The WealthTech Podcast Transcript

Host: Mark Wickersham

Guest: John O’Connell, Founder The Oasis Group

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Mark Wickersham: All right, John O'Connell, welcome to the WealthTech Podcast. I am excited to have you on the show. John is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and a wealth management technology expert with nearly 30 years of experience.

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Mark Wickersham: John is founder of the Oasis Group, a wealth management growth consulting firm he founded in 2019.

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Mark Wickersham: John, would you mind kind of giving a brief overview and a, introduction to the OASIS group?

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John O'Connell: Sure, absolutely. Thank you very much for having me.

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John O'Connell: So, the Oasis Group is, we're a consulting and research company. So, we approach the wealth management market, and we really approach 4 different segments. So, trust companies, family offices, registered investment advisors, and broker-dealers. And when we approach that market, we've got 3 lines of business. One is a training line of business, which is fairly easy online video-based training.

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John O'Connell: The second is research. So, we publish a lot of research in the industry. I'm published about 5 to 6 times a month in industry journals.

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John O'Connell: We have a newsletter that's very vibrant. We've got about 170,000 subscribers to the newsletter. And then we produce empirical research around the market. So we've produced research so far on AI note-takers.

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John O'Connell: on, wealth platforms, so think of, like, an Orion InvestNet, you know, things like that. And we've produced research around custodian platforms.

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John O'Connell: We're about to release research, actually in the next month, around AI prospecting tools. So, we produce about 4 research papers a year. I also produce a lot of white papers that are available on the website, so that's our research side.

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John O'Connell: And then finally, we have consulting.

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John O'Connell: And in consulting, I like to say we try to help everyone with everything around their data, whether that's gathering their data, which is going to be their technology stack from lead to annual meeting.

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John O'Connell: Whether that's, securing their data, which is our cybersecurity business.

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John O'Connell: Or whether that's owning and mining their data, which is our data lake and data warehouse business.

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John O'Connell: So, that's kind of the business that we've created, and I speak at a lot of conferences. I'm very lucky people, you know, ask me to speak at quite a few conferences throughout the year.

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Mark Wickersham: You're also a good follow on LinkedIn, I highly recommend people, follow.

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John O'Connell: Thank you very much.

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Mark Wickersham: I always interest when I talk to founders to understand their founder journey. So, why did you start the Oasis Group? What was the gap in the marketplace? And just tell me a little bit about the genesis of starting your own firm.

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John O'Connell: Yeah, absolutely. So, I was in the C-suite of a couple of firms before starting the Oasis group, and, what I found with a lot of those firms was, you know, although you've risen into the C-suite, sometimes you can't really decide what direction you want to go in, right? You've got either a board of directors that's providing you with some feedback, or you've got, you know, you might… in some of those cases, I was a chief operating officer, so I

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John O'Connell: reported into a CEO.

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John O'Connell: So, in starting my own firm, the… one of the first things was I really wanted to have a little bit more autonomy, to choose which clients we could really help and which clients were maybe not such a great fit, so we probably shouldn't engage with them.

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John O'Connell: the gap that I saw in the market is there's an enormous amount of technology available in the wealth management space, and navigating that and figuring out what solution really best fits the firm, was a real challenge, and a lot of folks were talking to me about that challenge. They were like, there's so much out there, I don't know what to choose, I don't know where to start.

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John O'Connell: And I… that was a real… a real eye-opener for me. That was a real… you know, I like fixing things, I like helping people, so being able to fill that need where people really needed help navigating and understanding what technologies would best fit their business was really exciting to me.

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John O'Connell: And that's… that's why I created the firm, and we've grown really, really well over the past 6 years, to a point now where we can help quite a few people, you know, with their… with their technology journey and figuring out what they want to… what they want to implement.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, you're starting to see this on the family office side, too. I mean, the RA side is a very dynamic market, but the… you know, I like to say the good news is there's lots of options available. The bad news is there's lots of options available, right? So…

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Mark Wickersham: There is, you know, there's a right vendor for every firm out there, or vendors for every firm out there, but it can be a bit of a challenge to figure out.

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Mark Wickersham: which is the right firm for them. Before we kind of dive into the technology, and especially around AI, I want to talk to you a little bit about growth.

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Mark Wickersham: type of manner, and that's certainly changing, especially with AI and how people find you. Let's talk about data. Obviously, data is a big component of what you do, and, you know, data is the new oil, but…

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Mark Wickersham: Data aggregation, data aggregation and consolidated reporting. Still a major challenge for advisors, which is, you know, data aggregation capabilities have come a long way.

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Mark Wickersham: I used to work at bile accounts, held away accounts, like, you can bring on that data now. Alternative investments, which was an area which was a real pain point for a long time. You see a lot of good options on that.

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Mark Wickersham: Why… why is this still an issue, and then what… what should firms be thinking about when it comes to data aggregation and consolidated reporting?

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John O'Connell: So, part of… part of the challenge, and there's quite a few challenges that firms run into with their data. So, let's take the firm that's been… that's been growing really well for the past, let's say, decade.

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John O'Connell: they have an enormous amount of golden data, really, really great nuggets of data, that tend to be locked up in notes from meetings, right? So we sit down as an advisor and a client.

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John O'Connell: we talk about a lot of different things, I capture a ton of notes, but those notes wind up going into a note field normally in a CRM, and it's really difficult to mine that data, or to really kind of come out with what is… what's the overall picture of my client, right?

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John O'Connell: So that's one challenge, is these data silos, where things are locked up and not really accessible.

