AdviceTech Podcast #61 – Paraplanner.ai – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the ensemble advice tech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And the guests joining me here today to deep dive into paraplanner AI why I’m so excited about this. It’s got that magic little letters at the end AI folks. One of them is a serial entrepreneur with significant experience in the tech and VC world. And he’s joining us from Dubai and the other is joining us from Sydney, Australia has been a financial advisor, and has run a successful outsource back office for financial advisors. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Denis Konoplev and Alex Gassner. Welcome, welcome.

Denis Konoplev
Thank you so much for having us.

Peita Diamantidis
Not at all. This is where we’ve had some international guests, but I think this might be the most far flung of everybody that we’ve had. So thank you for taking the time out of what I’m sure as normal scheduling for you to join us here. So before we dive into all things, paraplanner AI, I’d love to just take a moment to get to know each of you through your tech use. So, Dennis, let’s start with you. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Denis Konoplev
That’s a brilliant question. So our company logo is actually an emoji. And so whenever I’m sending an email or LinkedIn post as part of our branding, I’m using our brain and motion. So most of us merge by far.

Peita Diamantidis
Best answer ever. Fantastic. You can’t help it. You have to be using emojis. I love it. How about how about you Alex? What’s your emoji use? Like?

Alex Gassner
Yeah, I probably can’t can’t steal that one now, but mine would probably be the sideways crying with laughter emoji. I think that’s my most used one. There’s, there’s a lot of humor between mates and even within the business as well. You gotta you gotta laugh at something at some point.

Peita Diamantidis
I was about to say it’s, you know, laughing or crying all the same, you know? Both situations, right? I love it. No, sticking with you, Alex, how about if you had to, you know, we’re all so attached to our smartphones. They’re just sort of really they rule the world? Don’t they all? They’re all each of us. If you had to wipe everything off your smartphone, and just keep three apps, Alex, what would you keep? So

Alex Gassner
definitely WhatsApp. I use WhatsApp, a lot throughout family comms work. And friends. I probably choose Uber as well. I think I’m pretty dependent on that. So I’ll choose that. And then the last one would be my dad is incredibly particular about the type of apps that he use. And so last one would be Threema, which is a fully end to end encrypted app that my 78 year old dad uses purely to talk with me for no reason other than just, you know, that’s what he’s like. So basically,

Peita Diamantidis
it’s his own bat phone. Is that what it is? Pretty much?

Alex Gassner
Yes. That is Batman at 78?

Peita Diamantidis
That is fantastic. Have you done this? What’s What’s your if you had to, you know, get, you know, get rid of all the apps on your smartphone and keep just three, what would you keep?

Denis Konoplev
I’ll probably just get rid of the smartphone. It’s to be honest, it’s a distraction device. Like it really does destroy productivity. But if I really had to keep an app and keep Google Maps for getting around. Otherwise, it’s like difficult to function but all the other comps,

Peita Diamantidis
look, I’m with you with them. And you mentioned before we hit record that you you travel a lot and Google Maps for traveling, I don’t know how we coped with traveling without it. Because Jesus, it just liberates you, doesn’t it? Look, it’s so empowering in that sense. The only thing it doesn’t do, which I wish it did is is maybe sort of shaded sections for areas you shouldn’t walk through. You know, I have got caught out a few times with Google Maps where I’ve just blithely wandered through an area going from A to B and happen to walk through the most dangerous, dangerous part of a city in that progress process.

Denis Konoplev
Definitely.

Alex Gassner
I think a lot of people got caught out two days ago where it was the Optus internet dropped out. So absolutely. I think we all needed the old Gregory’s to get around at that point.

Peita Diamantidis
We did it was crazy, because it wasn’t just internet. It was their phone lines too. So if you had to pack with them, so we had team members who couldn’t even contact us to tell us that the system was down, like like what carrier pigeons like what’s the background? So yeah, it’s crazy. All right, let’s dive into powerplant AI. And we’ll get Dennis, I’m gonna get you to tell us about how this came about. But I’d love to start Alex with you. Just to give us some context, just for everybody listening, they may not have heard about the tool. Tell us where it sits in the you know, sort of advice, tech space. You know, what you guys might line up against, if anything, in terms of that category that exists in? Yeah, definitely.

Alex Gassner
So the best way to explain it, probably, I would say would be we’re kind of that wedge between the financial planning software and like the CRM, right? When I’m trying to be the financial planning software and we’re not Trying to be the CRM, we want to sit at that workflow level and try to drive efficiency and productivity throughout automating those processes. Right? So how an adviser engages his client, and spends a lot of time doing that the back and forth, once they get data, how they get that data into the financial planning tool into the CRM, and how they engage with their back office support staff. So that’s probably the best summary or way to summarize it. Okay. So

Peita Diamantidis
then, so Dennis, then in terms of, you know, you’re one of the cofounders of this. And, and I’m curious, and you have got a history and all sorts of different types of tech. This is not like your, you know, advice, tech crazy. You’ve done it through multiple industries. I’m curious, what was the problem you saw? And then, you know, what was it about? That? What was that journey where you realized this was a potential solution? Yeah. So

