client advisor partnership and using data for, you know, a better service here. So if you want to talk about them all at once.

Kendra: It's probably better to think about them all as client analytics.

Day: Yeah. So why don't we look at that?

Kendra: Yeah. When we think about how an individual makes decisions about investing money, about saving money, because obviously you've got to save enough money in order to invest it and around who they trust to manage their money. Those decisions are not discrete and they're not transactional. Typically, they're highly emotional. They have a lot to do with factors outside of an individual organization's or an individual advisor's control. So the power of analytics is in pattern spotting, what is resonating, what is not, what are the leading indicators of dissatisfaction? If you already have a client, what are the leading indicators of needs for a client that might be ripe for either a replanning conversation or entering a new need in their wealth and and advice world? You know, we talk about these moments that matter. How do you predict those? You don't wait to send a blast out that you're doing dementia care planning, for instance. You look across your book and relationships to see who might be giving indications that they're entering a later phase or want to go through that type of conversation. The sophistication of those insights for next best conversation, next best offer, as well as pre attrition or dissatisfaction are really advancing. And what that does is it gives an advisor or a channel owner the opportunity to be much more prepared and informed and personalized in their approach to conversations, in their approach to campaigns and offers and in their approach to any sales that they may be trying to achieve.

Kendra: It's extremely powerful at the institutional level. So a lot of what happens, especially in universal bank settings or in more complex offerings, is you have the left hand and the right hand not knowing what's going on. So you've got an advisor who's helping a family navigate a tricky cash flow issue, and then you've got someone else giving them more credit. And it's very hard outside of the institution if you're not part of the same institution. But it's still hard even when you're inside the same institution. So all of the client analytics and I really think of it as families, not just individuals, because a part of what you're trying to do in those client analytics is to understand who makes decisions, what prompts decision need, and where the untapped opportunities are. You need to do that when looking at the spousal and family and multigenerational relationships. But when you think of client analytics, what you're really doing is spotting patterns and ensuring you're equipped to have the right conversation at the right moment in time.

Day: So all this makes so much sense to me at the institution level and. So for our listeners, maybe can we bring this down to the advisor level and maybe talk about some examples or how does this feel right in the relationship in the moment? Are there a couple key moments or conversations that matter that you want to sort of invoke here so we can think about it?

Kendra: Yeah, for sure. So, you know, most advisors have exceptional instincts around conversation. They prepare and they care and they connect, and they are advocating for their clients trying to get the right outcome for their clients. So what we don't need is data that's policing or spoon feeding, right? Because people pick these advisors because they are exceptional professionals and they know what they're doing. But the feedback we hear from advisors is that in an information age, in a 24 seven age, in a “contact me any time without maybe booking an appointment” time you feel exposed. You don't know why someone's calling or you don't know what's happened. That might spark a concern that's being raised. So we think of client analytics as a bit of a cheat sheet or decoder ring to what might be driving a reach out or silence or a change in behavior for clients. What we find most powerful is when the two are brought together, those exceptional instincts of the advisor and those pattern spotting insights. So a great way to say it is, Hey, the wife has not attended the last four meetings. This could be an indication that she's uncomfortable with you. It could be an indication that there's unrest in the marriage. It could be an indication of a health issue. We have a 660% certainty that something's going on based on the change in her behavior.

Kendra: As an example. Now that advisor still has to use their instinct. They don't call the person up and go, Are you sick? They're not going to jump to some sort of autopilot conversation. Those are the most powerful insights. Another powerful insight on clients is getting feedback on how they were perceived in video or in meetings. Did the person make eye contact with you? Were they listening? Were you listening? Enough? This type of analytics and insight is extremely powerful because it essentially shows the advisor how to learn and improve with their own authentic style versus what happens when we pulled advisors out of the field and try to train them. We give them sort of a cookie cutter approach. It doesn't line up necessarily to the chats and the video conferences and in-person sessions they're having. Another example of client analytics that are really powerful is when you have institutional knowledge about someone and it's pointing to something that hasn't been discussed yet in the relationship. So a huge amount of money has changed. Their direct deposit sources have changed. That might be a sign that someone has lost a job or changed jobs. Sometimes the first phone call isn't to the advisor and having that insight that there could have been a job change allows the advisor to check in and say, Hey, I just want to remind you I'm here.

