AdviceTech Podcast #38 – Feezily – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello and welcome to the Ensombl AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamandtids and the guest joining me here today to deep dive into Feezily has a degree in electrical and software engineering. So you know a little bit numerous has been the lead singer in a band and was a four unit maths geek like myself so has probably been traumatized by the Coroneous textbook we all had to do. Right? How funny is that reaction? Somebody who hasn’t done for us won’t know that. But if you picture the worst design textbook ever, with the worst font to make it look like it’s an entire legal contract all the way through. That’s what that textbook was. It was the most horrific thing. So thank you so much for joining me on the show. Chris Colman.

Chris Colman
Thank you. Thank you for that intro. I sound pretty a lot more awesome than I thought I was.

Peita Diamantidis
Well, that’s my job right as the guest Absolutely.

Chris Colman
I do remember Jim Coroneous. There was a mistake in the some of his answers in the back of the book and my mate who also did for unit maths. contacted him because the book said if you find any mistakes in the book, please contact me. So he rang me he had a chat. And he knows that it was a mistake.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s fantastic. Man, he’s even you can google Coroneus and they’ve read it maths textbook. And there’s whole sort of you know, forums of people who’ve been scarred by tears. And it’s funny like these little things, right? It says little moments that imprint on us. Look, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I’m really keen to dive into the app. But as we always do, before we get started, we get to know you a little better as a user of technology. So share with us what is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Chris Colman
Yeah, probably overused one more than any other and that is the Winky Smiley. Okay, put that on most of the comments. I just post. Okay. People know, because there’s no ability to convey jovial nature in a post. So too many people take me too seriously, if I don’t put that little winky emoji,

Peita Diamantidis
Right. I view things like emojis as like a sight soundtrack in a movie, the soundtrack helps you understand? Like, what’s the real tone, you know, what’s really happening? And I think emojis are like padding texts, it gives you a bit of tone indication. So I’m right there with you on that. I think it’s really important I even use, I’m using them far more in emails now than I ever used to as well, because I just think it’s a way to really help somebody get a feel. For those of us that are a bit more jovial, I guess, too, we’d love that stuff. And so the second thing we want to know is if you had to delete all but three apps off your smartphone, which three would you keep?

Chris Colman
Well, I have to keep Gmail has helped me communicate with everything. WhatsApp definitely has got a lot of friend groups on WhatsApp. Okay. couldn’t do without that. Yeah. And unfortunately, this one’s gonna sound boring, but the myGov ID app, otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do my bears. My interactions.

Peita Diamantidis
I love it. Well, you should be pleased. You’re pleased to know that that’s not come up yet. So you’ve done well, you’re a unique individual. We already worked that out. Exactly. Now, actually, can I get you your little mic thing? Can you move it a little away from can move? Yeah, not even just a little better? Much better. Perfect. Well done. Fantastic. All right. So let’s dive into feasibly now. Am I saying that right? Is there a better way to say that’s perfect. So

Chris Colman
mispronouncing, call it free easily? Add an hour in there.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s like, oh, that sounds like something something you

Chris Colman
can you can spy on something. Cool it down.

Peita Diamantidis
We’d frozen cheese or something like that. Right. So for those who haven’t heard of it before? I’m sure some will. But in the audience, if they haven’t heard before, let’s take it up a little level and get a feel for what category does it fall under? Because, you know, where does it fit in this sort of advice tech app space?

Chris Colman
Okay, well, it can be used at two levels. It’s it’s basically a financial practice revenue management system. Yeah. And it can be used at the one level where it purely just translates all the data from all the different supplier files or provider revenue files and gets it into a normalized format in its database. And then from there, it can export it to whatever system we want, or can be used for the client and their own internal purposes. Yep. So we can export to for integration partners at the moment, it’s okay. Zepo Finn 365 advice, intelligence and I comply to?

