[AI Series] Revolutionizing Compliance With AI With Larry Shumbres
- Quik! News Team
- 6 days ago
- 28 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Larry Shumbres is the Founder and CEO of Archive Intel, an AI-powered compliance solution designed to streamline the archiving of electronic communications for financial institutions. Under his leadership, Archive Intel secured $1.5 million in seed funding to enhance its AI-driven compliance solutions. Larry is a seasoned fintech entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the financial technology sector, having held positions at leading firms such as Charles Schwab, Morningstar, and New York Life Investments. He founded and successfully exited Totum Risk, a pioneering risk tolerance platform acquired by TIFIN Wealth in 2020.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:10] Larry Shumbres discusses how Archive Intel helps financial firms modernize compliance
[5:23] Why outdated systems fail in modern compliance management
[8:15] Larry’s strategy to avoid the innovation trap as his company grows
[9:49] Building a compliance product with real industry impact
[11:30] Biggest development challenge — keeping up with API changes
[12:27] Tips for using machine learning to enhance risk profiling and AI in fintech
[15:21] How Archive Intel’s AI agent automates random compliance reviews
[20:50] Reducing false positives in flagged communications
[24:39] How new market entrants overcome trust challenges
In this episode…
Legacy compliance software in the financial industry is outdated, expensive, and inefficient. Firms often struggle with manual processes, high rates of false positives, and a lack of visibility into their data — sometimes even being charged to retrieve it. Why are so many companies still stuck with tools that fail to meet the demands of today’s fast-paced, data-driven world?
Larry Shumbres, a fintech entrepreneur and expert in compliance and AI, offers a fresh take on modernizing the regulatory space. Drawing on decades of experience, he outlines how to replace tedious manual reviews with AI-powered agents that automate flagging, auditing, and proactive messaging. By focusing on intuitive design, customer feedback, and realistic AI implementation, Larry shares how firms can reduce false positives by up to 98% while cutting manual tasks by 85%. He also emphasizes the importance of staying personally involved with customers and regularly listening to their pain points to keep innovation alive.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Larry Shumbres, CEO of Archive Intel, about transforming compliance with AI in the fintech industry. Larry discusses building customer-first technology, challenges with legacy vendors, and why staying connected to users matters. He also covers the role of AI agents, proactive compliance, and the cost of outdated workflows.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"Revolutionizing Advisor-Client Interactions Through AI With Tom Rieman" on The Customer Wins
"Navigating the Waters of Financial Marketing With Robert Sofia" on The Customer Wins
"Transforming Cybersecurity for Businesses With Matthew Connor" on The Customer Wins
"Scaling Communities and Operations Excellence for RIAs With Shaun Kapusinski" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
“We built an easier mousetrap for capturing electronic client communications.”
“You have to continue to listen to your client at the end of the day.”
“The AI is also double checking the AI that ran before through all of your communications.”
“We're trying to build it out to be proactive, and even on the reactive side.”
“Sometimes I think I'm guilty of not charging enough, which is fine.”
Action Steps:
Listen to customers early and often: Engaging directly with users helps uncover blind spots and accelerate meaningful product improvements.
Automate repetitive compliance tasks: Offloading routine reviews to AI saves time, reduces errors, and lets teams focus on strategic priorities.
Prioritize user-friendly design in complex software: Intuitive workflows boost adoption and satisfaction, especially in high-stakes industries like finance.
Plan for API maintenance from the start: Frequent third-party updates can break functionality, so managing integrations proactively prevents data loss or downtime.
Stay involved with customer interactions as a leader: Founders who remain customer-facing gain real-time insights and build stronger trust with their market.
Sponsor for this episode...
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Tom Rieman of Practice Intel, Robert Sofia Snappy Kraken, Matthew Connor of CyberLynx, and Shaun Kapusinski of HIFON. Today is a special episode of my series on artificial intelligence, and today's guest is Larry Shumbres, founder and CEO of Archive Intel. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik, using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit Quik Forms to get started. All right Larry. Our guest is a seasoned entrepreneur and prominent figure in the fintech sector, with a wealth of experience spanning over 20 years and affiliation with industry giants like Charles Schwab, Morningstar, New York Life Investments.