Kendra: If anything's changed in your situation, you don't need to wait until our quarterly review or our annual touchpoint. I can work with you right now specifically when you're sort of dealing with major life events. You know, we've talked so much about sending out happy birthdays, right? But very few financial decisions are made on the back of wishing someone happy birthday. But when there's a health event in a family, a cancer scare with a sibling or a parent going to long term care, people go through an emotional life checklist of am I okay? Is my family okay? Am I doing dumb things right now that will put me in a bad position later? And often in those moments they start engaging with all different people in their life and having the advisors understand that there could be an indication of that type of life change empowers them to be one of those people. And increasingly advisors need to be one of the people in conversation. They can't control the conversation. So our objective is to help advisors have more insights so that they can show up prepared and have the right conversation, and then to let them use that professional care and expertise that they've always used.

Day: Better awareness and getting inside the conversation in a way that's relevant and personal. That's partnership. Final one. Supervision.

Kendra: You know, risk and supervision is an important part of our industry. And increasingly, regulators are expanding the requirements as it relates to providing the right advice, the right duty of care and avoiding bad apples and. You know, getting much, much more robust about the systemic insights that are there allows us to get out of the checklist approach to supervision. So for years, the way this was done would be regardless, depending on the regulatory channel and depending on the role, a certain number of emails had to be reviewed or a certain number of transactions needed a certain number of sign offs. And many of those checks and balances or what we call controls still exist. But the advanced analytics allow us to pattern spot. And I've seen some really powerful pattern spotting specifically over COVID when people were not attending the branch or were not going into the office, when behaviors all of a sudden all were manifested and supported through digital channels, we get a lot more insight into what's actually going on and whether signatures were properly acquired or whether disclosures were properly shared. And it really is powerful to avoid unnecessary fraud, risk or exposure. It's also really powerful to ensure that the intervention happens before full explosion.

Kendra: Right? So you see something that may be an indication of high risk behavior well before a point of no return. It allows the leaders in the business or in in in the branch or in the area to actually see and interact proactively to coach and to manage down that risk. We call that mitigating, but I actually think it's more than that. It's ensuring that one, you are signaling to the advisors and anyone dealing with client information that there are eyes on them and there are eyes on that information and that those eyes are there for duty of care. Or two, you're showing it's not just Big Brother waiting to catch you up. When you make a mistake, it's there to actually protect you to. Here is an example of something that could be construed as high risk or potentially fraudulent. Let's go and get ahead of it. Let's stop it before it happens. And then three, it allows you to, you know, I guess, protect against misunderstanding. So actually seeing a pattern is different than convert confirming that that is exactly what's happening. So the analytics causes the investigation that causes the early confirmation, which is way better than waiting until there's a complaint or an audit.

Day: It creates a virtuous feedback loop that changes behavior.

Day: So this category is often referred to as “next best action” or offer or conversation or advice support. Can you talk about some of the innovations you've seen out there in the wild recently?

Kendra: This has been an exciting part of our business. So the most important thing that's occurred is the wide adoption of Salesforce. And it's not just because I think Salesforce is an exceptional vendor and one that I recommend wholeheartedly, but also because of the data model and the consistency with which we have good household data. So I'll just start by saying that was a breakthrough for our industry. We struggled so long to come up with householding standards and data standards that allowed us to do this type of conversation support. The next thing that has happened that has been really powerful is better understanding of what works and what doesn't. So for years it was a numbers game. Contact eight clients a day, shake so many hands a month, kiss so many babies a year. It doesn't actually work that way. And I think part of what we've learned is that high performance sales or productivity analytics mixed with better client data allows us to put together based on the situation the client is in, based on the amount of time the advisor has. This is the right conversation to prioritize and have, and this is the right way to prep for that conversation. So the industry way of thinking about that is next best action or next best conversation, but there's way more that underpins it because in order to get it right, you need to know what insight matters from the client, what insight matters from the advisor or from the firm level, and then how to equip that conversation.