Denis Konoplev
when my mother died, my father was a mat, we were working on a previous venture, like for a client, that was in FinTech, and it was actually through working together, we fell in love with working with each other. Something I would really strongly advocate, anybody looking for a co founder, love who you work with, it goes a long way. But we fell in love of working together. And but for both of us, we were having a bit of an existential crisis in the sense of trying to figure out, you know, the big questions the meaning of life, what would we do if we could do anything, because anything is possible. And we realized that the crux of everything, understanding money, and understanding how money works is like liberates you, and enables you to do whatever you like. And we went down the rabbit hole of trying to build a personal finance management solution for ourselves. First and foremost. We, we tried many different iterations. You know, we both have an experience in building software, in building software in a way that’s actually usable, but we couldn’t build something that we ourselves were happy with, let alone giving it to anybody else. And when we, when it was missing something in a personal finance management solution, and it’s only when we put it in front of other people, that we got the feedback, it’s like, it’s great, because meet the number, but it’s missing human element. And that was the unique insight for us that, look, a digital solution might be fantastic for certain people in the market. But like, tech can only go so far. It’s really like the psychology of money. And having someone who can guide you through that process is almost more important than the number that comes out. So that’s when we pivoted. We were a small team was just myself and fantasy at the time. So we pivoted into actually building tech that helps financial advisors. And that’s how paraplanner.ai came about. We came up with a core thesis that like whatever tech we build, ultimately should enable an advisor to focus on their client as much as possible. And where we get the name paraplanner.ai, obviously powerplant, like helping out with paraplanning tasks. But we’re using different technologies, not just AI, casual AI, because of its association with automation, but we’re using different technologies to essentially do heavy lifting, where machines are better than humans, so enabling humans to focus on the human parts, and enabling machines to focus on the machine parts.

Peita Diamantidis
I love that idea. It’s, um, there’s an expression I use all the time with advisors, and even in the podcast, you know, a bionic advisor, like, that’s really what we should be aiming for. Right. And, and, interestingly, for those of us that are, you know, either finance focused or mass focus, you know, my background is actuarial studies around So Uber math geek, it’s easy to think it’s about the numbers. But in, in reality, what we have is a relationship with money. That’s really what it’s about is our relationship with so therefore, the human element is so important to your point. And it actually makes me feel a bit better that somebody outside our game has come to that realization to like, that’s a, we might say that within advice circles, but it’s interesting. That’s the conclusion you got to so then let’s talk about the realities of that, like, what does that look like for a primary user? Is the expectation then that the primary user would still would be the adviser? Or are you seeing it being somebody else in the practice? Who’s the who’s the main person utilizing the tool?

Denis Konoplev
That’s a great question. So at the moment, we have a very specific ideal customer persona or someone we’re targeting with our software. We are, we are us focused at the moment. We are targeting us solo or independent and solo practices. So typically, it would be a lead advisor who’s doing advice doing all the admin doing the planning work. And the reason why we’re like focused on these individuals is that they are probably the least served in terms of focused on being an individual, like compared to small and medium sized practices or larger practices. They don’t necessarily have the support and firepower of all the ensemble of tools that a large practice might have. And they definitely won’t have the human support, or the resources to high human support in most cases. So like, like with any kind of tech startup, you focus on who’s got the biggest pain point. So we’re all looking to help them out at the moment. And we do provide both, like on our side human and AI enabled assistance. So this is kind of where Alex’s fantastic background comes in, we kind of balanced the human and automation element to help them out. But ultimately, the way we see the technology developing, it could help in small and medium or large enterprises collaborate around clients, but also automate workflows. So paraplanner is evolving just from a pure automation tool to an automation and collaboration tool.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, so I’m always about the what is it acting like? What does it look like? Or feel like? Or what’s it actually doing? So we were talking about it almost being that glue, or that, that wedge between, you know, an advice system? And then say, a CRM, or in reality? What does that look like? Like? What’s it? What’s it doing between those two things? Or, or in that middle step there? Yeah,

Denis Konoplev
of course. So we, we actually started out designing very much to mimic the way humans interact with other humans as in conversation, it’s the quickest way to communicate information. And it requires almost zero knowledge of learning system. So paraplanner, up until yesterday, actually lived in email conversations. So if you had a task to delegate to paraplanner.ai, you just draft a short email the way that you would refer to an existing admin or planning system with a request and you would reply compensation, you could for the emails, it had access to the CRM and planning software. So it instantly knew like how to action items, all you had to do was tell it what to do via email. As of yesterday, we’ve rolled out a chat functionality, which just speeds up the iteration process and helps helps you get instant feedback in terms of what you can or can’t do. I’m sure we’ve all seen conversational AI apps come up recently. And it’s, it’s, it’s just becoming the standard for, for seeking and getting things done. So very human.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it but I think also, what I love about that, too, is, you know, we’re all being told that that email is the Trojan horse, you know, it’s email bad is sort of my summary of what everybody’s saying, from a cyber perspective. So it makes sense that you, you’d might move out of that, so that then, you know, people can just be interacting through the direct chat functionality. But I mean, all of that sort of makes sense. So what might be the sort of thing that somebody is asking, like, what what would I type in

Denis Konoplev
to give you an example or clients given you a portfolio statement 80 pages long. And like market ticker symbols and market values, currently, as a financial advisor, have a couple of options, option number one, as I said, and spent over an hour manually entering that data into other systems. Option number two is by delegate that to my admin support member, that they spend an hour entering into systems, or option number three is, as soon as you’ve received that information, whether it’s been via email or secure upload, you will get an email notification from powerplant saying, like I’ve seen, you’ve received documents and so on. So while I’ve already extracted the data, here’s the data to want me to put it in your CRM. So you’re instantly saving an hour for the financial advisor and being proactive. Wow.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. So, and I’m assuming this is really any numerical form of data, right? So if it was a, I don’t know, it could be an extract from a bank account, or it could be like any, like, what paraplanner? Did I Oh, just be that the same? Is it like, yes, we just extracted that data for you. Yeah.