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John O'Connell: The second challenge that we find a lot of firms run into is their data's kind of dirty. It's, they've got a lot of data that's out there that's not really clean. A great example of that is, let's take a firm that does insurance, investments.

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John O'Connell: Together, right? Their insurance policy might have one address for the client, because the client moved and it wasn't updated on the insurance policy. They could have a different address

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John O'Connell: with the custodian, which would be the legal address that matters the most to the SEC, for example, and you can have a third address in your CRM.

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John O'Connell: So, keeping that data in sync proves to be very difficult for a lot of firms, and when you've got dirty data, you're gonna get dirty results, right? What I like to say is.

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John O'Connell: You know, a computer is going to make you get to that result faster. If you got really bad data, you're going to get the wrong answer a lot faster.

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John O'Connell: Than you would if you had really clean data. So, the data cleanliness is the second really big challenge. And then the third challenge that we find is the data's locked up in all these different systems. Let's go back to the example I used a moment ago. You may be using something like FireLite, right, for your insurance capabilities, so you've got information locked up in the air. You've got information locked up in the custodian accounts.

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John O'Connell: And then you've got other information that may be locked up in your CRM, and if you're… if you're handling… if you're using any of the wealth platforms, you got a fourth data silo with these wealth platforms. Bringing that data together has traditionally been the, you know, the purview of a really large firm, right? They would put together a data lake or a data warehouse.

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John O'Connell: Merge all this data together, and it was really expensive to put that together, and it was really difficult to manage that.

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John O'Connell: What we're finding now is firms in that 5 to 10 billion are beginning to really think about, how do I start thinking about my data and putting together a data lake? Not that they're building them at a large rate at that level, but they're definitely thinking more about data cleanliness.

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John O'Connell: And really, that comes back to their workflows. You know, if you get an address change, you've got to change that address in all of the locations. That's a workflow problem, not necessarily a software issue.

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John O'Connell: So…

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John O'Connell: putting together that workflow, where you make that change happen in all three locations is, or all four locations, is really, really critical. So a lot of times when we talk to people about data, we're helping them to get on a journey, right? It's not like you can flip a light switch and have a data warehouse with all your data in one place and do amazing reporting off of it.

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John O'Connell: It's a journey that you need to go on, and the first step of that journey is really looking at some of those processes to keep your data clean.

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John O'Connell: Really identifying a data steward within each of your applications, who's responsible for the data cleanliness in that application. And then, once you've got clean data and you've got a really good process to keep that data clean.

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John O'Connell: Now you can begin thinking about, what do I want to do with other technologies, like an AI technology, for example, or bringing my data together in a data warehouse to answer really interesting questions.

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John O'Connell: Starting off with some process and some real data cleanliness and stewardship is really the first step that we find with a lot of firms.

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Mark Wickersham: That seems so basic, but it seems like it makes so much sense. I mean, without clean data, obviously the ability to leverage AI is difficult, but then also just…

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Mark Wickersham: the amount of turn and extra effort you have to do on some of these tasks. Should advisors think about… obviously, there's…

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Mark Wickersham: They have multiple providers that they use with custodians and reporting systems and CRMs, but should they be thinking about owning their own data and bringing that into, say, a data lake? So, one is, should advisors own their own data, and two, how should advisors think about doing that?

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John O'Connell: they should definitely own their own data. Even if they're standing up a very small data lake and bringing all that data together, they should definitely own it. I'm going to give you a really solid example of that.

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John O'Connell: Let's say you want to change performance reporting systems.

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John O'Connell: You may have been on a performance reporting system for a decade or more, so you've got a lot of history in that performance reporting system of your client's performance, and you probably have daily positions and balances in that performance reporting platform.

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John O'Connell: Now, let's say you want to move to a different performance reporting platform. It's very expensive to migrate 10 years of data, right? It just takes more time to migrate that data, and it takes more time both for whoever you're having migrate it, like, let's say you hire a consulting firm like us to migrate it.

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John O'Connell: It's gonna take longer for us to migrate it, so it's gonna cost you more money, and it's gonna take your team longer to validate that data.

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John O'Connell: Now, let's take an alternative approach. Oh, and by the way, that's if you can get all 10 years of data out of your existing performance reporting platform, right? You may not be able to get it out of there very easily.

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John O'Connell: And let's say you went the route of just going back to your custodian. Snap a chalk line, start fresh, go to your custodian. Many of your custodians are going to give you 2 years of history on that data, so… so if you wanted to do 5-year reporting, I'm kind of stuck now, I can't really do that, right? Yeah.

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John O'Connell: So, a lot of times, what we would recommend is get copies of all your data in a data lake.

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John O'Connell: Okay, and hold on to that data. That gives you portability. Now, if I want to change from one performance reporting platform to another, I already have my data. I don't have to migrate it. That's happening every day for me with just a job that just copies the data from performance reporting into my data lake.

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John O'Connell: So if I decide to move from one reporting platform to another, I already have all my data, I own it. I can move.

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John O'Connell: If my custodian, for example, does not keep the daily positions and they truncate that to month-end positions, which many custodians do, just for the cost of storage.

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John O'Connell: I have those daily positions. I don't have to worry about my provider truncating that data. So, for a lot of reasons, I think, yes.

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John O'Connell: any wealth management firm should own their data. Whether or not they're doing anything with it initially is not really… that's not relevant. You need to own your data, because if you do decide to move, it gives you portability.