Kendra: A lot of it also comes down to time management. If you only have an hour, how should you use that hour? Many advisors would use that hour following up on something that should have worked in the first place. You blow open the door and make things more straight through. Make things work more predictably. They use that hour to sell. So all of these things are tied to advisor outcomes, client outcomes and overall profitability of the books. But the  innovation that's taking place on next best conversation is something we've been talking about for a very long time and we've had multiple generations of CRM that did not lead us, lead us to the Promised land. We are finally getting there and I'm extremely enthused by the mix of Advisor led and digital direct versions of next best action and conversation. It's really powerful when you start to see the client experience include all of the tools in the tool kit.

Day: It's exciting times. Creating insights from data is hard, as you mentioned, and then as you also mentioned, getting advisors to act on them successfully is pretty challenging. Can you talk about some of the obstacles you've seen and give us some thoughts on how to mitigate these risks and achieve success?

Kendra: Um, the biggest mistake I see is someone who is sitting in home office or sitting at a vendor site, completely disconnected to the human interaction, trying to design and define what matters. It's actually a barrier to working with me and my team that you need to be. Thinking from the outside in. Right. There's no point spending money on a whole set of insights that are not actually anchored in reality in the conversation. So the first thing I would say is you have to have clients and advisors at the heart of everything you do around insights. Or else the insights will sit somewhere in a report or on a desktop without ever being used. The second thing is the motivation for the insight or the coaching or the action needs to actually line up with what advisors and clients actually want. So I mentioned it earlier, sort of the Big Brother vibe. We have to be really careful not to misrepresent the purpose of an insight if you're trying to measure activity. So you can see who's low performing on productivity. Don't try to sell it to the field as opportunity analytics because they'll see right through that. If you're trying to incent a certain type of behavior and using analytics as the hook, they'll see right through that.

Kendra: It's really important that it be mutually beneficial and that it be very straightforward in its intent. And, you know, I think this is something that I spend a lot of time personally working with leadership teams on because there's a misunderstanding of just how sophisticated and tuned in advisors and salespeople in general are to how they are motivated, compensated and and measured. And that is 100% where a lot of these problems start. The second thing is too many insights. You don't need 15 things. You just need a couple and you need those couple of things to work. And if they don't work, you need a productive way to stop getting those things. We've had a lot of programs or campaigns around analytics that pump out things that prove not to be effective, and then they come, they come the next month. So if you're the advisor or the sales assistant or the branch manager, you start to tune those things out and you decide, this is not. It's not worth my time. And then I guess the last thing I would say is advisors are not one cohesive group and they don't operate based on the sales pitch. And you need to understand which advisors are going to be most adapted or most likely to benefit from something.

Kendra: And you need to understand the power dynamic between advisors. Who are they listening to? Driving adoption from the center versus driving advocacy from the outside in? There's a big difference in what the take up is when you shift your mind. The last thing I would say is there needs to be empathy for what it is like to be out in the world in front of wealthy individuals trying to convince them to trust you. And their family's future with you. And I think a lot of times we do not empathize enough with how much it takes to put yourself out there, to connect on that level with so many different individuals, to make those judgment calls with imperfect information. The teams that really have empathy at the heart and really understand what it feels like to be exposed when a client asks you a question you're not prepared for. When there's a need in an area you don't have as much knowledge on, for instance, a product or a type of product set that you may not have been exposed to before. We're seeing a lot of this in the alt space right now. We see a lot of this in insurance like when they know the family needs life insurance and they ask a question and the adviser feels exposed.