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. Okay. And if any, if you were to explore at that point, you’re talking at a sort of per client level, is that really what you’re saying? So it’s connecting to an individual client record? Or it’s,

Chris Colman
it’s basically No, it’ll be the consolidation of a whole month’s or whatever they have. It’s two weeks or whatever. Yep. All that data for all the clients, it just, they just hit a submit button once they’ve finished entering all the statements for a month, and then it goes off to their connected integration partner.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. So I think there’s going to be a whole lot of listeners who are advisors in practices who have never experienced the joys of revenue manager for financial advice. So I think we’ve got an opportunity to educate them on how the how, how much sympathy, they need to demonstrate to the poor person in the practices dealing with this. So yeah, for those of you who don’t understand what, imagine with your banking, instead of being able to log in online, and you’ve got your banking, imagine if your bank just sent you once a month, an email with a CSV attached. And when you open that just had all this data in it. That’s effectively, isn’t it? What’s happening with revenue statements from whether it’s an insurer or, or a platform provider? They send us this data in a sort of a raw sense, don’t they? So that’s it. Yeah.

Chris Colman
And it’s usually in their proprietary format. Yeah. So we decided to do it manually, you spent a lot of time in Excel, copying columns over and switching them around and changing certain values. And yes, it’s a real mess to do it manually.

Peita Diamantidis
It isn’t and bless their cotton socks, despite the fact that this has been something that’s been around for decades, right? It’s always been difficult. They all use different names for things. So some might be an ongoing fee, and some is an annual and some that like it’s, they’ve, it’s almost like there’s these nasty Gremlins and all these big institutions coming out up with as many ways as possible to make the job of consolidating this data as hard as possible. Yeah, right. It does seem a little level. Okay, so these are

Chris Colman
easily jobs to make that go away. Just it handles all the Gremlins for you use drag and drop a file and it it’s really hands out and

Peita Diamantidis
awesome. Okay, so the processing function, then is the files come in, which still would happen. So you get these files sent to you above all, you download them from the provider? For some of them, you have

Chris Colman
to get emailed, some get downloaded. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And then presumably, they get uploaded dragged into Feedly. Is that right? so easily? All right. So talk me through what happens then. What am I

Chris Colman
feasibly, will automatically look even without naming the file in a particular way or anything feasibly will examine the content of the file, through this AI component we’ve built and work out what provider it’s from based on the purely on the content, you don’t tell it that it’s from a MP or mil C or anyone and it just goes oh, that’s an imp such and such format. And then it applies the correct translator for that particular format. And then it translates the data and stores it internally.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, so some instances, they

Chris Colman
do require you say, Well, this is an MLC file, and you got to click from the drop down, choose MLC, and then if there’s multiple formats within MLC, you’ve then got to go to MLC, X, Y, Zed format.

Peita Diamantidis
Right? Okay. And this is particularly I sort of glimpse that on the website. And what caught my attention about that is, we’re all aware of all of the sales and mergers and takeovers and all sorts of things going on. Once again, bless their cotton socks in the industry at the moment. And one of the victims of that is revenue management, because suddenly it changes or it’s slightly different all the time it like all sorts of things get messed with when these big deals at a high level go on. And so I was curious about that are AI function that might sort of help smooth that out a little for people that is less clunkiness and files getting rejected and that sort of stuff?

Chris Colman
Yeah, that’s that’s exactly what it can do. Makes it much easier. And we actually introduced something else some time back where to handle those exact mergers, because oftentimes, they’ll merge and then they might keep the file the same format. But it’s like one path going into town. I think it was exactly the same format, but all the revenue and asked to go in detail rather than one path, right? So we added this component that went okay, well treat it exactly like it’s one path, but redirect all the revenue down in detail now instead of into one path because they no longer

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, exactly. So and it’s there’s just going to be more and more of that. Because of course, it’s like anything what’s going to happen is a whole lot of them are consolidating, and then they’re going to split it and then they’re going to like it’s never ending this is That’s

Chris Colman
right. Yeah, it just happens

Peita Diamantidis
once right? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so the data is all in there. It’s been loaded up, then what you know, in terms of what a practice might be doing then, and let’s just talk a small practice for now. Because I know there’ll be another layer then from a deal group perspective, but from a small practices sense, what are they then doing once that data is uploaded?

