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Stop Using Generic Marketing: Do This Instead · Views from 6,230

• 0:12
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  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Welcome everyone to Zephyr's Adjusted for Risk podcast from the shores of Lake Tahoe.
• 0:23
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: I'm Ryan Nauman, the market strategist here at Zephyr.
• 0:27
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: One of the biggest challenges financial advisors face is growing organically, which includes marketing and prospecting.
• 0:35
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: I could be wrong here, but not many advisors get into wealth management because they enjoy marketing and prospecting, it can be a challenge for some.
• 0:46
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: I have on the perfect guest to talk about the importance of marketing and prospecting in order to achieve organic growth.
• 0:56
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: But first, this episode is sponsored by the award-winning Zephyr, which helps investment professionals make more informed investment decisions on behalf of their clients.
• 1:07
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: All right, enough from me.
• 1:08
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: I've already talked enough.
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  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Let's go ahead and bring on the star of the show.
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  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: To give a very warm welcome to Eden Ovidea.
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  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Eden is the co-founder and CEO of Fenny AI.
• 1:24
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Eden, thank you so much for coming on the show.
• 1:27
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: It's an honor to have you on.
• 1:28
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Really excited about this conversation.
• 1:30
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: It's gonna be really fun.
• 1:32
  Ryan Nauman Market Strategist Zephyr: Can you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and Fenny AI?
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:37
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: I have to say I'm super excited.
• 1:39
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: I don't know if I shared this with you, but as I was getting into the industry and started building Finney, this was actually one of the podcasts that me and my co-founder were listening to pretty religiously just to
• 1:48
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: get a better lay of the land.
• 1:49
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: So it's great to be on the other side of things.
• 1:52
  Ryan: Thank you.
• 1:53
  Ryan: And then not many people come on and say that, so It's an honor.
• 1:56
  Ryan: Thank you
• 1:57
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: Yeah.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: So my quick background and the background on Finney me and my co-founders all studied AI engineering and machine learning in college, and then we all went through different walks of life.
• 2:07
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: I ended up in consulting at Boston Consulting Group on their private equity team, doing a lot of work in our wonderful indus-industry of wealth management, more so on the M&A side of things.
• 2:17
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: There's a long story there, but essentially all the cards lined up such that I was faced over and over again with the problem of organic growth for advisors.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: And I kept hearing how frustrating this process was.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: There was clearly no great solution.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: And I felt that in 2023, technology was just getting to the point where we can probably build something really meaningful and different from anything that had ever been available to advisors before.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: And so me and my co-founders all left our jobs at early 2024 to start Finney.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: And the goal and the only thing we do is help financial advisors grow organically.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: So basically help them find new families they can serve better than anyone else and grow their assets.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: That's truly the only thing we do.
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  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: It's the only thing I think about every single day when I wake up in the morning.
• 3:02
  Eden Ovadia Co-Founder & CEO FINNY: So it's a topic I obviously love to talk about.
• 3:05
  Ryan: Yeah, and then that's fantastic.
• 3:07
  Ryan: So I'm glad you brought that up because it feels if a lot of companies out there, a lot of firms in this space, they do a lot of things okay.
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  Ryan: They spread themselves very thin.
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  Ryan: It's good that you know what you're really good at.
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  Ryan: You do it really good.
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  Ryan: It's all you think about, all you do.
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  Ryan: It's not like you're trying to be one, a million things across the
• 3:29
  Eden Ovadia: Yep.
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  Eden Ovadia: Yeah, you know what they say, jack of all trades, master of none.
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  Ryan: I love it.
• 3:35
  Ryan: I love it.
• 3:35
  Ryan: You're exactly right.
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  Ryan: So your experience, you've got the wealth management experience, and then you're bringing technology together.
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  Ryan: I'm sure that experience has really helped you with you and your co-founders in starting Finney and getting a really big, better understanding of how, what the challenges are, the gaps, and how technology can fit that
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  Eden Ovadia: Yeah absolutely
• 4:01
  Ryan: What...
• 4:03
  Ryan: This is probably a question just I wanna know, Eden, but what's it like to be the co-founder and CEO of a company that's supported by Josh Brown?
• 4:13
  Eden Ovadia: Josh is awesome.
• 4:15
  Eden Ovadia: There's actually a funny story.