Denis Konoplev
You know, we process we process almost any type of document. And we just just so the listeners and you can understand we’re not, we’re not trying to build out every single capability in house, we do integrate with best of breed software. So when you use paraplanner.ai, you’re actually leveraging some of the top tools out there that are consolidated in this really easy to use format. So it can be pretty much any kind of document from numerical financials. Eight months to import policies. W tos.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay. And so. So just taking that question further than is the intention that it will be leaning on. So that the point is to extract just the numbers, or is it literally somebody, you know, we could load up behind, you know, a Product Disclosure, I mean, product disclosure statements here for insurance, you know, I mean, you could knock somebody out with one of those things, is the intent that then you could end up loading something like that in and then ask questions. Is that where you’re going? Or is that a separate type of use?

Denis Konoplev
That is correct. So it would end the day you’re trying to extract and understand useful information from a variety of documents, like if we put ourselves in the shoes of a financial advisor, it’s like, what would be my ideal scenario, an ideal scenario is like, as a financial advisor, I’m spending my time engaging the client, providing them value in hand holding them, but all the data that’s coming in, wouldn’t it be amazing if it was just extracted and put in ready for use and to access them, and that’s the experience that we’re going for. Now, like, being realistic, we’re not doing this in real time, at the moment, that is a learning curve. We, you know, we really pride ourselves in our accuracy. So after any machine work is done, we still have a human check to provide, like, a feedback in the loop. That’s kind of baked into, like the service, it’s a non negotiable for us. But yeah, ultimately, the experiences get financial advisor focused on the client, maintaining that relationship, and all the admin and kind of manual data entry work is done through our plan.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, so like some curious from your perspective. Oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. I

Alex Gassner
was just going to add add into that as well that like, I think that that element of that human touch at the end, or just to double check the data is really important. Because, you know, we’ve heard from advisors before that, even when they enter the data into the systems, if that was three months ago, they come back and go, it was was it lower? Right? I’m not entirely sure whether or not add into that correctly. So having that human element, almost like that last quality check, before it goes out, you have the confidence, and you know, that the data is accurate. So

Peita Diamantidis
yeah, really important. Look, it is in if any, anytime you start just trusting the data, it’s always a challenge, isn’t it? And we’ve we’ve, you know, in our game data feeds from providers, like they’re the bane of everybody’s existence. It’s always been a problem. And so, Alex, I’m curious, you know, with your, you know, understanding of the Australian market, and what a lot of advisors are, the way they’re operating. I’m curious how you like, what’s your example of how you see an advisor, who right now is, is using certain tools and operates a certain way? How do you see that, you know, playing out in real life for them? If they use something like paraplanner? Do now? Yeah,

Alex Gassner
I think, you know, with the target client that we have, at the moment, being those smaller, smaller firms, maybe even the solo independent, you know, those, those are people that eventually get to a point where growth and scale is just an issue, right, and they’re wearing every hat in the business, they, you know, I have 6070 clients experiences pain point, their home at seven or eight o’clock at night with a pile of paperwork that they need to get to, or get through. And even sort of comps to get back to clients, etc. Being able to free them up from from from their time being spent on that and having it spent on building client relationships and being able to invest back into the business to grow and scale. I think that is what that’s our kind of like one of our core mission statements, right? So there are probably I don’t know how many hundreds of FinTech tools out there, particularly in the US market. But, you know, there needs to be kind of a point where you don’t have 15 or 20 different tools, and you use a few very core ones that add true value to the business, right? So we’re we’re trying to sort of fit in that space where we can solve, you know, the admin and planning tasks for for the advisor. And I guess, eventually you just have them, have the capacity, returned back to them to be able to scale and grow the business. So just

Peita Diamantidis
from what I’m sort of gleaning from talking through what it can do is it then more likely to be weighted towards a new onboarding of a client, you know, where it’s, it’s when that’s new information to you. We don’t have access to anything yet. We can’t see it online. We can, you know, like that sort of position where they’re just downloading a whole lot of information at us sort of, is that sort of where you’re seeing this applying? Certainly, initially?

Denis Konoplev
Yeah, it’s, it’s when we look at, like, what were the two biggest pain points for financial advisors in terms of like the most time invested, that’s what we’ve looked at like the full or like water, start a relationship. And then after a relationship started onboarding is the first major use case that we tackled, to get clients set up to collect all the information, because that’s where a lot of legwork is done. The second, the second big area that we tackle is client review meetings. So in the United States, they typically take place every quarter, half a year, or once a year. Now, if you imagine you’ve got 70 clients, I’m sure any advisor, listening to this will, will know this pain point, you’re spending an hour to four hours preparing for that client reviewed meeting, you’re you’re going through your emails, you’re collating information from your planning software, your CRM, bringing it together, making it making it easier to understand, and what if we could cut that down and provide you with a summary of the key points that are relevant specifically for that review meeting. Now you’re going from, you know, one to four hours of prep time, suddenly down to minutes, where you’re not having to trawl through all this information. That’s more time that you can spend with your clients. That’s all the heavy lifting that’s been done. And yeah, it can be freed up time. So those are the two key areas that we’ve been focused on.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, so just to sort of lay that out in a big, granular and practical example. And I apologize for that. I’m just one of those click translates into it. Right. If I’m going to do this right now, how would it then, you know, we’ve got an annual review coming up, we run the reports for the different products that are the accounts that the client has, we’ve got that sort of, you know, maybe it’s the last 12 months of of how things have gone. And I’m, what I’m hearing is that really this is for the situation where, which is most situations where you don’t have that automatic data feed into your advice system, you know, so that’s not all just going to be in there is instead of somebody taking that information out of, you know, platform website, and then entering into next thing, that’s what, that’s what this tool is for, it’s to extract that information and then push it into whatever tool might then use that to then do the analysis that otherwise you do. Have I summarized that correctly.