Larry recently founded, developed and successfully exited a pioneering risk tolerance platform called Totum Risk to Tiffin. Prior achievements include building smart vision by investment, acquired by Nasdaq and leading the sales team at Imoney, culminating in their acquisition by fidelity. Larry, welcome to the customer wins.
Larry Shumbres: 01:47
Thank you Rich. That intro makes me feel old now.
Richard Walker: 01:50
Oh, no. Hey, look, I'm right up there with you. I turned 50 this year. Oh, if you haven't heard this podcast before. I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win.
How they built and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Larry, I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?
Larry Shumbres: 02:10
Yeah, great. Great question. So before I started this company Archive Intel, I was looking for a problem to solve in the industry. And when I looked at the roadmap, I was like, wow, this is pretty saturated. I'm like, how am I going to, you know, start a new company and what am I going to solve for to help the end customer.
So I went back to my champions, the, the champions that helped me build totem clients out there. And I said, what's, what's a problem that, that we could solve for in the, the financial industry. And I would say eight out of ten of them came back to me and said, compliance. Compliance is one of those areas that's nobody thinks about. It's a requirement.
We have to do it. And all the products that we're currently using are old legacy products that are outdated. Like if you can improve the processes, make it more modern and easy with an AI overlay like we would be interested. So after doing a lot of homework, I came up with the idea of building a better, all-encompassing electronic communication, capturing and monitoring solution for the financial industry that encompassed everything from email, communication, social media, website and texting. And as I was building it and before I even launched it, the SEC came out and started to find all the financial firms for not monitoring capturing their text data.
So the timing was almost perfect. And that's what we built. We built an easier, I would say, easier mousetrap for capturing electronic client communications. And then as we were building it, we realize that, you know, this is a very manual process. The compliance officers would have to sit there and review all the flagged communications, whether they're email or text or any social media.
And when you look at these firms, whether they're a small RA or a large broker-dealer insurance company, you're talking about hundreds of emails or communications all the way up to the larger firms where there's hundreds of thousands of communications. And then after the flagging, they also have to manually go through and run a regulated SEC or Finra review of 15% of all their communications. Again, a very manual, tedious process. So we built an AI to run and do all that for them. So reduce all the flagging the flag false positives by 98%.
And we built in an AI agent that will run the random review for them. They could schedule it, set it and forget it. And it's done. So again, helping the end customer, whether they're a small or large firm. Cutting back about 85% of their manual tasks was our goal.
And that's what we've accomplished so far.
Richard Walker: 05:02
Wow. That's amazing. Okay, I have several questions around this because you chose to start something that I mean, you're hearing that the legacy systems were just out of date and not as modern as they as they could be. How did you. So first question, I guess, how did you view the competitive landscape then for this type of product?
Larry Shumbres: 05:23
So there were maybe 2 to 3 main competitors out there in the market that were old legacy products. I review them, I looked at them with other financial advisors. I saw the workflow, the UI, how difficult it was to maneuver and then then ask a lot of questions like, you know, how can we make this better? And then also in the back of my mind I'm thinking, wow, these are really bad. Like these.
I mean, when I log in and I can't figure it out and I've been in tech for over 20 years, I'm like, wow, this is this, this is not a good customer experience or client experience. So right away I'm like, I can make this better. Just the UI alone. And the workflows. And then second was, all right what else is bothering you with them.
And then I found that the cost was really high. They couldn't even just run a report. You couldn't run a report. I mean, how. I mean, we're in 2024, 2025.
How do you not just run a report and export your own data? No, it gets worse. You have to pay them to run a report, and then you have to pay them to get your data out. And it's not cheap. It's really it's really expensive.
So right there I'm like these companies don't get it. Like they're way out way out of date. So that was really the light bulb that went off. I'm like we could have something here.
Richard Walker: 06:45
I mean that sounds like 1990s philosophy of software. We own your data, we control everything you pay us, etc.. What do you mean? You're a business person. You're an entrepreneur.
What do you think it is that it kept these companies from modernizing and keeping up with what user experiences should be like?
Larry Shumbres: 07:03
Well, you see it a lot, right? In the industry where you have a company and it grows and, you know, the first few years you're focused, you're listening to the client, and then you get you start to get bigger and bigger and your executives and you have levels of management and you stop listening. You stop that flow through from connecting with the client to the executives. And in between kind of gets missed. And then these other companies went into other industries.