Chris Colman
Okay, so if they’ve got a connection with Zephyr was one of the other integration partners, then basically, all their reporting and all their compliance stuff is done by that partner. Yep. So feasibly, in that case, it’s just acted as the, the normalizer of the data and taking that load from all those different formats, we were talking about getting into a central database, and then sending it off to the Zappos or the world and all the reporting and the compliance gets done over on that side. Okay. And that’s what I was saying. It’s two, two levels of feasibly the other level is where you don’t do so much where you may not have an integration partner, and then you start doing further work in, feasibly and that can we do things like raising our CTRs for advisors, and doing all the fancy reports, based on the client lists and stuff like that? Yep. And, obviously breaking it down into cars. Yeah. Corporate authorized representatives. Yep. Okay. And basically, it’s using a, an accounting system that’s built into feasibly to do all the financial side of those things. Okay, as invoices.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so that might be like, you mentioned car, so it might be that this is used for. And in fact, there’s a few of those out there right now, where there’s sort of one broad license, but there’s a couple of businesses under it, because they sort of consolidated some small boutique practices, you know, and then coming under one, and so this would then let them split things.

Chris Colman
That’s right. Yeah, multiple cars and each park and then multiple advisors.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. Okay. And so then, as it’s so that, I can imagine that then the person doing the initial processing is loading up those files? And then do they have the opportunity? So let’s say we, they’ve, you’ve set up in physically, the automation in terms of, okay, we’re using that, you know, the ICT eyes, and all of that is happening? Is there an opportunity then in between for them to go? Yes, that’s okay to go uncomfortable with that information. How does that work? In terms of, you know, layering, how that can get sent out?

Chris Colman
Okay, so, yeah, that can then we’ve got a workflow system built on the accounting system, we got a workflow system, so we can configure it so that once you do an end of period processing, it can generate all the invoices, and then you can review it, and then you can we can configure it to actually automatically email those out. Awesome. Big, big deal a group site with lots of cars and lots of advisors. Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely necessary. If you’ve got a small practices, one or two, they can just download the PDFs and email it across the

Peita Diamantidis
room. Perfect. So then for, say, their own AFSL, then I’m guessing that the primary user really is just the person whether it is the accountant or the principal, or whoever it is that sort of loading up those files. Are they really the primary user? Do you find anybody’s use? Like, is there any reason that the advisors use it as much or anybody else in the practice?

Chris Colman
Not at this stage? No. But that’s something one of the clients had mentioned to us a while ago that it may be rather than sending everything to the advisor, maybe they can get online and feasibly themselves and actually see the reports online and I can go back in history as well, then, yeah, might have been sent something two months ago, they’ve lost it. So if they could get back on the system themselves.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so to that end, then they’re like the end client has in the end, you know, the public, the consumer, then this is sort of never reaches that far. This is very much within practice. Select. Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Okay.

Chris Colman
It’ll be usually a, an admin person, operating at once so much be the adviser themselves. Yeah, there are some that do that. But most of them will have an admin person that maybe they also do their accounting and pay their bills with that. And they’ve also been given the role of revenue processing.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And how about how about then, you know, for, like, one of the biggest issues, it doesn’t matter what system we’re talking about, and what function at forms but going from one to another, right? That minute, we make the decision to go from what at all, you know, a to b? How are you finding that when people because clearly, most practices have this or their deal group does. And so somebody’s going to be if they make the decision to go with physically, they’re going to be coming from somewhere to somewhere else. How do you guys manage that? What do you find are the things that people can do in advance to help them make that easier?