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John O'Connell: It gives you the ability to mine that data moving forward. It gives you the ability to start really launching a data cleanliness project, really to figure out, is my data that clean, and how do I clean it up?

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John O'Connell: So, for a whole host of reasons, I think, yes, they should own their data.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I mean, like you said, from a vendor risk management perspective, right? So, you want to move vendors. Maybe you're in an unfortunate situation where you have to move vendors. You're seeing that with Morningstar exiting the market, but especially if you're following a best-of-breed approach, and you want to swap out particular

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Mark Wickersham: nodes in your stack, then, you know, having that in a central repository, it reduces that risk. Like you said, it's expensive to be able to convert large amounts of transactional history. I've seen a lot of…

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Mark Wickersham: implementations where you pick the right technology vendor, but you end up in this land war in Asia because you're trying to take 10 years of, you know, transactional data, convert that over to the new system, and it just becomes an absolute slog.

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John O'Connell: Absolutely.

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Mark Wickersham: What are you seeing with advisors on alternative investments? Obviously, Family Office has been chock full of that asset class for a long time, but you're starting to see a democratization or a broader distribution of alternative investments to

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Mark Wickersham: beyond ultra-high net worth, the high net worth individuals and advisors are taking on that. So, where do you see that in terms of

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Mark Wickersham: how advisors are prepared for that. Do you see advisors, you know, embracing that asset class, and what should people be thinking about when they're looking to increase their clients' exposure to that particular asset class?

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John O'Connell: So, there's a bunch of confluing, or information that's kind of confluencing together around that, right? So, there was a study that came out by Bank of America of young investors, and they found that many young investors feel that they're not going to achieve the return profile that they want just in this stock market.

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John O'Connell: So there's a large uptick in young investors' interest in alternative investments. So let's take that as one data point. The second data point we'll take is many wealth management firms, advise on 401Ks.

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John O'Connell: for small and medium business, small and medium businesses. So now with the new legislation that you can have alternatives in the 401K platform, I think you're going to find a lot of REAs

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John O'Connell: trying to get educated on alternative investments very, very quickly, because now they can offer those to their Main Street millionaire small business owners that, that they're managing their 401K, or their 403, you know, 403Bs, or something along those lines. So.

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John O'Connell: I think that's the second data point that we have to look at. And the third data point is the access to alternative investments through technology is becoming much easier. It used to be the purview of the family office because accessing the data around alternative investments was rather expensive.

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John O'Connell: Right? Now you see a lot of alternative investment platforms, think of, like, an iCapital, Case, you know, and others, that are coming… canoe, that are coming into this space, and really kind of providing better access to alternative investments. Now, with all that being said, right, the alt space is enormous.

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John O'Connell: Right? Many people think of… when you think of alternatives, they're thinking of, like, 1031 exchanges, interval funds, non-traded REITs, right? But when you start really moving into the private equity and private debt market, it's much, much larger.

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John O'Connell: And those alternative investments are not as readily available yet. So I think what we're going to find is advisors are going to, or wealth management firms.

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John O'Connell: are going to focus a lot more on alternative investments, you'll still see the top 6 alt asset classes being the most popular, right? And what you're gonna find is family offices

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John O'Connell: And trust organizations will be looking at alternative investments that may not be readily available to, for example, the RIA space, like private equity, private debt.

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John O'Connell: So, I think that alts are, you know, we're going to see the explosion of alts. We've already seen the explosion of alts, if you will. That explosion is going to become larger, over the next two years, certainly, and I think it's going to accelerate very, very quickly over the next year.

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John O'Connell: But I do think that you'll… we're gonna… my… my prediction, if you will, is we're still gonna see this bifurcation of the alternative market, where you're gonna find some investments that are still more available to that family office space, and other investments that are available to more of the rank-and-file RIA, if you will.

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Mark Wickersham: That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, so much of the economy now is in private markets versus public. You're definitely seeing really even… much fewer IPOs these days. Really, the…

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Mark Wickersham: The economy has shifted more to the private market, so if you want your clients to be able to participate in that, then you need to be…

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Mark Wickersham: in alternatives. Certainly, AI has been a game changer for alternatives, because much of that information is unstructured in documents. Let's talk about AI trends. You put together a AI wealth, wealth tech map. Can you talk to me a little bit about your map?

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John O'Connell: Sure, absolutely. So, what we've done is, there are a lot of firms that you're gonna find that are adding AI capabilities into legacy platforms, right? So, certainly, InvestNet made a big announcement recently, Orion's made a big announcement recently, where they're gonna add AI capability into their platform.

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John O'Connell: Advisor360 purchased Parrot, and you're gonna see them adding AI capability into their platform more and more.

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John O'Connell: What our AI wealth tech map is focused on is slightly the other side of that coin, if you will.

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John O'Connell: So we're focusing on firms that are AI-first. They didn't have a platform before. They're building their platform with an AI-first mentality. So, that's a different architecture. They're not going to have a lot of legacy technology debt that you'll find on the other side of that coin, and I think they're going to move in a very nimble way.

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John O'Connell: that's been proved out with the map. I mean, we're at, like, 88 firms on the wealth tech map right now. I've got another 30 firms that are in backlog. When I say backlog, we review those firms before they're put on the AI wealth tech map.

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John O'Connell: So, we want to make sure they're past the audiation stage, they're past the pilot stage, and they're at a point where they can be in production with a wealth management firm prior to getting onto our AI wealth tech map.