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  Eden Ovadia: When Josh came when I met Josh, I think at this point it was like two and a half years ago it was really early days of Finney.
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  Eden Ovadia: I was just getting started, and despite me having been in the wealth industry from a consulting and M&A perspective, I didn't really understand the dynamics and all the people and the super players and power players like Josh and
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  Eden Ovadia: Michael Kitces.
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  Eden Ovadia: And so Josh came inbound and booked a demo from our website.
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  Eden Ovadia: And I remember I just-- it was me, his assistant, and Josh, and I just started pitching him as if he was, a regular advisor.
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  Eden Ovadia: And I was like this is how Finney works," and, just started doing a demo.
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  Eden Ovadia: And I remember his assistant was like "Sorry to interrupt here, but do you know who Josh Brown is?"
• 4:55
  Eden Ovadia: And I was like, "Yeah, I've done some research on Ritholtz," but very light.
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  Eden Ovadia: And so we took a step back, and he's "Okay, so this is actually, a little bit more context."
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  Eden Ovadia: They were super gracious about it.
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  Eden Ovadia: But it-- And then we ended up having a good laugh for a minute afterwards, and obviously in the end, he ended up coming on as an advisor to Finney and an investor in our company.
• 5:12
  Eden Ovadia: But it came from a really organic place, and I think he appreciated the fact that I probably came into this a little bit more naive than others have.
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  Eden Ovadia: It's been tremendous to work with him.
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  Eden Ovadia: I think when he had publicly announced his involvement in our company, we had been booked straight demos for eight m- eight, eight weeks straight.
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  Eden Ovadia: There was like a wait list just to see the product.
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  Eden Ovadia: It-- which has been awesome from that perspective.
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  Eden Ovadia: And he also is just super wise and has just eagle eye view of all the innovation and everything that's happening in our industry.
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  Eden Ovadia: So just been a great person to bounce ideas off of.
• 5:45
  Ryan: I love that story.
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  Ryan: And and it probably helped that you didn't go into it just all starstruck, and you're just regular person.
• 5:52
  Ryan: That's fantastic.
• 5:54
  Ryan: I love it.
• 5:56
  Ryan: you had said that your background, you did a lot with M&A.
• 6:00
  Ryan: And, M&A is very popular today.
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  Ryan: It's like whenever you see wealthmanagement.com articles, it's all M&A mergers firms acquiring other firms.
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  Ryan: It's just all over the place, and I feel as if that's maybe people rely on that for growth.
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  Ryan: It's a popular growth vehicle for wealth management firms.
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  Ryan: Do you think growing organically has become a lost art with so many people just saying I'll get growth by buying another firm"?
• 6:30
  Eden Ovadia: Hundred percent.
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  Eden Ovadia: I think a lot of firms over the last five to ten years have become complacent and a little bit lazy, honestly.
• 6:36
  Eden Ovadia: And growth in M&A is almost almost like a hack, right?
• 6:42
  Eden Ovadia: You can just buy your way to these growth numbers.
• 6:45
  Eden Ovadia: But ultimately you're not really building up the muscle in how to grow the good old-fashioned way through client acquisition.
• 6:51
  Eden Ovadia: And now with how-- as these multiples are going through the roof, growth through M&A is no longer...
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  Eden Ovadia: it never really was the economical decision, but now it's just the most capital inefficient thing a firm can do.
• 7:02
  Eden Ovadia: All the good deals are now going at these crazy multiples, and the deals that aren't probably have a reason why they're not.
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  Eden Ovadia: And so it's no longer a great strategy to just rely on M&A.
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  Eden Ovadia: You have to supplement it with, a good growth strategy.
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  Eden Ovadia: When you bring in a new asset a new partner firm, you have to help them actually reach those growth numbers that you made the bet that they would be worth it, right?
• 7:23
  Eden Ovadia: And so I think in the last, let's call it twenty-four to thirty-six months, there's been an immense resurgence back to focus on good old-fashioned client acquisition, share of wallet growth, like the old school way of growing as the
• 7:35
  Eden Ovadia: market has made it really difficult and capital inefficient to pursue M&A.
• 7:40
  Ryan: I- it's funny that you said the old school way of growing, right?
• 7:43
  Ryan: You would think like organic growth, like referrals, not many people talk about the importance of referrals today.
• 7:49
  Ryan: It's all this other...