They went into healthcare, they went into education and government, and then it went global. So you're trying to appease everyone, you know, with one product where I think that's it's doable, but you have to do it right, and you have to continue to listen to your client at the end of the day, in customer to continue to enhance it and make the product better.
Richard Walker: 07:56
Okay. So I know this is tough because you're how old is your company now? A couple years.
Larry Shumbres: 08:01
Oh you're old.
Richard Walker: 08:02
You're old okay. So I'm going to ask you a future forward question then. How do you think you'll do it differently? You know, five years down the road, ten years down the road so that you don't fall into this trap. What are you going to do differently?
Larry Shumbres: 08:15
So the one thing I even do today is I'll jump on. Well, I'm doing a lot of the demos and meeting with clients today, but not as much as our sales team. But I as we grow, I'm always looking at technology. I'm always looking at how other people are doing it. But I also would like to continuously jump on a call or two with our sales team, with our support team, find out and listen.
Hear them you know the customer directly instead of hearing it through our employees. I think that's one thing that a lot of other executives and CEOs just we're like, oh no, no, we have people for that. Yeah. And that's where you're really going to hear, you know, what's working, what's not working at your company and what you need to do.
Richard Walker: 08:56
Yeah. You know, that's sorry. That's along the goals of along the lines of my own personal goals over the next two years. What I'm personally trying to do is transition out of daily tasks and into just talking with people. I love talking to customers.
I love hearing how we can help solve problems. What problems are coming up? And it helps us innovate. It helps us think about the next thing we should be doing. And I don't ever want to stop doing that.
I actually would rather not answer emails though.
Larry Shumbres: 09:22
I agree. I think there should be AI for that.
Richard Walker: 09:24
No. Not entirely. It's still have to have the personal touch. So here's another question. Because you started a business in compliance, which oh my gosh, I mean, drill my eyes out.
That sounds so boring to me. And yet I'm informs, right? How boring is that? Why did you choose such a boring business? And how hard is it to work in that world?
Or are people really engaged in it? Are they interested in this?
Larry Shumbres: 09:49
Yeah, it is very it is boring, right? It's so it's not boring to me because it's fact based. And my undergrad degree was pre-law. So, you know, you're looking at, you know, all legal things and compliance is, is somewhat time tied into, you know, regulatory rules, regulations in the law. So it interested me to find out more.
Right. And I knew about compliance. And I've been in the industry long enough that I've had my licenses in the past. I've been on the investment side. I've been on the tech side.
So when I kept hearing about these issues with compliance, I was reading about it. I'm like, well, this is very simple. Like it's nothing huge. Like, we're not talking about, you know, trade surveillance and pre pre-trade monitoring and surveillance. We're just talking about electronic communications, record keeping, capturing data, reviewing it, flagging it.
I'm like, you know, the SEC rule 1784 1783, right. And a few other kind of low-level rules. I'm like, this is very simple. Why are they making it so difficult?
Richard Walker: 10:57
And that's where that's.
Larry Shumbres: 10:59
Where I thought we could you know, based on my tech experience, I'm like, we should build something to make it easier.
Richard Walker: 11:05
I think that's where the magic is as an entrepreneur, when you see a problem, nobody's solving well and you're like, this has got to be more basic than that. It's got to be easier than what they're doing.
Larry Shumbres: 11:16
Yes.
Richard Walker: 11:16
And I'd argue that it's not always as easy as you think it's going to be. When you dive into it, maybe I should ask, what are some of the gotchas that you've woke up to a year into your business going, oh my gosh, this was way harder than I thought.
Larry Shumbres: 11:30
Connecting all the APIs for all the connectors, it's you have and we have a lot, but we don't have a ton, right? And every connector you have to have, you have to have somebody or you have to be reviewing their updates daily, almost or weekly because they could change a policy. They could change, you know, a UI, they could change an update. And if you don't update your API, API at the same time, you're not going to capture that data. So that's the biggest I think that was the biggest.
Gotcha. When we start to build this out.
Richard Walker: 12:04
Yeah, my biggest gotcha was we thought we could launch with 300 forums and win customers. And today we have 42,000 forums. And sometimes it's still hard to win customers because we don't have the forms they need. Talk a little bit more about the AI. Were you enamored with AI, or did you just suddenly see it as a tool that could solve a problem?