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John O'Connell: So, we talk with a lot of firms that we look at and say, yeah, you're not ready yet, get a couple more implementations under your belt, and then let's talk again, maybe in 5, 6 months, about where you are, and then we can talk about putting you on the map.

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John O'Connell: So, I do want to stress that the map, we looked at every one of the firms that are on the map.

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John O'Connell: the people that are on the map are ready to be put in production with wealth management firms. And I think that's a big differentiator between us and some of the other, some of the other, you know, maps and directories you find out there, where you can submit…

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John O'Connell: what you, you know, you can submit your firm to a directory, and it can be added to that directory. It doesn't mean that it's ready for prime time, it just means you're on the directory. So we've taken a slightly different approach to that.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I mean, you're certainly… I think some advisors are… are…

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Mark Wickersham: getting introduced to AI, because the platforms, they are incorporating AI capabilities. Some of them might not even be noticeable, right? Reconciliation, that's a great task for…

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Mark Wickersham: for that, being able to take a look at large data sets and look for anomalies, be able to take a look at even firms using it for coding. But then you're also seeing specific point solutions around AI. One of the biggest ones has been AI note-taking.

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Mark Wickersham: Talk to me a little bit… it seems like that's the largest area of adoption for advisors. I think it's something like 70% of advisors have adopted a AI note-taking tool, and it's saving them pretty significant time, 3 to 4 hours a week, which is significant, but…

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Mark Wickersham: Talk to me a little bit about some of the innovation that you're seeing around AI point solutions. Where is that innovation coming from? What are the typical things, and what should advisors be thinking about, especially when it comes to these point solutions?

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John O'Connell: So, 2025 has certainly been the year of the AI note-taker, right? And the reason that that's done so well is, you know, as human beings, we're horrible at multitasking. So, Mark, if you were to tell me a number, I'm gonna write that number down. And while I'm writing that number down, I'm not hearing what you're saying next.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, you're not engaged.

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John O'Connell: I'm not engaged, right? So, that's why a lot of advisors had 3 people in their meetings. The average was 3. So, you'd have a lead advisor, maybe a junior advisor, and a CSA, all in the meeting trying to capture notes.

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John O'Connell: The good news of that is you have an ability to train some of those junior staff members to understand what to listen for and what to take notes on.

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John O'Connell: The bad news to that is it's 3 person hours for each client meeting, which can be very, very expensive. And that's not just the meeting itself, right? You've got meeting preparation, you've got the meeting itself, and then you've got the notes and action items that come out of the meeting. So for all of those reasons, noteetakers have taken the advisory space by storm.

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John O'Connell: And as you pointed out, over 70% of advisors today use an AI note-taker. So that was 2025. What we're going to find in 2026 is it's going to be around document management. So we talked a moment ago about the alternative space. When you think about documents.

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John O'Connell: Analyzing a tax return is very easy. It's structured. There's no variability on a tax return. It's a 1040, right? And it's very easy to use a 1040 in all of the schedules to be able to analyze the tax return.

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John O'Connell: When you start thinking about, let's say, wills as a good example, well, there's 6 different software out there, 6 different software packages that your attorney may use to create your will.

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John O'Connell: And they always have some secret sauce that they wind up putting in, an extra clause or an extra change that they put into the will.

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John O'Connell: You know, at an attorney level, right? So that's their secret sauce at the attorney level. So what happens is, even though you may know the 6 formats for the 6 different softwares that wills, can be generated from, you can't really just rely on that. It's not standardized.

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John O'Connell: Now take into effect, you've got wills, trusts, estate plans, you've got alternative investment documentation… Subscription agreements, partnerships.

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Mark Wickersham: right?

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John O'Connell: all of that documentation is not standardized. So, what we're gonna see in 2026 are this huge growth in the number of tools that ingest these documents.

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John O'Connell: analyze them, and then use APIs, application programming interfaces, to push data into various places. That may push data, for example, into your CRM. That may push data into a financial planning tool.

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John O'Connell: So what are we going to see from the financial planning firms? Well, some of those financial planning firms are not API first, right? They're going to have to evolve really quickly to develop APIs, or they're gonna lose market share.

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John O'Connell: That's very straightforward. Most of the CRMs have a vibrant API built around them. Some of the wealth-specific ones lack some APIs, they're gonna have to come up to speed quickly, or they'll lose market share. Why?

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John O'Connell: Because the consumer, the financial advisor, is going to demand that their

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John O'Connell: document ingestion capability can push data into these other places, to avoid the swivel chair, right? Like, I've looked at it over here on my document ingestion stuff, and now I'm going to turn over here and cut and paste it into my CRM. No advisor's going to want that.

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John O'Connell: That technology genie is out of the bag now. With the integrations that we're seeing between note takers and CRMs.

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John O'Connell: That technology genie's out of the bag. No advisor is going to want to go back to swivel chair when they start dealing with these document ingestion capabilities. So, 2025, you're the note-taker. 2026, you're the document ingestion. 2027?

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John O'Connell: For mid-sized firms, it's going to be the year of agents.

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John O'Connell: For large firms, we're already seeing them roll out agents today. I think you'll see them roll out more agents in 2026, and in 2027, the largest firms will be in the world of digital workers.

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John O'Connell: Which is where you take a variety of agents and string them together. So, think of an example where an agent reads a document.

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John O'Connell: It interrogates the document and pulls out the first agent brings the document in and reads it, second agent pulls out all the great bits, third agent pushes it off to all the… all the individual

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John O'Connell: individual software packages that need the data. When you string all that together, those 3 agents, you have a digital worker. Then what happens is you just upload the document, and the next thing you know, it's all sitting in your CRM.