• 7:49
  Ryan: And it's what happened from, and I'm gonna age myself here, 20 years ago when I got in the industry, it was all about here's a business card, referrals, let's set up your neighbor, your friends, your family.
• 8:01
  Ryan: What happened to those days?
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  Ryan: Where'd
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  Eden Ovadia FINNY: Yeah, referrals are still king.
• 8:05
  Eden Ovadia FINNY: I depending on which research you're looking at, it's something like seventy-five to eighty-five percent of growth in our industry still comes from referrals.
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  Eden Ovadia FINNY: The problem is referrals are the passive growth strategy, right?
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  Eden Ovadia FINNY: There's not much you can do in the form of being proactive in referrals.
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  Eden Ovadia FINNY: Most advisors just have to sit back and wait for them to come in.
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  Eden Ovadia FINNY: And so firms with high growth ambitions who want to two, three, four X their growth from last year, referrals serve as the baseline.
• 8:29
  Eden Ovadia FINNY: But anything you wanna do above that, you have to start getting creative with different growth strategies because it's really hard to scalably, predictably grow referrals as a channel
• 8:39
  Ryan: Yeah, very good point.
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  Ryan: And you're relying on other people.
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  Ryan: Like you said, it's not the most proactive approach, and at some point your clients might run out of referrals too.
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  Eden Ovadia: Right
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  Ryan: on how wide their net expands as well.
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  Ryan: So
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  Eden Ovadia: Can you imagine if I went to raise, a f-- round of funding from investors and they said, "Hey, what's your growth strategy?"
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  Eden Ovadia: And I said, "Oh, my clients are gonna refer me new business."
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  Eden Ovadia: I'm like, they're like-- They'd be like, "Yeah, of course they are, but what's your growth strategy beyond that?
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  Eden Ovadia: Like, how do you wanna hit these growth targets?
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  Eden Ovadia: Are you just gonna sit back and wait for your clients to refer business to you?"
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  Eden Ovadia: It's like that's any other business it's a bit of a silly thing to say.
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  Eden Ovadia: They're implicit in growth strategies, but what else are you doing?
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  Ryan: Yeah, exactly.
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  Ryan: And like you said before too, I hate to cast this term across financial but it could be a lazy approach, right?
• 9:26
  Ryan: Versus being more proactive and really getting out there and putting yourself out there, whether that's doing events or whatever, marketing, whatever it is.
• 9:37
  Ryan: So why do you think organic growth and prospecting has become so difficult for advisors?
• 9:43
  Ryan: I think, when you get into the wealth management space, you have to realize, prospecting, connecting relationships, it all goes together you would think.
• 9:52
  Ryan: But obviously it's a challenge for some.
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  Ryan: Why do you think it is so difficult?
• 9:58
  Eden Ovadia: I think you said it earlier, the best advisors didn't typically go into this industry because they're pro marketers, right?
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  Eden Ovadia: They typically, the best advisors I've spoken to have a passion for helping families.
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  Eden Ovadia: They've honed in on their skills.
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  Eden Ovadia: They're really good at doing a very specific subset of whether it's financial planning, estate planning, tax planning just being a holistic partner to their clients.
• 10:17
  Eden Ovadia: But they're not in it because they wanna build, the best social media marketing strategy.
• 10:21
  Eden Ovadia: And so those skills typically are a little bit different.
• 10:24
  Eden Ovadia: And I also think in the age of AI now, having a well-defined voice that cuts through all the noise and slop we see has never been harder.
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  Eden Ovadia: Before, advisors could just do the bare minimum and hope that someone is gonna find them online.
• 10:37
  Eden Ovadia: But now it's-- the bar has just kept ra-- getting raised in terms of how to stand out that it's really never been harder to make a voi-- a name for yourself in the industry
• 10:48
  Ryan: Yeah, you're exactly right.
• 10:49
  Ryan: It, I have a lot of conversations just talking about how competitive this space is, and
• 10:55
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah
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  Ryan: expectations from investors and prospects, they want personalization, they want a whole menu of investment options.
• 11:03
  Ryan: Again, myself, when I started, it was just mutual funds, ETFs, and we're good.
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  Eden Ovadia: Yep
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  Ryan: and clients, they want more than that.
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  Ryan: That's not gonna do it, and it's getting competitive, very competitive.
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  Ryan: So how is You talked about AI and just AI slop.