Denis Konoplev
Yeah. So if you have your most of your communications taking place with your, with the client by email, right. So already, step one trawling through all the client emails and trying to summarize what has been the conversation since our last meeting, is a really big pain point. So the common task used for AI is to summarize things. So we look at all the past interactions, and we summarize the key points that have taken place along the way. We compare that with notes from the CRM, notes, from planning software, any progress to ultimately produce a short report for the financial advisors, which tackles and reminds them, you know, this is my client, this is my client profile. Here are the goals and objectives that we’ve discussed with them previously, in the last few things in here are the historical goals and objectives, what progress have been made, has anything come up in between this meeting and our previous meeting that we’ve needed to tackle the you know, they, they might have had, like an unexpected situation that was not captured in the goals, but was captured in communications. And finally, any action items or points of progress that they should have made between the meetings. So as an advisor, you’re going into that meeting prepared with a full picture of your client. Because you can’t remember every single detail, you can’t remember all the communications and you can’t track all the progress using existing tools easily. So we use the summarization feature or the reading feature for us to understand the data and then the summarization to provide that summary. Most importantly, because, again, you could say, well, there’s a bunch of tools out there, they’re all kind of AI based and what makes us different. To provide this summary or like, why is powerplant AI different, it’s different, because it’s not a generalist tool that is designed for any use case out there. It’s a specialist tool specifically designed for financial advisory and filing. And that’s the Wildung context that

Peita Diamantidis
lives on the account. That’s, that’s useful. So Alex, then, in terms of the type of we mentioned, that your sweet spot initially is the sort of, you know, one, you know, single advisor or smaller, you know, independent sort of practice, because that’s where the bang for buck for them will be like, it’s really going to, you know, give them more bandwidth. Is there anything though, that you would say, if somebody’s going to take on a tool like this, that they should either get organized or do differently or set like, is there any sort of pre work that makes that mean, somebody can really, you know, get some value out of the tool faster?

Alex Gassner
Yeah, I think, sort of one of the things that I’ve experienced, and I’m sure that everyone, every every advice business that has ever engaged any third party or FinTech A core service provider can understand that, you know, the success of that relationship is very dependent on you investing the time and effort into that relationship, right? So the Client Onboarding is certainly about a bit more of a hand holding process, right? Where we meet, perhaps weekly, perhaps it’s only a 20 minute conversation, but it is going through the things that are working things that might not be. And then also, what are the tasks that are sitting on your desk right now that you would really want to get rid of, we’re still early days in our business, which is like, I think a good thing because as we onboard customers, we really want to listen to them, right? We really want to like understand what their pain points are, and get feedback from them. So then that we can develop and implement that feedback into our product roadmap, right? Yeah. So we don’t want to go off and build all these solutions, and then go, hey, here it is, go use it, those conversations, and that onboarding, that handhold Pelton handheld process is really, really important for us. So just understanding the clock potential clients kind of understanding that if you’re putting 20 to 30 minutes into this relationship a week, then it can work quite well. But it’s certainly not something that you would just buy off the shelf, expect it to do everything for you push a button, and all of a sudden, your business has tripled. So I think that’s probably the most important kind of thing to note. I was I would say, yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
yeah. Okay. And I am curious. And this might be something for you, dentists that. I certainly hear. And I’m sure it’s happening globally, there’s a lot of talk about utilizing client portals instead of transitioning towards interacting with clients via portals rather than email. And a lot of that is about security. But also, convenience. You know, I think we all dread opening our email inboxes. You know, so if somebody can just quickly respond to their advisor on an app or whatever. There may be, that’s easier. So I’m curious for you then and the tool. What does that mean? Is that something then that set up as part of the initial onboarding where it’s like, okay, what tools are you using to communicate with clients? And can we sort of, you know, interact with that or extract information? How does that work?