Chris Colman
Yeah. So if it’s someone who’s going to be using the full system with invoicing Everything, then what we normally set up is a client feed from a client data feed from typically x plan. Or we’re establishing one now from a device intelligence as well, where those platforms, those CRMs can give a daily client or a nightly dump of their client data set. Yep. And then when we get provider statements in, we have the names already in the database to match to so I can do name matching, and only has to do each one like each one once. So you get a ANP filing you do the matching is done once you only have to do this name match again, if a new clients added, yep. And so then they will appear to you get it’ll give you a choice of names that looks similar to the name you’re trying to match to. It’s usually pretty accurate. So yeah, just click and go. Yep, that’s the one. Yeah. Okay. So it’s sort of pretty visual, you get your choices on the right hand side and go, Yeah, Bill Smith, and there’s a Bill Smith there. And there’s only if there’s only one on Bill Smith, well, you’re pretty confident. That’s the dude. So except, and away you go.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. Okay. And so then, in terms of then, for example, so one of the things that historically, we’ve just not been as strong on in advice, because, well, I didn’t really have a good because but because we were usually what we would call commission systems, right? So in the old days, it was all about products. And so it came when it came.

Chris Colman
That’s the only word now it is right. And,

Peita Diamantidis
and whereas in this environment, then I think pipeline management and you know, being aware when the fee does get paid, you know, all those sort of things is something we’re going to have to do more and more of because more practices are getting paid directly for as an example. Right? So they’re, they’re charging a fee, and it’s getting paid those sorts of things. So I guess I’m curious about whether it exists now or down the track you guys in terms of you know, can somebody put into the system, Hey, I’ve, I’ve quoted this to that particular client, where we’re waiting for that money to come in, like those sort of things. Are they on the development path? Or do they exist already?

Chris Colman
Yeah, they actually, they’re already you can actually raise invoices from within feasibly for that can raise their invoice to go to their clients. And they can also set up a like a yearly schedule, so that on the 25th of September, every year, you will get a reminder that they’ve got to a studio, whatever, okay, and there’s also a note section they can put in with each client, like I say, I told them next year, I’m gonna up it by 2%, or something or 20% inflation purposes.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so the invoice that goes out is is just effectively paper, or is that or is it something that they can, you know, call it a link to pay?

Chris Colman
PDF? Okay, search? Yeah. Okay.

Peita Diamantidis
So it’s not something that’s like a equivalent of, say, a stripe or, or square where the where the individual could transfer from within the tool. So you guys aren’t at that point where a client can sort of, you know, zap money from a link? No.

Chris Colman
But a lot of clients have like an EZ debit set up already. Right. So continue to use that and use

Peita Diamantidis
that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Because it is one of the things that I think will be it’s not very common right now. But I do think, if you use, you know, down the track, there’ll be more people doing, you know, programs that last six months, and so the payments are spread over, you know, three equal payments. So, you know, like, these sorts of things. And we’re going to need more and more tools that help us do that without just triggering a task to remind us to send the invoice to follow up that you know, like, ah, that’s just Yeah, crazy, crazy talk. So I expect those are the sort of things that will be coming down the track.

Chris Colman
With our process management, like workflow engine that’s built underneath, feasibly. We’ve used that in a number of other products that we’ve never had. It’s developed over many years. And yeah, it’s quite flexible. We can automate lots of things we can we can actually go into a visual process editor and describe the process and the steps and what it’s going to do here and have decision points. Where are this didn’t work, or if this was set up, go this other way. Yeah. So we can visually program the whole process. Okay, fine. Get that automatically far off every year or three months, whatever.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so I’m expecting then that you probably are indifferent about whether it’s advice income, or it’s a mortgage broking or other things. So if a practice is sort of multi,

Chris Colman
that’s right, yeah, we can do mortgage commissions or insurance or investment, that

Peita Diamantidis
sort of, and I’m assuming the tool then just copes with that. It’s like, well, it’s seen those sort of things enough and it and it can process those things. So that’s a bit of a positive so that you’re not trying to handle that in multiple places because that can get

Chris Colman
Yes, that’s difficult. In fact, we designed it from day one to be like that was for a lot of the legacy systems though. hooked into, you know, fund commissions. Yeah. In fact, we call the instead of calling them advisors internally, and feasibly they’re called agents. Okay. And agent could be an advisor could be a broker. mortgage terms. Yeah, it could be whatever you want. So we went with this generic agent term, an agent that acts on behalf of someone else. So yeah. Okay.