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John O'Connell: Or your financial planning tool.

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John O'Connell: You're gonna see the largest firms implement that in 26 and 27.

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John O'Connell: You're gonna see smaller, mid-sized firms implementing agents in 27, and then in 28, you'll see them moving to digital workers. Simply because the largest firms can spend the money on that development right now.

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John O'Connell: Those development costs will come down as these agents and digital workers become more readily available, and then mid-sized firms and smaller firms will have access to it.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, agentic AI is definitely the next wave, and, you know, obviously, I think there's

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Mark Wickersham: in wealth management, it's been a talent-constrained resource, been… the number one issue, you know, has been about attracting, retaining talent, which is certainly going to help, and…

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Mark Wickersham: the beauty about agents, too, is that they don't forget, they don't get sick, they, you know, they gotta complete that task, and I'll let you know that they can't complete the task. I do wonder, you know, when you start with AI and these AI point solutions, are we gonna end up repeating the past, where we're gonna end up with a bunch of siloed

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Mark Wickersham: you know, AI solutions, or is it this API connectivity that's going to be able to prevent us from repeating that past? Where do you see that? Is that… do you see that as a likely scenario that we'll end up kind of repeating the past with, you know, a bunch of AI solutions that don't talk to each other, or what do you see?

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John O'Connell: I think you're gonna see, initially, a bunch of AI solutions that don't talk to one another. If we look at every technology innovation that's happened, you know, go all the way back to, you know, Tim Bernards-Lee and creating the World Wide Web, right? We had websites that didn't talk to one another initially, so…

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John O'Connell: Whenever a new technology comes out, it's gonna innovate really quickly within stovepipes. And then we'll break down those barriers with middleware and integration, and then eventually we'll get to a point where it's more of a seamless architecture.

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John O'Connell: And I think you're going to see that exact same thing with AI. There are so many firms that are trying to move quickly around AI. I think I mentioned a moment ago, I'm seeing enterprise firms that are already rolling out agents, right? Those agents are being rolled out for point solutions. They're not talking to one another at this point. It's not going to be until they start really worrying about digital workers and data supply chains

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John O'Connell: that you're gonna see these things become integrated and come across the data supply chain.

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John O'Connell: So, no, I think initially we are going to see a lot of point solutions, we're going to see integration headaches, and then we're going to get to a point where we have better digital supply chains and data supply chains that'll bring that stuff together. Now.

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John O'Connell: Can you avoid some of that? Yes, you can. For example, I've been writing a lot about business process management within the wealth management space, right? So, do not build, for example, your workflows in a closed solution. Unfortunately, Salesforce is a closed solution. If I build a workflow there.

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John O'Connell: it's difficult for me to call out to other solutions using Salesforce, right? You've got to have a programming team to be able to do that, and they've got to really know what they're doing.

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John O'Connell: So, building workflows that are in open source, or transparent, that are separate from your point solutions also gives you portability. We spoke earlier about having a data lake and owning your data gives you the ability to change vendors without a lot of pain and suffering, or lower amounts of pain and suffering, lower cost.

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John O'Connell: The same thing happens with your workflows. If your workflows are built in a closed solution and you decide to change, guess what you're gonna do? Rebuild all those workflows again.

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John O'Connell: Right? So you're spending the money twice.

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John O'Connell: it'd be better for you to really examine your workflow architecture and say, let me use more of a business process management capability, which has been around for 20 years, right? That capability, if you talk to a manufacturing company or a large

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John O'Connell: financial services company, they're running everything on a BPN platform. In wealth management, for one reason or another, we have not embraced this technology.

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John O'Connell: And we should, because it will give people portability of their workflows. So I think that's incredibly important, and I think as you build digital agents.

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John O'Connell: as you build AI agents, those agents can attach to your external workflow, which will reduce that pain and suffering of trying to integrate all this stuff later. So I do think a thoughtful approach

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John O'Connell: To your workflow management and what you're creating around digital workers.

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John O'Connell: and around AI agents is gonna save you a ton of time and money in the future.

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John O'Connell: But there'll be firms that just move fast and loose, and implement it, and then worry about the integration later.

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Mark Wickersham: So you're talking about BPN software that sits over all these different applications that can have workflows that go across. Like you said.

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Mark Wickersham: manufacturing, lots of other different industries that have embraced that. So this is… this is what you're recommending or seeing as a way to kind of get past this siloed approach.

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John O'Connell: Absolutely. It's a way to get past the siloed approach, and it will save you money in the long term. A lot of money in the long term.

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Mark Wickersham: Let's talk about AI adoption. Obviously, I think there's… beyond the note-takers, like, I think firms are…

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Mark Wickersham: struggling a little bit, they don't necessarily know how to adopt, AI software, or may have tried and didn't get necessarily the results that they want. I think it's obviously… there's multiple aspects to it, too. Like, how do you… how do you protect client privacy? How do you stay in compliance? But also, how do you be able to bring in AI capabilities as a firm that actually really make a difference and an impact? So.

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Mark Wickersham: Talk to me a little bit about how do you see firms should think about adopting AI, and what steps should they take?

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John O'Connell: I think the first is, we lack a regulatory framework today around AI. We're seeing regulatory frameworks emerge, for example, in Australia and Europe.