Denis Konoplev
Yeah, so it’s, it’s funny, you mentioned that a client comes to is something that we wanted to tackle very early on, it does come up often, email is highly inefficient. And having having a compliant tool that allows you to converse with your client would be fantastic. That’s the theory. The reality is, is that it’s the question you asked, What three apps would you keep on your phone, if you deleted everything? Alex mentioned him to keep WhatsApp, I’m sure most people keep a method of communication like that, like nobody’s keeping a dedicated tool, just to communicate with the financial advisor, unfortunately. And I think it will be a while before we get to the point where you can use third party tools that are compliant like that. For consistent communication, email is just very ubiquitous, it might not be the best tool, but it’s something that is very ubiquitous, and anybody can send anybody an email. If if we talk about a client portal, that goes beyond just the communication, where I see a lot of solutions, trying to like add value, you know, you show dashboards, and you show progress. And all these kinds of things. We did very, very, very extensive user testing, we spoke with advisors that do use these tools, and the feedback that we got every single time was a client is paying me to do the work. And they’re not gonna sit there and like, look at client portal. They don’t check them. They’ve got usage statistics, they just don’t log in. That’s, that’s, that’s not the way that users want to interact with that. If they did, they would go for a digital only solution. And as I mentioned before, like, you know, the digital only solution isn’t necessarily appealing to the mass market, they want a human involved. So it’s, I’d love to see that it would help us like greatly standardize communication, but it’s going to be a while and it will just create a mess as well, for advisors like they, they will have to check their email inbox, but at the same time, they’ve got this other tool. And like I mentioned at the start that that might have been confusing to some of the listeners. But hopefully now it’s making a bit more sense when I said, we’re building an automation tool and a collaboration tool that lives like close to the email, this is why we’re doing it. We’re not trying to split the attention and focus with advisors. We’re actually trying to consolidate more things for advisors, so they have a single view on their communications and that type of practice and ultimately,

Peita Diamantidis
and it’s a Yeah, it’s an interesting consideration, isn’t it? Because it’s certainly the you know, concerns around email and, and the push from compliance And even from PR insurers is all about that security issue. So I’m sure you know, the listeners like Peter, you need to ask about security. So. So in terms of then this, this will be interacting with and absorbing and feeding back some pretty private information for clients. So how have you got comfortable on that level of security to protect not just us as advisors, but clearly our clients as well.

Denis Konoplev
So I guess two words about my, my background that might be relevant. I majored in privacy, security and data governance, and studied under one of the top shows a top researchers in the field and in the UK. And my thesis was also on this topic. So for me, it’s a very, like, specific point of passion and the level of security and compliance that you have to adhere to. And just both technically and morally in the UK as like, and then Europe is one of the highest standards in the world as it is with Australia. So this is at the forefront of any decision that we’ve made. And what does that actually translate into. So number one, we have an AI that forgets, and I know that sounds a little bit weird in the context of technology that can forget. But we have an AI that forgets, basically, we don’t store any information about clients ever. So we’re not a record of truth, or store. That’s why we connect to other systems to CRM and planning software. So after our machine has processed a request, maybe extracted some information. If it gets the effort data, there’s no storage, there’s no reuse. And so if we were asked to basically say, Well, how long do we store it, it’s, it’s a fraction of a second before it’s gone. Number two is we have stages of filtering set up for information. So if you have a document that comes in, and it’s raw source, from the source, you have a lot of personal identifiable information, and that you don’t want anything processed. So we have an initial step, which actually removes any personally identifiable information of the skates, before conducting any further processing. So when we use like other tools and commercial models, we’re never sending them personal information. And then finally, well, you could ask the question, the value of an AI business could be determined by its ability to train on use of data, like how you handling that. And what we do and make use of extensively as synthetic information. So will synthetic data where we’ve used the original data source deleted it, but we have produced a synthetic version of that data that doesn’t match with the original source, but we use that for training models. So we can still get fantastic output, but without ever actually revealing personal information. Yeah, data security is at the core and data privacy is at the core of absolutely every decision we make.

Peita Diamantidis
So and I’m going to simplify this extremely, and I am no expert in this at all. So I apologize if I get this completely wrong. But when you talk about, like a synthetic version, it’s it’s like converting something that may have a very specific number into something that’s a it’s bigger or smaller than than that, like, is it sort of narrowing it down? You know, just taking off the detail of the characteristics and just almost like tags that might apply to that data? Is that sort of what it’s like, how does the synthetic data thing work?

Denis Konoplev
Yeah. So when you have synthetic data, you have, let’s say, the original data, like the name and age, a number that in its original form synthetic data. Let’s say you have 100 records, or 1000 records with that kind of data, synthetic data will resemble the original data. But it’s been transformed into something that doesn’t match the original dataset. So if you took the synthetic data, and looked at it, and let’s say looked up individual data points, they would never match with the original data set. So you have something that, in its essence resembles the original data set, but in practical terms, like is completely useless. Like if any of the records were accessed or used for training, you would never be able to reverse engineer and get back to that original result and still be able to get the outputs that you’re looking for. Okay,

Peita Diamantidis
so it’s some sort of facsimile version that the dumb takes away that sort of question. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So, Alex, then talk to me about, you know, you’ve seen practice or businesses go through this then I am. I’m sort of interested on some, you know, sort of weird use cases or some things that surprised you about the way that they managed to use the tool like, what’s that journey been like as as you are? We get people utilizing, utilizing the tool and sort of being onboarding as as they get to put it into the practice. Yeah, interesting.