What was your kind of focus?
Larry Shumbres: 12:27
Yeah, because I'm a little tech geeky. I, I in my last product, we had machine learning, right? So we were bringing in data for a simple risk tolerance questionnaire that had 12 questions. And really, we only had an answer at the end of the day. We could have just said, here's one question for your client.
The rest of it we're pulling from machine learning from data that's already out there. And the one question was around, you know, client preferences because preferences change all the time. So you know today your preference the sun's out. The markets are up. You're having a great day.
Your preference could be you know yeah I could take on more risk today than you know the next day could be raining out. The market's down. You're having a bad day. You answer the same question. You'd be like, oh you know, no more conservative, right?
So based on preferences we're like, that's really the only question you have to ask the rest of its risk capacity. Right. You know, how much risk are you willing to take based on your life situation and your goals and all that data we could pull in from financial planning tools, other public information, etc.. So that's where I started to get into machine learning and AI, and then I even, you know, had I got into the crypto space, is one of my failed entrepreneur gigs where back in 2017 with Bitcoin and everything, I was like, oh, you know, I love blockchain. I love how this is working.
Let me build a hedge fund that's 50% tied to digital gold, and the other 50% is allocated toward the top ten cryptos, right. And unfortunately, the regulators here in the US weren't ready for that. And I don't think anyone really was at the time. So I shelved it. But between blockchain and AI, once I, I started looking at the workflow of how the, the compliance officers and the analysts were, were reviewing electronic communications, like, there's just so much in here that we could do with AI to make your life so much easier and not really even have to think about this.
Yeah, that's what I'm always thinking about with AI. So we have on our, our we just hired, you know, another full-time data scientist to come on and help build it out even more because those ideas are coming. They're kind of just always there. And we're always trying to figure out, okay, what else can we add that will make their life easier? And one that that we're working on right now is marketing review.
Richard Walker: 14:55
So one of the hot topics in AI right now is agents. And I don't think there's a subtle definition of what an agent is. So my own perspective on agents and I've not built one, but my own kind of thinking is it is any kind of AI that's performing a process. It's doing a workflow, it's doing a series of steps versus just giving you back feedback on your knowledge or something. Have you guys started playing with agents?
Is that on your roadmap?
Larry Shumbres: 15:21
We have we already built out our AI agent for our random review process, and the way that it works is today. If you are in all the products, you'll go in and say, all right, we need to run a random review of 15% of all the electronic communications on our email, LinkedIn teams, you know, text messages, iMessage and our website. And then it performs that here's your random review and here's 100,000 emails or, you know, whatever it is, depending on the size of your firm that you have to then click through each and every one of them and say, I reviewed this and then save it, right. So you can imagine just, you know, the time to just sit there in such a, you know, mindless task that you have to, to perform as a compliance officer. So with the AI agent, what the AI agent is doing, you're telling it.
I want to run a daily random review of ten, 15 whatever percent you want on all your communications. You could select the channels that you have and you could can select the time frame. Or you can just say daily or weekly or monthly and you can say, I want AI to run this with the AI agent and it's done. And then it just sets it and it runs it for you. And then it tells you that it's completed when that random review is done.
And better yet, then the AI is also double-checking the AI that ran before through all of your electronic communications to see if it may have missed something. And if it did, then it moves it to an escalator folder and alerts that compliance officer or advisor.
Richard Walker: 17:00
That is awesome. Do you think, given the nature of the work, do you think there's a possibility we won't need humans in compliance in the long run?
Larry Shumbres: 17:10
I know it will always need humans in compliance. The AI is never going to catch everything, right? You could train it. You could, you know, put in the rules and models and the LMS and use Lambda three and whatever the latest technology is or large language model. but at the end of the day, it's not going to catch everything.
You know, it's going to catch a lot, but not everything. So you're still going to need that compliance officer or advisor or someone reviewing the information.
Richard Walker: 17:38
Yeah, but you're definitely going to get rid of the menial work, the tasks that.
Larry Shumbres: 17:42
Oh yes. All the old school manual tasks. Yeah. You get rid of. And trust me, they're happy to get rid of those because it's a regulated.
They have to do it and no one wants to do it. Right.