Kendra: We also see it when advisors are caught off guard. So I use that example of the phone call. You know, the phone is ringing or the text is coming in and, you know, as an advisor or as a sales assistant, like there's a reason for this, but I don't know what it is yet. And I'm going to I'm going to like find out live on the phone. When the analytics come from a place of empathy, they address those use cases first and they help advisors look smarter, be more prepared, use their time better and get better, better intimacy with their clients. And that, I think, is like a design criteria that's often not prioritized. We spend a ton of time on the business rules. We spend a ton of time on data hygiene. We spend a ton of time on, you know, the pitching of the analytics. We don't spend enough time with the human dynamic and understanding the conversation. What is the barrier to decision? What are the types of decision makers, what are the concerns that are unarticulated? And then what are the things that insights and analytics can do to improve the connection between those advisors or institutions and those client families?

Day: This is music to my ears and we're definitely going to take it to heart here at Responsive and I hope all the listeners do as well because it's pearls of wisdom moving forward. What are some of the key things you think wealth businesses should be thinking about strategically with new tech on the horizon and key innovations? What should they be discussing?

Kendra: So we've already seen a move away from adding bells and whistles and just layering net new capabilities to truly transforming the core of the business, which is one of the breakthroughs we've been waiting for the ability for clients and their families to communicate their needs and to have those needs served without having to cheat on or repaper or change relationship is really where I think the industry is moving. And in order to do that, you need to have a mix of capabilities, offerings, products and price points on the platform. You need to be able to dial up in a time of high need and dial down in a time of low need. And you need to be able to hyper personalize. When we talk about hyper personalizing, we're not talking about having a totally different investment strategy based on every potential preference. What we are talking about is understanding what the family and the individual values and delivering that at scale for a profit. So things that I see that are, I believe, core to getting that right. Everything related to a discovery we’re very good at onboarding. We're not good at ongoing to to a discovery. There is still not a fully baked, fully mature industry standard there. That is a major area of innovation that I continue to see anything related to situational planning, dementia care, death of a spouse, any family succession in small business, anything related to legacy, anything related to sandwich generation dynamics. And I could go on and on getting those scenarios right and then doing it on both sides of the balance sheet.

Kendra: Really important. We've innovated at length on asset allocation, product selection and sort of retirement planning. And I think we've got to keep going, don't get me wrong. But there are so much more to that in people's financial lives and we really have to continue to double down, triple down on those other elements, anything related to collaboration, both within a firm or within a team and with the intermediary serving clients and their families. So anything related to bringing the best of the advice ecosystem to bear, getting the best specialists, the best expertise, the best portfolio managers in the right conversations, anything related to speeding up the way work gets done. And the network effect of advice I think is a huge area, huge area of potential, huge area of innovation, and then anything related to the democratization of more advanced and more more lucrative strategies. So we're seeing huge innovations in the alt space. We're seeing huge innovations as it relates to ESG. We're seeing huge innovations as it relates to tax advantage investing. And we've got way more we can do to democratize that, bringing that down to lower price points and making it more predictable and systematized so that the people in the field, advisors and their assistants can connect with the humans and not just be doing the mechanical pieces of our industry. And then the last thing, which is the least sexy, it's where no one likes to go, is in driving out the cost of our industry.

Kendra: The cost to serve has not been addressed appropriately. We must lower the cost to serve. We must make it more affordable to access excellent advice, experiences more profitable to be in the advice business long term and more sustainable to compete in a more advanced and more digitized world. And in order to do that, we need to look at the regulatory frameworks. We need to look at the platform vendors, we need to look at data, and we need to look at the way work is done and that frontier that doesn't get everyone up in the morning, but it certainly really pays a lot of bills at Deloitte because that is where the real spending is taking place now, helping large platform providers, whether they're in a universal bank, in a traditional broker dealer or whether they're in a platform provider to the ARIA or independent community, helping them drive out the cost and innovate and move to cloud and truly automate our business will be the focus for the next 5 to 7 years. And if we get it right, this business will thrive because the need for advice is going nowhere. The demand and value for that intimate connection is going nowhere. The next generation of investors is no more sophisticated or able to do it themselves. And we have proven that advice is needed for all asset classes and types of investor profiles. So it's an amazing industry, but we cannot sleep on the modernization agenda.