Peita Diamantidis
Which makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of then, I mean, fee disclosure, is this big task now we’re all tasked with is that and then need to do an FDS? And you know, and all that sort of things, is that then how you see your integrations with other tools can then use your data and it feeds into the other tool that provides that

Chris Colman
That’s right. For integration partners provide all that side of things at the moment. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so that’s part of I’d imagine a key part so. So hence. So let’s talk through those. So you mentioned advice, intelligence, and x plan. So you’re doing

Chris Colman
no, we’re not going we were getting the client data feed from it. We don’t have a we don’t have data going back to explain at this stage. Okay. Okay. Before we do send data to its advice, intelligence fin, 365, Zepo. And I comply to, okay, yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so the fact that it’s, I mean, the fact that you’re doing Zepo means it’s, there’s probably a whole lot of others CRICOS zipper does sort of talk to a whole lot of other tools, then that can give it some extra grunt in that sense.

Chris Colman
That’s right. It’s got all the Power BI. built in. So yeah, they want to do on certain Zepo land. They can. Yeah, yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And how, like in terms of, you know, other integrations, is there any others you’re working on? Or is there anything else that sort of down the track that’s coming? In terms of your integration list?

Chris Colman
We’ve been in talks with some others. They’re the main ones at the moment. Yep. That alive? Yeah, we’ve, in the last little while, we’ve been really focusing on that whole extra, the completion of that revenue management side. So we’ve been that’s where we come out, you know, the RCTI generation right? side of things. So yeah. Focus.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And look, I think, those tasks, automating those tasks is really important, because it just doesn’t require any insight. So it’s, it’s crazy that we do some of these things manually, because there’s no human interaction really required in that sense. Like, we’re not going to provide some nuance, right. It’s really structured, repetitive. Happens every month. So I’m a big fan of anything that automates those in terms of the then practices, then you do work with it there. Is there a size a type or a way they approach things that works better? For you know, with you guys, or you know, is there anything that it really suits and then others you’d like? That just doesn’t suit us?

Chris Colman
Oh, no, we’ve anyone who didn’t we didn’t suit we’ve done our best to change to suit them. Yep. Okay. It’s a great marketing model that won

Peita Diamantidis
the nomination Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Love it.

Chris Colman
Yeah. There’s some really large dealer groups. And then there’s small practices. We also deal with aggregators that we don’t deal with their clients directly. Yep. So they do the processing on behalf of their clients. And they use feasibly to do it. Okay. Okay. And it was set up specifically for that. So you can outsource to the Philippines or India. And all of the clients that they have, under their books are all available from a drop down menu or from a menu on the main screen. Yeah, so they want to go in and do client a or practice a, they just click, and then everything from then on, they’re dealing with client a, okay. And we also put mechanisms in, in that case, when, when an agency or aggregator like that’s downloading lots of files from for lots of different clients, there’s always the opportunity for them to accidentally upload to the wrong practice. Yeah, so in those cases, we do support embedding the name of the practice in the file name, okay. And then if it determines what practice the file is for, and you’ve if you’ve accidentally tried uploaded to the wrong practice, this seems like it’s for these guys.

Peita Diamantidis
Because that is easy to do when when you’re on a roll of doing those sorts of tasks. You’re getting into drone sort of failure, which is which can be bad.

Chris Colman
Is there go uploading the wrong data and the wrong practice?

Peita Diamantidis
Oh, God, awful. Is there any features that you think, you know, are gems but people often don’t get to the point of using are they And he’s sort of unsung heroes in terms of the features that you feel like users could get some extra benefit out of.