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  Ryan: Yes, it can help a lot of advisors, but also, they might be using it in the wrong way.
• 11:28
  Ryan: How is AI changing advisor prospecting?
• 11:33
  Eden Ovadia: It's made it harder to combat the noise, but I think for advisors who have done the work, the best advisors have already figured out why they can serve their end client better than anyone else, right?
• 11:43
  Eden Ovadia: I think, before we might have seen a lot of advisors say, "Hey, any pre-retirees in the US I wanna work with."
• 11:49
  Eden Ovadia: That just won't cut it anymore because now the pre-retirees are saying why you and not the thousand other advisors that I see online that also help pre-retirees?"
• 11:56
  Eden Ovadia: And so it now becomes really important to say, "Oh actually, I wanna help people who own dental practices and are thinking about selling their practice and retiring."
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  Eden Ovadia: And, I've worked with a dozen others like these, and I've become the premier expert.
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  Eden Ovadia: And so I think in the world of AI, it becomes a force multiplier if you know how to use it properly.
• 12:14
  Eden Ovadia: And so let's say you come to...
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  Eden Ovadia: I'll use Finney as an example.
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  Eden Ovadia: You come to Finney, and you say, "I want to work with this niche or this set of niches."
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  Eden Ovadia: Finney can help create really personalized time-sensitive content targeting that end client and also create, hyper-segmented lists to reach out to.
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  Eden Ovadia: But garbage in, garbage out, right?
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  Eden Ovadia: Finney is not a silver bullet.
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  Eden Ovadia: If you tell Finney, "Hey, I wanna work with all pre-retirees," and create content that's generic to all of them, w-- this is not a magic wand, right?
• 12:42
  Eden Ovadia: Like it's going to create AI slop.
• 12:44
  Eden Ovadia: And I think there's a common misconception there that any platform, any- anything is going to be this like silver bullet that'll solve growth.
• 12:51
  Eden Ovadia: It takes real work
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  Ryan: Exactly.
• 12:54
  Ryan: I love that saying, "Garbage in, garbage out."
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  Ryan: We say it a lot in terms of data.
• 12:59
  Ryan: If you throw
• 13:00
  Eden Ovadia: Yep
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  Ryan: Zephyr and it's garbage, you're gonna get garbage out, for sure.
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  Ryan: Do you think you mentioned niche, your financial advisor is focusing more on a niche market.
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  Ryan: Where the industry is going, is be really good at that one niche market?
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  Ryan: Or are you just that net as wide as you can to get as many clients as you can?
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  Ryan: Do you think the best advisor should focus on, like you say, dent- dentists or, I worked for a financial advisor, he really focused on, he had sports agents as clients, so that was his market.
• 13:34
  Ryan: Do you think that's the way especially in terms of marketing?
• 13:38
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
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  Eden Ovadia: It's funny 'cause we actually opened today talking about specialization.
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  Eden Ovadia: It was in the ter- in the context of Finney, but I, I said earlier, jack of all trades, master of none.
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  Eden Ovadia: I think that applies to this industry as well.
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  Eden Ovadia: The end consumer, their expectations, and you said it earlier, have just been skyrocketing, right?
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  Eden Ovadia: They expect to be, have hyper-personalized level of service white glove really specific, holistic, just they want help in a bunch of different things.
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  Eden Ovadia: And advisors just who are generalists aren't gonna be able to deliver that level of service and specificity that the end client is increasingly expecting.
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  Eden Ovadia: And so I think a hundred percent, niching is actually...
• 14:17
  Eden Ovadia: And having multiple niches, right?
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  Eden Ovadia: It doesn't have to be one thing that you do really well, but you can have a couple of areas of focus.
• 14:23
  Eden Ovadia: But the more that you spread yourself thin across these, the less specialized and the less sharp your messaging is going to be, and clients can pick up on that really quickly, I think.
• 14:31
  Eden Ovadia: It's the biggest trend that we've seen over the last twenty years is the changing demands of consumer and their expectations regarding, personalized experiences.
• 14:40
  Ryan: Yeah.
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  Ryan: Let's talk about personalization.
• 14:42
  Ryan: Perfect segue, Eden.
• 14:43
  Ryan: It's y- I talk a lot in terms of personalized investment solutions.
• 14:49
  Ryan: One-size-fit-all mutual funds and need to...