Alex Gassner
I don’t know, I think that quite a number of practices have just started very simply trying to test the waters and kind of dipping your toe in, right? They want to, they want to, they want to test to see the capabilities first. But also, it’s almost like when kind of like these first LM models came out. And you had that ability to sort of prompt chat GPT. It wasn’t exactly obvious what you might use it for. Right. And so there was a window there, there was a chat window, and go for it, essentially. And so I think that they even found that a lot of users started to move away from it a bit, because they just didn’t understand how to engage with it properly. It was it was new technology, right? Yeah. And so in the same kind of respect, our clients kind of when they do get on boarded, they start very slowly with quite simple tasks, and then they move up in complexity as we go. And hence, again, is why we touch base every week to go through those types of scenarios. You know, the technology, like in its complete form is probably quite transformational. And I don’t know if every industry out there is ready for that full transformation. Right? So abacus kind of question internally recently has been how do we bridge that gap between the technology and all of its capabilities versus while the actual user and what they want to use it for? So again, that handheld process of I don’t want to call it education, it’s not education, but it is just discovery of what the capabilities are. Yeah, that’s a that’s a big point. So we’re kind of uncovering answers to questions we thought maybe we knew, but but we technically probably did it as we go. So coming back to your question, I think that we’re discovering every week new ways that advisors want to use the tool. And that’s really exciting for us. And look,

Peita Diamantidis
it is an interesting, it’s such an interesting point. And the more I read about what’s going on, and look, we’ll just use the catch all AI because we know it’s more than that, but let’s just use it because it’s what people have as context. But I think the best skill that any of us could have with any of those things is just curiosity, like, you’ve just got to be curious to go. I wonder if you know, like, I’ll just give that a whirl. And certainly my experience, even with chat, GPT look, the more curious I got, and the more things I asked or the way I asked them or you know, like you, you actually become a really good, briefer, you know, when you’ve got a brief a designer or brief it like you can, the output is so much better when you’re better at writing the brief. And so I think, with these sorts of tools, it’s learning those skills. And so probably that’s one of the biggest challenges, isn’t it is because we can’t just be who we were before, even with a tool like this, we’ve got to learn some different skills to then be better be able to take advantage of them. Yeah.

Alex Gassner
And we’re not walking around constantly thinking, oh, what could chat GBT do for me right? Now, let me just outsource that, or it’s the same with paraplanner AR, right? You know, advisors aren’t sort of sitting in front of their clients saying, Okay, how do I use this tool now? So that that prompting and kind of like discovery process, we want to we want to do that, you know, collaboratively. And

Peita Diamantidis
so So Dennis, you you guys talked about being in the US, but clearly we have. We have young Alex here. He’s based in Australia. So is are you testing this in? So have you got practices in Australia getting used to the tool as well? Okay, what’s that approach? How’s that all working for you guys?

Denis Konoplev
Yeah, so we, aside from the US almost commonly submitted, like requests to get access to a platform comes from Australia. I think we got a couple of 100 of advisors from the from Australia every single month that are reaching out to us. We, as paraplanner haven’t launched in Australia, but we have, we’re in the process of giving Alex and his his existing practice scale up. Access to these tools, so just shameless plug, if anybody does want access to like, fantastic service, and to get access to some of those tools. It’ll be coming through Alex as well. But yeah, perfect.

Peita Diamantidis
So because I do think with any of these tools, to your to what we were just saying then the early users who are curious enough, are the ones that are going to find that thing that you guys didn’t even think of, you know, that application, and it won’t necessarily even be advisors, like I find the gems for us in our practice come from the support team, because they utilize something and they go oh, and suddenly they freed up a whole day. Wow, okay. That never would have occurred to me as a way to utilize the tools so it’s sort of letting people you know, go a bit wild and get a bit creative and an income leveraging that. That journey that’s clearly going to be powerful. Going forward. Totally agree. Yeah. So, okay, so Dennis, what’s the, what’s the future then look like? Like, is there some blue sky world peace things at the end of all of this? Or like, where’s it heading for you? What’s the, what’s the next stages, but also, you know, where is it hitting, you know, further down the track.

Denis Konoplev
Like, like I’ve alluded to, like we, we all focused on the, like, the automation and communication part at the end of the day, like, that’s where most of the work gets done. And if we can automate directly where you communicate like, it opens up a realm of possibilities, but in terms of where this could go, I just see a huge opportunity in several spaces. So number one is in the solo, kind of independent financial advisory space, which was severely understaffed, we were just seeing a lot of fragmentation of the tools that are being used the processes, because at the end of the day, it’s just one person, it’s not, it’s not possible to cater to everything, it is a very, is a tough industry to tackle in a tough segment to tackle. Because it inherently doesn’t scale. But at the same time, it presents like a huge opportunity. And, like, for me, like I love seeing the transformation in someone’s practice, when they’ve gone from being completely overwhelmed as an individual to suddenly having time to like focus on their clients and get new clients. We have been asked quite extensively like, you guys are building amazing software, are you going to build, you know, a CRM or planning software? It’s a possibility, but maybe not an immediate one. There are some very established players. And I think, I think the opportunity that exists in front of us like doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to go out and build a CRM today, but maybe one day, Independence depends on what happens in the market. And that the obvious one is Australia, like, I think I think we want to bring power plant or die as quickly as we can. Through Alex to the Australian market. The market is far more regulated. And in, shall we say, your level, your level is on a whole different level in terms of what needs to be produced, and how work is done. And it ultimately presents a barrier to the average person having access to solid financial advice. And at the end of the day, that’s that’s all financial advisors when they want to provide an amazing service to their clients. But if you’ve got if you’ve got all this heavy lifting that you need to do, and it just makes it economically unviable to take on certain clients, then, you know, if I’ve ever heard of a course to fight for I think that’s definitely one.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it certainly is a it’s a frustration, because I think, you know, lots of us would love to be able to, you know, either reduce fees or keep fees competitive, you know, all those sort of things. But like you say, when you’re continually legislated, and then also potentially, you know, tools don’t keep up with what we all need. And then providers who were interacting, well, they’re a bit slow to like, it’s, you know, there’s so many layers where the poor advisor sits in the middle of that illiquid, you all just sort this out, please. Like, why is this so hard? And I think it is such an interesting industry in that sense, where I see a lot of either innovation or progress or true transformation occurring at these small, you know, individual advisor practices, but of course, not empowered with the funds or the weight to actually get something built or to get you know, so it’s, it’s such a strange environment, because really the people that are going to come up with those almost batshit crazy ideas that would be wonderful. aren’t the ones that are going to have the resources to then have that, you know, create an impact across the industry. So it is exciting to to see more tools like this come up that are trying to empower those people. Like yes, yes, yes, we want you to do more, or what have you doing, let’s just solve this problem for you. You know, let’s just give you back some of that bandwidth is doing things that isn’t really advice anyway. Right. It’s not actually what advisors should be doing. You know. And, Alex, I’m curious about your what your take on this is, you know, from your deep understanding of the market hit where, what do you see that opportunity being where do you see that going? For the industry here? Yeah,