Chris Colman
Oh, they’re awesome reporting facilities in Fazeli. itself. Yeah. But again, because most of the users are going through an integration partner with their all the reporting is done with them. Yeah, it doesn’t really get us a lot. Okay. But there are some smaller clients that are coming online that aren’t gonna go through an integration partner. And so they’ll probably use those. Yeah, okay. Yeah, a lot more.

Peita Diamantidis
And I guess, you know, that’s where it’s another example you’re talking about the automation of the CTI is going out. But, you know, the best systems even automate the report so that then it’s like, you get knowledge and you go, oh, there’s a new report, it’s not something you’ve got a task yourself to then go in and check it out, you know, these, once we can get to the point where the systems are nudging us to, to monitor and watch, you know, that’s fantastic. Yeah, you know, that really feels like we’re empowered. And not just constantly looking at a massive task list that we’ve got, we’ve got to act on. Awesome.

Chris Colman
And so what’s to take over? So we didn’t have to do anything, I was a

Peita Diamantidis
bit of a fan of the robots. Would you please do that thing? I need you to take over that? So what about developments? Talk to me about what’s on the path going forward, whether it’s, you know, in the near future, or where you see things going a bit further down the track, that’s more of a wish list sort of thing? That’s, I’d love it to get to this point. Yeah,

Chris Colman
we’re doing some optimizations at the moment on when, when client matching, there can be if you get a very large dealer group with like, 30 or 40,000 clients. When you first as I was saying before, when you first upload a new statement for provider, you’ve got to match. And so to do the, the lookup to compare each name with all those 30,000 can be quite a burden for a computer to do. So. Yeah, we’ve we’ve already, we haven’t released it yet. We’ve already brought down the timings on those quite significantly.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. Because it’s not something people are as used to these days, is it where you hit Enter, and then there’s a massive delay people are so used to things happening immediately. Yeah, whereas I remember, you know, the bad old days when you’d I mean, it was even Das, you know, and all that’s when you’d sort of do something and you’d go away for 20 minutes,

Chris Colman
need to come back and have three coffees.

Peita Diamantidis
Right. And the problem was, if you hadn’t quite got the directions, right, you’ve wasted the 20 minutes as well, because you’ve then got to correct it. But yeah, okay. So and this is sometimes it’s a lot of data, isn’t it? Like it really is each? It’s not? I think when people you know, sort of think about that data, all they think about is the number of say policies, but per per policy and per revenue run, this is a list of information that’s provided, useful or not, that you guys are processing.

Chris Colman
And we often get problems where the names aren’t exact. So it’s not a simple matter of doing an exact match, because that’d be very quick. We have to do what we called these fuzzy matches, okay? Because someone might be officially called Robert. But they told their product, or the advisor, was always calling them, Bob. And they signed them up to MLC, some MLC product as Bob and then MLC ascending through Bob. And we’ve gotten down the system as Robert. Right. So we’ve had to introduce this fuzzy nickname mapping system where it actually goes all well, if we’re looking for Bob, we’re also going to look for Robert never looking for Edward, we’re going to look for TED or an eddy. And so you can see the multiplication of computing effort involved in doing name matching when you’re not just trying to look for exact matches.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. And what am I now I didn’t ask before, what about client groups? Like you’ve got a family that you service? And there’s Can you is there ability to sort of group them together in the system? Yeah. Okay.

Chris Colman
They come through the x plan data set will come through and that has that information about the groups, okay. Everything?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, cuz it’s, I mean, we mentioned earlier that it was, you know, there’s this, you know, one company takes over another company, that’s one example. But then the lovely product providers then randomly do these product upgrades, where suddenly everybody in this platform gets shifted to that platform, or whatever the stuff is, all the time. So, so all of this is much harder than than it sort of feels like it should be to be honest, in terms of the way they make it. So that makes sense. Anything else further down the track that you think you guys will be adding or, or or sort of developing into the system?