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John O'Connell: But in the United States, we still are lacking a regulatory framework. So, think about this if you were… if you've been a CCO for a long time, many times when you go through an exam, one of the things that a regulator wants to see, whether it's the OCC or FINRA or the SEC,

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John O'Connell: One of the things they want to see is, what's your process? Show me your documented process, show me how you've educated your team to follow that process, and show me how you've measured their ability to follow that process. So, that's fairly straightforward. We've wrestled with that regulatory

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John O'Connell: framework, if you will, for decades. So, AI is no different. You should start with an AI-acceptable use policy.

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John O'Connell: Right? So, what AI are we going to allow people to use? How do we teach them to protect PII when using that AI? Right? And what are some of the acceptable use cases that we want them to do? For example.

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John O'Connell: You may say, hey, researching companies, researching investments, no problem.

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John O'Connell: Creating an investment strategy? That's a problem. We don't want you doing that yet. That should be in your AI acceptable use policy.

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John O'Connell: These are the use cases that are inbounds, these are the use cases that are out of bounds. If you get that down on a piece of paper and educate your team, you're already about 50% of the way there of being able to have a compliance blanket.

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John O'Connell: Right? So, you've got your processes written in your AI Acceptable Use Policy, you've got some guardrails there to protect the firm, the PII, and your team, and you've educated them on it.

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John O'Connell: Then what you need to do is, now's where technology steps in. Now you get technology to say, this is what we're going to deploy on your machine, and these are the things we're going to block on your machine. So, for example, if you are allowing someone to use

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John O'Connell: ChatGPT, and you don't want them using Copilot, you can block Copilot using Microsoft Active Directory, and you can enable ChatGPT.

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John O'Connell: That's… that's where technology comes into play. From a compliance perspective, you… the compliance… the chief compliance officer and your chief technology officer should be partners in that piece of it.

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John O'Connell: But I would start with an AI acceptable use policy, educate the team on it, come up with use cases that you really want to… want to implement, put some ROI around those use cases. Like, no takers was easy. I have 3 people in a meeting, now I only have one. You can measure that pretty quickly. When you start thinking about agents or other uses of AI,

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John O'Connell: it's less, obvious, right? So, you've got to establish some baselines. Let's take that investment research for a moment.

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John O'Connell: If you had a research analyst that worked on researching something for 4 hours, and then that went to a senior analyst to approve that research or sign off on it.

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John O'Connell: That junior research analyst may be able to do this in 30 minutes using AI, instead of 4 hours. But you've got to know that it took them 4 hours in the first place, otherwise it's hard to measure that ROI.

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Mark Wickersham: Right, right.

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John O'Connell: Right? So, snap a chalk line, understand what their… what you're currently… what your current manpower is, or person power is, and then

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John O'Connell: use that use case with the ROI to determine whether or not you're generating success.

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Mark Wickersham: I mean, that sounds like great advice for any technology project, right? You really need to understand your total cost of ownership, or else how would you know you're successful with a future endeavor, right? If you didn't know

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Mark Wickersham: really how long it took you, what the total cost was of doing certain things, and how do you know if you save money, or how do you know if you're in a better state? It's just this kind of gut feeling, right?

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John O'Connell: Yep.

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John O'Connell: And the controlling is never… you're never gonna feel like you're getting enough out of artificial intelligence or any other technology without doing some of that homework up front.

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John O'Connell: is super important. I mean, a lot of times, I talk to advisors, and they're like, I tried it, you know, I tried AI, I asked ChatGP something, it gave me this really, really weird result. Well, a lot of times, what they're doing is, in artificial intelligence, you can do what's called a zero-shot prompt, which is usually a pretty simple prompt. Like, for example.

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John O'Connell: Tell me everything you, you know about the band Chicago.

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John O'Connell: it's a zero shot, right? It could tell me the members, it could tell me when it was formed, it could tell me the history, it could tell me the number of albums. I'm not giving it any parameters, right? Now, let's give it a much more succinct prompt. You're a music expert and a music critic at the level of Rolling Stone magazine.

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John O'Connell: I'd like to know everything that, everything that you know about the band Chicago. From its origins, I'd like to know all of its discography, I'd like to know, did it… did one person write all the songs, or was it an ensemble that wrote the songs? What was it best known for? What awards did it win?

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John O'Connell: now I'm asking a much more insightful question. I'm gonna get a much better result set back, right? It's not gonna skip, for example, the awards that the band Chicago won, or the fact that many of the band members wrote songs out of the band Chicago, right? Like, even the trombone player wrote a song one time. Yeah. So, you wouldn't know that if you asked a zero-shot prompt. It's gonna give me a much more generic result set.

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John O'Connell: Now, if I ground it and say, you're a music critic at the level of Rolling Stone magazine, that's pretty narrow. Now it's going to give me a much better result set, because I've told it how to behave. And I've also given it a really great structure around what I expect that output to be.

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John O'Connell: Now, a lot of times when you use a more interesting prompt, the first thing you're going to see AI saying is taking a little bit longer, thinking more deeply, right? That's what you want. You want AI to think more deeply. You don't want it to act like a Google search, you want it to act like artificial intelligence.

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Mark Wickersham: Did Peter Cetera ruin the band and actually suck?

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John O'Connell: Yeah, that's… that is a huge form of debate, right? Like.

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Mark Wickersham: Great. Yeah, I totally agree. The more you put into the prompt, the better results that you get in terms of not only specificity, but also you say, around that there's this additional context, right? So, hey, act like I'm a music critic, or…

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Mark Wickersham: you know, get really specific on that. And some people, you know, you just put in, like, a one-line sentence, and you get kind of crap back, but in other cases where the more specificity you provide, and the more AI kind of knows you, the better the results that you get, for sure.