Alex Gassner
look, I think you know, the QPR represents a big shift. It was about time as well, like the pendulum had swung way, way too far in one direction. And I think now, it’s swinging very much back into equilibrium or back sort of towards the the adviser side. So I personally think that if you can have tools that are going to drive the efficiency and productivity to give you 1020 hours Are we more or your support staff more, and you can see more clients scale and grow? I think there has never been a better time to be independent. And I think that there’s never been a better time to be a small independent financial planning firm, right? I think you’ll be you’ll, you’ll see in the next while X amount of time in the next few years, an advisor might be able to look after 100 clients today, they might be able to look after three, four or 500 clients in the future. Right, right. So well, who knows, like if you if you have more time to grow, and you can put more advisors on and leverage their time, then that represents an opportunity. And if that helps you to reduce costs to serve, well, then it opens up another market, right for financial planning advice. So the consumer is going to win as a result of it as well. So I think it’s a really exciting time. And I think it’s particularly exciting to be that small advisory firm that may have been struggling for quite some time. And I think the tide is absolutely shifting.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, definitely isn’t, I think, what’s become I mean, I’ve sort of, you know, as somebody who loves all the tech, hence hosting this podcast, but loves watching it and trying and for years, you know, always happy to test something out or take a look at it, even things outside the industry. What I’m excited about two now is that, I think actually the advantage has shifted to the small, I actually think now given how quickly things are changing, given all the things that you have access to now and this is a great example, then small practice or small doula group or you know, small environment where we can get together make a decision and act like that has some real power to it. Whereas the bigger, the bigger groups were, you know, the crazy democracy environment there and all of the layers of red tape. And I just think that the weight of that is potentially going to drown them over time just for this type of thing. You know, like it’s the ability to see something. Yes, assess, yes. Click carefully. Think about it. Make sure you understand the risks, make sure you understand the security, but then implement get value. I think title is going to be the game I’ve been going forward, even though that’s not necessarily what the industry is saying, you know, there’s a lot of talk about consolidation and those sort of things. I’m not sure that’s how it’s going to play out. You know, I’m starting to think that armed with the right tools, these bionic advisors are going to be able to really go far and have a huge impact. So Dennis, is there anything we’ve missed? Is there any features or elements or things to be aware of for the listener aside for clearly reached out to Alex? And if you can get in touch with him? Is there anything else though, you, you want to cover off?

Denis Konoplev
I guess, yeah. If anybody wanted to try powerplant AI, the best way would be to sign up or contact us by email. We do have the onboarding process that Alex described before. We aren’t friendly, we don’t buy. We, we’ve we’ve seen all sorts in the sense of people who don’t even have a checklist, trying to run a practice, all the way through to like hyper organized individuals. So we can help out in any situation. That’s the power of being a small startup, we can really care about each advisor. So yeah, please, please reach out if you need help. Or if, if, if even if it’s not for power planet, or AI, specifically, like we, we do a lot of research into other tools that help advisors within the tech stack. And if you want to have a chat about a specific tool that you are looking to investigate, like, we’re really happy to explain the pros and cons, how it works, how it integrates with your tech stack. And I think to make it more efficient,

Peita Diamantidis
perfect. Anything else? Alex, from your perspective to cover off?

Alex Gassner
Well, I think that’s I think that’s pretty much covered it off really well.

Peita Diamantidis
Beautiful. All right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more, which I’m confident you probably will, then the the website link in the episode will be in the episode show notes along with the LinkedIn profiles for both Dennis and Alex, I’m sure you’re gonna get some people reaching out to you. But it sounds like really, you know, any of us here in Australia, we should hunt down Alex and get him to talk to us about how it works. And so we can onboard us. And basically, you know, we can all semi retire, because we’re gonna have all this time available. I’m personally very excited about that. I’m already planning what I’m going to be doing with that, Tom. So thank you both very much for joining us here on the show. And I’m really excited to see more advisors either being able to do more, or potentially, you know, be able to do less, and really enjoy it. So thank you so much for your time,