Chris Colman
Ah, we’ve got a lot of things in the backlog. I probably should have looked that up. Man, it sounds great things. The point

Peita Diamantidis
is a lot of it in reacting to what people are sort of required Testing? Is that what you do? Like, it’s like, hey, it’d be great if it did this. And so then you guys go through a process of prioritizing when you can do those is that

Chris Colman
exactly. Okay. A lot of usability issues, some of them are downright, you know, we really need to be able to do this, because that saves so much time. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
yeah. And look, it is a tough, it’s a tough thing to get attention of in a practice, because as a rule, there’s one person doing this. So when you’re looking for efficiencies, in a practice, this sort of stuff doesn’t get as much attention as you might think, because it’s only one poor soul that’s suffering through this, the rest of the team are blissfully ignorant about that. And it’s right. So it’s often one of those things, that’s, that’s not actually given much attention, to be honest. You know, as long as everybody gets paid, and the money comes in, you know, there’s sort of, there’s not as much attention as there should be so. So I do I do like the idea of streamlining these things, because it is a, it’s so repeatable a lot of these functionality. That’s right there, you know, so So, and I guess that’s where I guess you guys have been folding in things like the AI stuff is? Well, let’s make sure that anything that that some simple AI could do, it does. Rather than,

Chris Colman
like, we can’t AI, the transit, the actual translation of the data. Yep. Because that’s just, I was not an exact science. And if you get revenues wrong, that’s it’s really, really bad. If the computer suddenly thinks, you know, this, is that when it’s not that way too risky. Yeah, the classification of a document to say, this is a colonial first date first rap file. It’s dead on and it it’s either that or it’s not, because if it’s slightly different, yeah. Ah, now, I don’t know what that is.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah. And, and that’s the thing I think we probably don’t consider enough is simpler. And when I say that simple, I I’d like the application of like, if, if a human would just scan down something to try and identify if it’s a type, well, then AI can do that. Like, you don’t need a human to do you know, if you’re if GC scanning for something in the like you say look for first rep, okay, it’s there. Like, okay, well, tech can do that. Perfect. Alright. Is there anything we’ve missed in terms of the functionality or what the system can can do? I think so. Things. It sounds like it’s sort of you’ve picked a real niche in terms of solving a problem. Yeah. And like you say, there’s been legacy systems that have done it for some time, but you guys have sort of stepped in with it’s something from, like a clean, you know, from scratch. So you can sort of respond to whether

Chris Colman
that’s right, we didn’t have the burden of the legacy code base, we could just develop this completely modern, really well architected management system.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, perfect, perfect. All right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more about Fazeli, and you are the poor soul in the office that’s like some of these revenue statements, or you know the person and you feel sorry for them and want to find out well, then the website link is in the episode show notes. And I’ve also included Chris’s linked in details, and I’m sure be happy for you to reach out and he will point you in the right direction to find out more. Thank you so much for joining us on the show, Chris and sharing with us what all of us need, because the practices need to get paid and need to know you know, all their data information, but it’s probably one of the less focused on sector of the advice tech space. So I really appreciate your time.