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John O'Connell: Most of the prompts that I use, Mark, are, like, a page or two pages long.

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John O'Connell: I'm giving you some really great ideas of what I want back, and I get very, very good results back from it, but I take the time to put that more insightful prompt together, and I get much better results.

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Mark Wickersham: To a brighter note, I mean, the wealth management industry is…

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Mark Wickersham: so dynamic these days. You look at some of the conferences, like Future Proof, which you couldn't even imagine 10 years ago. It's just a really, you know, it seems like that especially the independent advisory model and the multifamily office model in particular, the winning business model.

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Mark Wickersham: What does the future of WealthTech in particular hold? Taking a look at it, I know it's hard to go beyond 3 years, given how dynamic the space is, but what do you see as the major trends, and what does the future hold for WealthTech?

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John O'Connell: So, I'll hit both the consumer side, the wealth management firms first, and then I'll hit the wealth tech side, if you'll indulge me with that.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah.

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John O'Connell: On the wealth management side, the future is extremely bright. I mean, if you take a look, the United States mints the second largest number of millionaires on an annualized basis anywhere in the globe.

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John O'Connell: So we're minting more millionaires every year in the United States, right?

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John O'Connell: Because we're minting more millionaires, there's more need for the service. There's more need for a wealth manager, to get really professional financial advice from a wealth manager. And whenever anyone gets to a certain level of wealth.

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John O'Connell: they do get to a point where they're like, hey, I've done great so far, I've managed it myself, I've done great so far. So think of those young investors that are still building their wealth.

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John O'Connell: Once you get above a million dollars or two million dollars, then they start beginning to realize, hey, I could… I could build my own furniture, too. It doesn't mean that I want to do that, right? So, it does get to a point where they really are beginning to look for professional help.

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John O'Connell: So…

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John O'Connell: there's so much opportunity in the wealth management space at this point that I think the future is very bright. We also have, by the way, this shortage of new talent coming into the wealth management space. So, as the leader of a wealth management firm, what you need to consider is, how do you begin getting into colleges?

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John O'Connell: And educating in the college experience why this industry is so important, and why this industry does help millions of people to retire with dignity, and to be able to retire at a level that they can enjoy their retirement.

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John O'Connell: it's a great space to be in, and it taps into a core… a core need for humans to help other humans, and I think that it's a, you know, you can attract really great, talented people into this space.

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John O'Connell: We need to do a better job as an industry of educating the college students of why this space matters, and how it can help people, and why they should get into it.

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John O'Connell: Until we do that as an industry, we're gonna continue to wrestle with these shortages, right?

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John O'Connell: people think that the wealth management industry, you need to have, like, a degree in mathematics to be able to do this well. That's not the case. But there are so many college students that I talk to that are like, I'm not great with numbers, I don't want to get into that business. You don't have to be fantastic with numbers to be in this business.

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John O'Connell: I do think that there's a… there's a huge opportunity to educate, because there's a huge need in the marketplace. We're minting more millionaires every year. The need is not going to go down, it's going to continue to increase. So that's on the consumer side.

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John O'Connell: Now let's talk about the provider side, where we have wealth tech firms.

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John O'Connell: You know, you take a look at some of the other maps that are out there, there's over 480 firms on some of these maps, right? You take a look at some of the directories that are out there, especially if you look at the directories that handle all of North America, not just the United States. There's over 500 firms that are on some of these.

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John O'Connell: we are going to see a large amount of consolidation in the wealth tech space over the next couple of years. There's just too many firms.

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John O'Connell: Right? We've seen this explosion. There's just too many firms, there's not enough buyers of the technology at this point, and you're seeing a lot of firms in this really high level of specialization that are… that are going to wind up getting bought.

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John O'Connell: So, that being said, you know, what I see is that… that actually strengthens the… what we talked about earlier on the discussion, that wealth management firms need to own their data, and they need to own their business processes. Because if one of your providers gets acquired.

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John O'Connell: then… You might be… you might have to change platforms.

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John O'Connell: at your cost. You might have to leave that firm because they were acquired by a competitor.

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John O'Connell: And you don't want to be in that ecosystem, you're going to have to leave. So, owning your data and owning your business processes, I think, are more important than ever for the consumer, the wealth management firm.

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John O'Connell: On the wealth tech side, we're just going to continue to see this explosion in innovation, though, right? There are going to be a lot of incumbent firms that that technical debt is just simply too great, and they're going to sink and sell.

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John O'Connell: And then there's gonna be new AI-first firms that are gonna just take the market by storm. If we had spoken 3 years ago and talked about having an artificial intelligent note-taker, we would have both looked like futurists.

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John O'Connell: And here we are today with a 70% or 75% market penetration across what is really

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John O'Connell: you know, the top 5 AI firm… notetaker firms own a vast majority of that market share, although there are 17 firms on my WealthTech map.

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John O'Connell: So some of those firms, you know are just not going to make it, right? Because if the top 5 firms own the vast majority of the current market share, and we're already at, you know, there's only about 25 to 30% of the market left to penetrate.

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John O'Connell: you know, you're in… you're either in that… that, let me take it away from a competitor, which is always a more difficult sale, or you're just kind of racing to try to get a little bit more of that market share. So…

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John O'Connell: We're gonna see consolidation in that side of the world, and it's just gonna happen.