Denis Konoplev
and yours as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Thanks so much. So, Whew, that was interesting, right, folks? I’m curious, is anybody out there listening being one of these early testers of paraplanner.ai. This is a perfect example. We’d like a really early stage tool where the ensemble platform and getting on there and sharing your experience with your peers. And basically, you know, having a bit of club where we all share Hey, we’re going on this journey to let’s talk about what we’ve discovered. where the value sits, what’s worked, what’s not, this is a perfect example of a tool that we can do better together, to be honest. And so I’d love to hear your take if you were already on that journey. And I’m sure others would in the community. So please head over there, feel free to tag me, if you post in the ensemble community, tag me if you’re using parallel anorak because I’d love to know about it. So please do that. In terms of my thoughts, there’s sort of two things that stood out about, about that conversation. For me one was an expression that Dennis used that I think is something we should all start to learn a bit more about. And it was the expression AI that forgets. Now a lot of the AI most of us have been sort of consciously using, which would be something like check GPT is it’s actually we want it to learn from what we’re saying, we want it to get better, better at, you know, either analyzing what we’re saying, or coming back in a certain tone. So as an example, feeding in the way you write so that when you ask it to draft a, you know, an expression or paragraph or, or even an article, it’s learning from your very word. So the specificity of what you say and how you say it is actually really relevant. So that’s an AI that we don’t want it to forget, right? We want it to be learning as it goes in that sense. Whereas what Dennis was saying here is you know, that some of these AI is going to be AI that forgets, because it’s going to be being given some of this private information. So that was interesting to me, I’d not quite heard it put that way before. So I think that’s something we could all, you know, maybe get to understand better and ask those questions. What does it mean? You know, how does that work? I think that some education for all of us, you know, down that down that path, and really getting a better sense of the reality of that and what risk or not, it represents. So that was the first thing. The second is, some of these tools are just going to require us to be super duper curious. Like, I mean, deeply, you know, what, I don’t know whether I’ve quite got a handle on where the value is. But oh, it sounds interesting, right. And I know, that’s not everybody’s bag. But honestly, some of these have just that sense of wow, if people took the time to just play with it a little, then you work out very quickly, whether it was going to have a big impact, and you would help them work out where else it could have a big impact. So it doesn’t mean you do that straightaway. But what I would say to you is, you know, almost having that as part of your plan is you know what we’re going to invest the month of March, I’m going to have somebody that’s going to spend some time with the team, maybe with Alex, and we’re going to take a look and really see whether this could work for us, right. So it doesn’t mean you’ve got to do it now. But put it in the plan, have a think about it. And whether it’s this tool or any number of other tools, we can’t necessarily wait until they are perfect, and have everything sorted out. Because the minute things are sorted out, the next thing is going to come right the next new fandangled things. So having this willingness and ability to give things a bit of a try without taking too much risk or investing in too much change in maybe even your process just yet, I think will prove to be value in the future. That may mean that there’s a person in your practice that you just assigned to be a guinea pig. All right, this one’s up next, that’s what you’re testing this month, you know, so you might have somebody who’s willing to put their hand up to do that. I may even find that really fun and love that responsibility. So just have a think about that as as a sort of a different mindset that we’re all going to need. And it sort of naturally leans into, you know, my nest next section in the podcast, right, the curiosity corner, because I believe this is such a big part of how we’re all going to have to behave going forward, that you know, each each week, I’m nudging you to try and think differently and look at something different. So I think this is a perfect example of where maybe a little bit of that is going to need to be applied. So this week, bionic advisors, there is an interesting app that I’d love you to have it have a look at and let me know what you think. This is one for you as individuals. But I think it is such an interesting example of something very specific that they’re trying to help people with. And the app is called Sleep town. And you can find it at sleep town doc dot seek our tech.com. And sleep town is just a little app that wants to help you build healthy sleeping habits. Right. So what happens is you go to bed at an ascertain agreed time. So this is for people. One type of person might be Gee, I end up sitting up on my phone and scrolling through my phone and I don’t go to bed when I think I should. All right. Well, this app says if you go to bed at a certain time, then when you get up you’ll have the opportunity to construct some buildings. So it’s like a gamification right now if you don’t behave within the within the sort of rules of what you’ve established of what healthy sleeping is. Then the building’s you might have been working on that you have enjoyed as part of the game could be destroyed, because you’ve failed to achieve your set goal. Yeah. And then if you do achieve your goal consistently, so you build better habits, then you get to build really rare and interesting buildings, right. So it really is pure gamification of building a new, better, healthy habit. So I’d love you to check it out, maybe you’ve already used it. Maybe you’ve got a huge town you’ve built with sleep town, because you’re such a wonderful sleeper now. But I think you know, these tools that really do help us transform our well being, I think, aside from being wonderful for us as individuals, I think the more that financial advisors understand these tools, the more likely we are to come up with a similar one for the public that we just hope would really help their financial well being. So please do check it out. I’d love Love, love, love to hear what you think, or if you’ve used it successfully, or somebody you know, has, and let’s keep these ideas flowing. And let’s keep trying new things out. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week, folks, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice, tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’re ready to achieve Zen in the world of advice, tech, then please be sure to encourage your dealer group to reach out to me to hear about my new keynote for 2020 for the zen of advice, tech finding balance in the digital age. Now, this has been a world where you know, technology can sometimes feel overwhelming, you may even feel that way up to the previous discussion. And during this session, I’m going to show you how to streamline your tech stack and in and really enhance client relationships with only as much tech as you need, while also applying a sort of really mindful approach to tech mastery. So you know, let’s embark together on a path to a really more focused, more efficient and rewarding operational environment. So if you’re curious, please reach out, reach out to me on LinkedIn and that’s LinkedIn forward slash Peita M D PEITA. M D, and I’d love to have a chat. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.