Chris Colman
No problem. Thanks for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
So are you a current user of feasibly I’m betting you probably aren’t only because a lot of our listeners are advisors or power planners or support staff, as opposed to the people who might be processing payments within a practice. So far less of you will be nodding away. Yes, people, Peter, we do use this tool because you won’t be actually performing the function the tool delivers on however, I think it’d be great if you’ve ever been through the process of moving from one of these tools to another, you know, please share your experience on the ensemble platform. These functions are like we were saying before, a bit of an unloved portion of practice management, but are fundamental. And so sharing that experience and the insights you have whether it’s with Fazeli, or another tool, I think would be invaluable. And of course, if you have shifted to Fazeli, then share that experience and you know, any insights you could bring to other users out there. Now as for my thoughts, I’d actually like to throw down a bit of a challenge to all of those out there who aren’t in practice management, revenue processing parts of a practice or a dealer group. So if you’re any of those other things that I talked about, you might be an advisor or or paraplanner, a support staff. Somebody’s not involved in that sort of revenue processing function. I’d love you to take the opportunity to ask how that gets done in the practice. So the dealer group, what’s the tool they use? What’s the process? They go through? What gets in the way? You know, is there anything you do in your work that could make their life easier? Like, just get curious find out are how these things work? How often what, you know, what are the challenges they face, every time we can get insight into how somebody else is working and what works or doesn’t for them, we can all collectively improve, and there may be a single thing you could change in the way you operate. They could save them 10 tasks every month, like we just don’t know, right? I mean, things like advisor codes and and you know, which client we put under which advisor because all those things can overcomplicate the some of these roles. And so you may find that the reason you’ve set those up is something that isn’t as necessary. And it can all be processed at the revenue management system. Who knows? Ask the question, right? Just check in with those people and just say I’m just curious, I’d love to know, I just heard this podcast episode. And I’d love to understand which tool you you’re using to do revenue management, right, the more we can understand all the elements of how we work together to deliver for the public, then the better collectively, that service can be. Now, as you know, there’s only one skill we need to become bionic advisors I just mentioned that didn’t I focus at avid curiosity. So to help you build that habit, today’s curiosity corner app actually came up because I was looking for a particular type of diagram for somebody else trying to represent something in a better way in a simpler way. And I came across this tool called sand key art, which looks as weird as it sounds, you can find it at Sand key art.com. The spelling of that is SA n k e y a RT. And basically, if you’ve not heard of it before a Sankey diagram, this is a type of diagram, just like a pie pie charts, a type of diagram, right, a Sankey diagram is basically a visualization of data, or you could think of it as cash flow, right? Moving through some points. So basically is moving from left to right, right, so it’s going from one set of values to another, the things that have been connected or collated together are called nodes. And the point where they connect are called links. So as an example, you could think of it as showing in almost a flow diagram like rivers coming together and then splitting apart again, the rivers could be a couple’s income coming in from two separate places, but then it gets split into all the different places, they’ve got to apply that income. Right? So it’s something that really easily but concisely actually captures that sort of consolidation of cash flows or balance sheets, I’ve seen it done for balance sheets, all sorts of things that just break it apart in a far more visual sense. So this is a tool that is, you know, basically you enter in like a little spreadsheet, the data, you tell it, what things connect to what you even can pick the color of those little rivers that flow from left to right. And it produces the diagram for you. And you can then extract it as a PNG or a JPEG. So it’s sort of lives in that middle ground between a pure graph that we might do like a line graph, versus a designed image that we then add the clients details in, because we really liked the way that image works. So this sort of sits in the middle of that sort of tool it was once you play with it a bit, it’s really quick to pull together. And I really like it for that helping somebody get insight into their cash flow, because the thing it does is the the width of the river. So if you think about from the left to right, two rivers coming together in one point, then the width of that river is defined by the dollar value. So if one of the incomes is bigger than the other, it’s wider. If one of the places that goes one of their expenses is bigger than the other, it’s wider, so they instantly can look and go, Whoa, that’s a really big expense. Right? So this is something that really gets across insights really quickly for somebody that’s not particularly mathematical. So check it out. Let me know if you’ve ever used a Sankey diagram before, or you like the tool. It’s not flashy or crazy at folks. It’s really that simple. It’s just going to create these types of diagrams. That’s all it does. But I just It caught my eye and it solved a problem for me, so I thought it might help. All righty, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix automagically sent to you each Friday. And you know if this is sort of spark some ideas for you and the way you want to challenge things or, or do things different in your practice and you feel like you need to get your team together to sort of get that brainstorm humming then I’d love to facilitate a brainstorm for you that Could even include a team building session so we can help to build their curiosity as a as a real muscle going forward. And then bring them together to make innovation just a automatic part of what you guys do together. So if that’s of interest, please reach out to me on LinkedIn at forward slash Peita M D. That’s PE ita M D. Otherwise all look forward to turning up in your ear buds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.