• 14:51
  Ryan: They're not gonna work anymore.
• 14:52
  Ryan: You need a personalized investment solutions to offer these clients because they want personalization, they want to be able to customize, they want transparency, right?
• 15:02
  Ryan: And a lot of times like I said, I talk about them in terms of investment solutions, investment management.
• 15:08
  Ryan: You also have said, though, it's also very important when it comes to prospecting to have a personalized approach.
• 15:14
  Ryan: Why is it also important for prospecting in term- in addition to investment solutions?
• 15:22
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah, the, this whole industry is based off of trust, right?
• 15:27
  Eden Ovadia: That's what's driving client relationships and the prospecting or just, growth strategies, that's the very first time, the very first interaction you're gonna have with a potential future client.
• 15:38
  Eden Ovadia: So sending a generic message, a generic newsletter, some, s- generic market outlook or insights, the same way you wouldn't pick a generic mutual fund for your client, you probably don't want to put your f- the first interaction they
• 15:49
  Eden Ovadia: have being something that isn't, doesn't represent your best foot forward.
• 15:53
  Eden Ovadia: And that's the idea, right?
• 15:54
  Eden Ovadia: Like personalization at every step, making for and building that trust-based relationship from the very first interaction.
• 16:00
  Eden Ovadia: There's no reason why your future client should think of you as, should get some spray and pray email that has nothing to do with you
• 16:08
  Ryan: Love that.
• 16:09
  Ryan: Yeah, and staying with the personalized approach, I, the first thing I think of is that's a lot of work, a personalized approach, whether it's on the investment management side or prospecting or ju- Like you said, a newsletter going
• 16:23
  Ryan: out to everybody that's not personalized, do they actually read it?
• 16:28
  Ryan: how can you do it at scale?
• 16:30
  Ryan: We've talked a lot about financial advisors.
• 16:32
  Ryan: They've got a lot on their plate today.
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  Ryan: It's not easy
• 16:36
  Eden Ovadia: Yep
• 16:37
  Ryan: advisor, so they have to, do things at scale, make it efficient in order to do what's most important, and that's relationship building.
• 16:45
  Ryan: How can the enterprise firms that are so big scale prospecting and marketing while maintaining a personalized approach?
• 16:53
  Eden Ovadia: I'm so happy you said that because I was about to say, listen there's two worlds of being a financial advisor.
• 16:59
  Eden Ovadia: There's being a financial advisor and also running your entire business yourself or with limited help.
• 17:04
  Eden Ovadia: And then there's being a financial advisor at a large firm where you might actually have a marketing and sales team to support your efforts.
• 17:10
  Eden Ovadia: In the f-- in, in both cases, I would say give the work to the experts.
• 17:16
  Eden Ovadia: In the case of a smaller RIA, the, that expert might be AI agents maybe platforms or tools that can help them scale.
• 17:23
  Eden Ovadia: And in the world of larger firms that can afford to have a centralized marketing or sales function, I would say lean on them.
• 17:29
  Eden Ovadia: The best-- this is actually like something we just announced a couple weeks ago with the launch of our work with Mercer Advisors.
• 17:36
  Eden Ovadia: But we have been thinking a lot about if you are a large firm with hundreds of advisors, how can you scale, the personalization?
• 17:44
  Eden Ovadia: How can you make sure that every end client is getting a very personalized bespoke interaction at scale?
• 17:49
  Eden Ovadia: And the cool thing about AI now is it's actually able to do that, and we can actually turn an entire agent or an entire force of advisors into a sales force, each one amplifying their own unique story and
• 18:02
  Eden Ovadia: offering to their network and having a centralized team do that on behalf of advisors.
• 18:10
  Ryan: Yeah.
• 18:10
  Ryan: Yeah, I think it's so important.
• 18:12
  Ryan: And like you said, providing that support.
• 18:14
  Ryan: Now I feel as if some of these large firms, they just bring them on and then let the financial advisor still figure it out, right?
• 18:21
  Ryan: Which isn't helping the financial advisor, like you said, grow organically coming back to it.
• 18:27
  Ryan: So you talked about this process, especially maybe they have a centralized marketing group that can help.
• 18:34
  Ryan: how can financial advisors automate these processes so they can spend more time, which is most important, building relationships and supporting their clients versus, again, going back to investment management.