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John O'Connell: What I would recommend for the… for the wealth tech consumer, definitely own your data, own your process, be ready for the consolidation when it comes, because it is going to happen.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think, to your point, that there's too many, kind of, legacy software firms out there that maybe have, kind of, their growth has kind of leveled off.

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Mark Wickersham: They kind of have this reoccurring kind of revenue base that is turned into kind of a cash flow for them, but you're not seeing the innovation, you're not seeing…

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Mark Wickersham: Firms that aren't growing are going to struggle to innovate and be able to resolve that tech debt and be able to invest in not only resolving tech debt, but also to invest in innovation and…

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Mark Wickersham: Firms should really be taking a look at that. You know, if you're on legacy software, you're not on a modern tech stack, like, don't wait. You're gonna get left behind, and it's gonna happen really fast.

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Mark Wickersham: Because it is going to be such a dynamic market.

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Mark Wickersham: John, I'd love to end the podcast on a personal note with 3 questions that have nothing to do with WealthTech. You are a best-selling author. Talk to me a little bit about what was the writing process like, like writing a book?

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Mark Wickersham: You know, now that you've kind of gone through that process, would you do it again, and what did you learn that kind of surprised you?

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John O'Connell: I would definitely do it again, because it's incredibly fulfilling.

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John O'Connell: It is grueling, it's more like a marathon or a 100-mile bike ride, and not a sprint.

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John O'Connell: I did wind up bringing on a writing accountability partner who helped me to make sure that I was staying on track, and right in my firm, we help manage large-scale projects as part of our business.

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John O'Connell: But having that accountability partner was incredibly helpful for me. And that really helped a lot. So…

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John O'Connell: to hit those points, yes, I would do it again. Oh my goodness, it's grueling. It's a lot harder than you think it is. And yes, if you can find yourself an accountability partner.

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John O'Connell: to really help you through the process. Not an editor, an editor is different. You need an accountability partner to finish the book, and then an editor will help you polish it, but you definitely need an accountability partner.

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Mark Wickersham: Is the accountability partner, is that a professional role, or is that kind of, you know, like a friend, or a wife or something?

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John O'Connell: No, no, it was a professional role, because your friend is not going to tell you whether or not some of your writing is terrible, right? A friend's not going to tell you.

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Mark Wickersham: My wife was.

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John O'Connell: your deadline. A friend's gonna say, well, you had a lot going on in your life. No, you need an accountability partner who will tell you the hard truth of.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah.

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John O'Connell: you're not balancing things well, you're doing a crap job at balancing it, and you need to do better. That's an accountability partner.

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Mark Wickersham: Love it. What's the, one skill or hobby that you have that people might not know about?

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John O'Connell: I used to… I had a full woodworking shop in my basement before I moved from New Jersey, and I still have a large… I have two work tables, woodworking tables that are out in my garage at this point, and

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John O'Connell: you know, so I'm moving from making furniture to making smaller things, like signs and things like that. But yep, I love it. Working with my hands is…

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John O'Connell: definitely a big change from being on my computer and video conferencing, so I really enjoy it.

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Mark Wickersham: It's kind of like, I don't know, like painting, like painting a room or a deck or something, like, there's something like, you know, your day-to-day thing, like, you could work at a desk all day long, and you… the desk looks the same, but when you do something tangible with your hands, right, it just… you get that result where you just look at it and say, yeah, it looks pretty good, yeah.

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John O'Connell: Yup.

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Mark Wickersham: I could definitely understand that.

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Mark Wickersham: What's a recent book that you read that you would recommend?

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John O'Connell: So, I'm a huge fantasy and science fiction person.

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Mark Wickersham: Okay.

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John O'Connell: So, so I just re-read The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien. If you've, if you've watched, any of the, like, the Rings of Power that was on, Amazon.

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John O'Connell: and you want to really know the backstory around that, check out the Silmarillion, it's absolutely fantastic. For those of you who are, who are, significant historians and,

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John O'Connell: And, really, really into fantasy, you can check out the history of Middle-earth, but that's, like, you know, 13,000 pages or something. It's an enormous 10-volume.

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Mark Wickersham: Oh my god!

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John O'Connell: Right now, I'm actually reading Mistborn, which is another fantasy book. It's a little bit older, there's quite a few in the series. I tend to pick up books that have really more than one, edition in the series.

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John O'Connell: Because I don't like waiting for something else to come out, so I tend to pick up books that have a couple of books already in this series, and then I'll read that, or I'll also listen to a book on tape, you know, with Audible, so I do both.

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John O'Connell: And I usually have two books going simultaneously, which is also…

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Mark Wickersham: I do have that problem, too. I got 2 or 3 books, like, maybe then it's that before you buy another one and start going on that. Like a lot of older dads, I love the World War II, you know, the history of it, and Rick Atkinson, who's… has a recent one about the Revolutionary War.

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Mark Wickersham: just finished up his three-part series on the, World War II. He focused on, on,

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Mark Wickersham: Africa, Italy, and Europe, which was really great, and then Ian Toll, I just finished up a three-part series on the Pacific War, which kind of gets a little bit overshadowed by the war in Europe, was really absolutely fascinating. The fact that both of them were going on at the same time just…

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Mark Wickersham: boggles my mind what the U.S. and the world went through at that particular time, but so I appreciate the book recommendations, I appreciate your time, John. This has been a lot of fun. I can't believe how quickly the time has passed on this.

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John O'Connell: Mark, this was incredible. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it, and it was my pleasure to join you. Thank you.

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Mark Wickersham: Good stuff. Alright, thanks, John.

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John O'Connell: Take it easy.