Day: We're all waiting for that day when the cost basis for small accounts is really there. And. And we can get these things to regular folks. Our final deep question, we end with a deep question. Hybrid advice is a category you've talked about for some time, and like all catchphrases, it comes to mean everything and nothing. But in your own words, what is your vision of what hybrid advice should be?

Kendra: I agree. I started using that word before a lot of people in the industry. Now I want to stop. I was trying to avoid robo, so I introduced hybrid advice to my pitches and dialogues. And now I want to get away from it. What I think is being challenged is the paradigm that you can only get advice once you're wealthy and once you consume advice, you have to keep paying for it all the time. So when I think about hybrid advice, what I'm really thinking about, what I'm really thinking about is the decoupling of the advice experience from the transactional experiences that you may or may not need. Based on that advice, I'm thinking about the decoupling of licensed professionals from individual channel and really bringing the best of what is needed to the consumer and their family to that client family. In a way that makes sense and is valuable without all the other things in the way. So what that looks like may vary really dramatically based on the need of the client. But if I need a full service all the time. 100% dedicated advice. I should be able to get that. And it shouldn't mean that I don't get access to a digitized experience or an institutional knowledge of my family. And if I don't need that, if I need something cheap and cheerful because I have a highly predictable set of needs and those needs, frankly, do not require the hands on dedicated advisory experience, I should still get great advice and I should be able to consume it and pay for it in a model that makes sense for my asset class.

Kendra: And I should be able to pick and choose how that evolves over my investing life. Right now, our regulatory frameworks, our go to market panels and our technology is oriented by product and by channel choice, and we're doing tons of things to bridge the gaps. But the true future is much more fluid and flexible and it is much more similar to an ecosystem. And that's why I've started to move towards this concept of ecosystem advice, which I know some might find a little bit consultancy and ambiguous as well. But what I'm really trying to say is bringing together the needs in a way that is valuable, helping solve for the problems and the potential of a client family's needs in a way that makes sense without over clubbing it in the in-between times or under delivering it because they can't afford that great advice. Doing that in a way where advisors are still doing what they're great at, but they're complemented by rich digital experiences, some of which they deliver in a personalized manner, some of which are delivered to them to make them look smarter or more prepared and some of which are delivered right beside them to allow for their customers not to have to cheat on them or change accounts when they want to try something cheap and cheerful.

Kendra: Also, plugging into all of the intelligence and potential of things that are happening outside of that individual conversation, including the things they're doing as it relates to cash flow, as it relates to their spending behaviors, as it relates to their broader place in the community and in their family. So I think there's just so much potential that can be unlocked when we move away from a channel construct. That's why, for instance, we don't optimize and channel. We really look at platform and that's also why I think the debate is about whether digital is part of every investor's experience. Right? I never see anyone question that anymore. We are already in a hybrid age, and if there were any naysayers, they fell off the vine during COVID because we saw everyone consuming through digital with a great, great degree of confidence and satisfaction. So now the question is what's beyond that? What's beyond the sort of bringing together of all those experiences? I believe that's an ecosystem approach, and I think it's already starting to play out and it's really exciting.

Day: Kendra, thank you so much for coming on the show and also for pushing this vision of new advice, ecosystem advice across regulatory channel lines. I know that's a hard fight and I'm grateful that you're doing it because it's our vision as well. Thanks so much.

Kendra: Thanks for having me and good luck out there in the market.

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