• 18:47
  Ryan: Instead of sitting behind Bloomberg and just searching for the best mutual fund or something, their time is better off meeting with clients.
• 18:54
  Ryan: How can
• 18:54
  Eden Ovadia: Yep
• 18:55
  Ryan: automate the marketing process?
• 18:58
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
• 18:58
  Eden Ovadia: So I think the beautiful thing about a, like a platform like Finney, but there are others too, is that you can set and forget a lot of the work in the background as long as, like we said earlier,
• 19:08
  Eden Ovadia: if you give it the right context to start, you don't put garbage in, you put good in you're gonna get good out.
• 19:13
  Eden Ovadia: And so the idea here is leveraging a platform like Finney, they can actually identify who their niche is and then Finney can basically do the rest of the work.
• 19:20
  Eden Ovadia: So f-- so right, I'll use you as an example.
• 19:23
  Eden Ovadia: We can find people who you would get-- Our m- machine learner models can actually find people who we think you would get along with more than anyone else can then create personalized content based on everything it knows about
• 19:33
  Eden Ovadia: you and your specialization and all of your knowledge, targeting those people, run the entire marketing and sales process essentially until meetings are booked in your calendar.
• 19:43
  Eden Ovadia: And that's typically the handoff process.
• 19:44
  Eden Ovadia: That's when a human intervention is going to have the most leverage.
• 19:47
  Eden Ovadia: But any action before the first meeting really is almost like wasted time for the advisor.
• 19:52
  Eden Ovadia: They're way better off serving their existing clients
• 19:56
  Ryan: Yeah, you're exactly right because that's where they build AUM, and help with referrals, right?
• 20:02
  Ryan: You build a stronger relationship there and I'm glad you brought...
• 20:06
  Ryan: Sometimes y- people, they get upset, they all of a sudden, on their phones if they search something or they talk about something, all of a sudden they get all those ads, right?
• 20:16
  Ryan: But it's that personalized approach.
• 20:18
  Ryan: Amazon's doing, all these big tech firms and consu- consumer firm companies, they're data, we search for things, to offer more personalized goods and services.
• 20:32
  Ryan: And we're awfully slow in the wealth management space to adapt to technology.
• 20:37
  Ryan: We are, and that's what you guys are doing at Finney, I believe, is, being able to add that personalized touch so we're just not throwing out slop, like you said.
• 20:45
  Ryan: I think it's fantastic.
• 20:47
  Ryan: And staying with AI, it's really evolved.
• 20:52
  Ryan: I feel as if last year people were talking about it, trying to figure out what it was.
• 20:56
  Ryan: It's a support tool maybe last year, but now it's really evolved to being, helping advisor growth.
• 21:04
  Ryan: How do you think it's evolved, and what do you think advisors are using it for today?
• 21:10
  Eden Ovadia: In, in terms of growth?
• 21:12
  Ryan: Yes, in terms of growth and really being more of a partner versus just doing content
• 21:19
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
• 21:19
  Eden Ovadia: I think the first part is one that you nailed.
• 21:21
  Eden Ovadia: It's spending more time on their clients and abstracting and automating away anything else that AI can do really well.
• 21:27
  Eden Ovadia: At its very core, it's just giving advisors time back and helping them grow more efficiently.
• 21:32
  Eden Ovadia: So what that actually means in terms of behaviors that it can automate AI is really good at taking a lot of unstructured data and structuring it and making sense of it.
• 21:40
  Eden Ovadia: In the world of growth, that means looking up tons and tons of people and identifying and scoring them based off who the advisor can serve better than anyone else, matching them to clients that they might look like already
• 21:52
  Eden Ovadia: and saying, "Hey, Ryan, you already work with John Smith.
• 21:55
  Eden Ovadia: Jane Smith over here has a very similar profile.
• 21:56
  Eden Ovadia: We think you would work really well with Jane Smith as well."
• 21:59
  Eden Ovadia: And then the next step, generating personalized content, researching Jane Smith, figuring out, where she works, what she looks like, predicting what her pain points might be, and then addressing those in the very first outreach in a personalized way.
• 22:13
  Eden Ovadia: Basically running, that entire process, all that prospecting that is, at the end of the day, it is a volume game, and so would just not be worth time to spend human hours on until you really get that meeting,
• 22:25
  Eden Ovadia: and that's when you can-- the human can take charge again.
• 22:29
  Ryan: That's awesome, Evan.
• 22:30
  Ryan: All right, let's bring out your crystal ball.
• 22:33
  Ryan: Bring your technology background, what you're doing at Finney, your experience in wealth management.
• 22:39
  Ryan: What's the future of advisor growth technology?
• 22:44
  Ryan: What's that look like moving forward?
• 22:47
  Eden Ovadia: In my ideal world, advisors would be spending zero percent of their time on doing anything before the first client meeting.
• 22:56
  Eden Ovadia: All of that would be-- or the first prospect meeting.
• 22:58
  Eden Ovadia: All of that would be completely abstracted away and automated from the advisor so they can really focus on building the relationship, building that trust in a human-to-human connection.
• 23:09
  Eden Ovadia: Everything else the AI agents would be doing, and I think we're getting closer and closer to that world
• 23:14
  Ryan: Yeah.
• 23:14
  Ryan: You know what?
• 23:15
  Ryan: I think that was all of our listeners out there, that was probably music to their ears.
• 23:19
  Ryan: They probably are like, "Yes, w- let's bring it tomorrow.
• 23:24
  Ryan: Bring it tomorrow."
• 23:25
  Eden Ovadia: Yeah,
• 23:26
  Ryan: For sure
• 23:27
  Eden Ovadia: No one likes to be, prospecting and getting told no all day.
• 23:30
  Eden Ovadia: No one likes to write a thousand manual emails just, to have them go unresponded to.
• 23:35
  Eden Ovadia: So I think most advisors would be pretty happy with this, the future state of the world
• 23:39
  Ryan: I read something recently, it's true.
• 23:42
  Ryan: Advisor, and I'm not even saying advisors in general, but other people in the business world, they spend two hours of their day in the morning planning for their day, right?
• 23:54
  Ryan: Planning for it, and then they kinda do it.
• 23:56
  Ryan: But two hours just to plan what you're gonna do for the day, that's a lot of time.
• 24:01
  Ryan: So if, like you said, if there's a tool, technology that can shorten that two hours or basically give that two hours back to a financial advisor is huge.
• 24:11
  Eden Ovadia: Yep.
• 24:11
  Ryan: So
• 24:12
  Eden Ovadia: I love that.
• 24:12
  Eden Ovadia: That's a great analogy actually
• 24:15
  Ryan: Awesome, Evan.
• 24:17
  Ryan: Fantastic conversation.
• 24:19
  Ryan: Really glad to have you on.
• 24:21
  Ryan: It was an honor to have you on.
• 24:23
  Ryan: I've followed a lot of your guys' work, doing some great things at Fenny.
• 24:27
  Ryan: Really exciting.
• 24:28
  Ryan: And happy to see you guys grow so much.
• 24:31
  Ryan: So thank you for coming out.
• 24:32
  Ryan: Where can our audience get more information about Fenny AI?
• 24:38
  Eden Ovadia: Super simple.
• 24:39
  Eden Ovadia: They can just go to finny.com.
• 24:41
  Eden Ovadia: That's F-I-N-N-Y dot com.
• 24:43
  Eden Ovadia: They can find me on LinkedIn.
• 24:45
  Eden Ovadia: I say like my passion project these days is just being super vocal on LinkedIn about what we're building and educating, and there's so much interesting things happening in our industry right now.
• 24:55
  Eden Ovadia: And so I I like to get a pulse on that.
• 24:57
  Eden Ovadia: Just I'm pretty active there, so that would be another great forum to connect.
• 25:01
  Eden Ovadia: Reach out.
• 25:01
  Eden Ovadia: I respond to every single one of my LinkedIn messages.
• 25:04
  Eden Ovadia: And, and let's connect
• 25:06
  Ryan: Awesome.
• 25:08
  Ryan: thank you so much.
• 25:09
  Ryan: Fantastic conversation.
• 25:11
  Ryan: And thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Zephyr's Adjusted for Risk podcast.
• 25:16
  Ryan: You can watch all of our other episodes on the Zephyr YouTube channel and Spotify, along with any other or all your other locations or platforms you watch your podcasts.
• 25:27
  Ryan: Also, be sure to like and subscribe to those channels and give us a follow on LinkedIn.
• 25:31
  Ryan: you very much and have a great rest of your week
• 25:34
  Eden Ovadia: Thanks, Brian