Richard Walker: 17:55
Yeah. So look I don't I don't know compliance the operations of compliance that well. But I have to imagine that when something is flagged and has an issue, there's got to be more communication going out, maybe back to the advisor or the office to do something to rectify it. Is that true?
Larry Shumbres: 18:12
It is. Yeah. Yeah. So today if like there's an email or communication flagged, then they have to reach out to the employee advisor. Whoever sent that email or communication talk about it.
What's the issue? You know, take notes, resolve it.
Richard Walker: 18:29
Are you guys using AI to automate that communication in any way?
Larry Shumbres: 18:33
So what we're trying to do right now and building out is being proactive on the front end to block any non-compliant communication from going out in the first place. So if you're typing an email and you say, hey, Rich, send me your Schwab account numbers and your Social Security number, right? Yeah, you forgot to encrypt it. Or, you know, just mindlessly, you know, send hit that send. It'll block that email from going out saying, here's highlighted the non-compliant language that you should fix and it won't send it out in the first place.
So that will help the compliance officers in the back end never have to worry about those emails going out in the first place. Yeah, yeah.
Richard Walker: 19:18
So you're really helping prevent a lot of problems to even occur then.
Larry Shumbres: 19:23
We are. We're trying to build it out, to be proactive. And then even if you have to be reactive on the reactive side, just reducing the false positives, right. The flag false positives. So that was one of the bigger the first biggest pain point that we heard was we could put in what they call lexicons which are basically flagged keywords and phrases.
So guaranteed money laundering whatever, right. Most firms will put about 100 to 150 of those, those keywords and phrases in there. And unfortunately it will catch a lot of that in an email. Even if you're saying, hey, I do not guarantee this return, it'll flag it right. Even if you put in, you know, words before or after it, it's not going to pick it up every time.
So with AI, we've trained the model enough and we continue to train it and add new data on a monthly basis to make sure that we're catching as much as we can. So that's reduced the flag. False positives. Now, we've seen some firms all the way up to 98% reduction.
Richard Walker: 20:23
Okay. Now, I have to assume you're using large language models and you have to pay those large language models. So I want to ask a question I'm super curious about for another entrepreneur like yourself running a company. How do you price it? I mean, how do you make sure that the agents aren't running so often that your bills are skyrocketing and the client's exposed, or you're exposed to unlimited I token costs, etc.?
How do you manage that?
Larry Shumbres: 20:50
Well, I'm always working with, with and talking with our dev team and our CTO, and they're actually brighter and smarter than I am, which is great. They're always saying, no, we don't want to do it that way. Larry, let's do it this way. We could save money doing it this way for now. And then as we grow and get bigger, then we could we could pay for the customized GPUs and LMS and things like that.
So basically how we're doing it today, we're customizing it as much as we can on our side and training the models without having to go through and, you know, customize the actual LM itself. And so that's basically how we're cutting down on cost a little bit right now. But I know what the cost will be. And I just put that into our budget for, for future capital raise or, you know, when we were profitable.
Richard Walker: 21:38
Yeah. But do you have to price your product to include the I consumption or not?
Larry Shumbres: 21:45
Right. Some firms may be doing that, but I don't think we need to. I think we don't need to pass that on to the client. From what I've seen so far, what we're doing is we're again, there's a cost to add that I option or benefit or feature. But yeah, we're not really passing that on to the client.
Now we're we are passing on some costs to the client is on the messaging side. Just because there's the cost there actually is higher than our AI costs right now.
Richard Walker: 22:18
Yeah, yeah. Well, and AI is going to in some ways get cheaper. Otherwise I think get more expensive depending on the model or whatever. But look, the nature of my questions are really driving into when you have a cost structure that is variable, but you want to give your customer something they can budget for, that's straightforward. How do you blend the two?
And there's no simple answer to this. It's different by company I think. But personally I see that as part of the challenge of building any kind of software company. Do you feel that way?
Larry Shumbres: 22:49
Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. Especially when you first go to market. So what I always look at is what are if there's competitors out there, what are they charging or how, you know, how is their pricing. And then I see based on what they're charging for, are there areas where I feel like they're overcharging the client. So, you know, simple things like getting your own data out.
Why would you ever charge a client to get your own data out these days? Running a custom report. Why are you even running custom reports for your client? Your clients could. They should be able to do that themselves.
So right there we're like chopping the, you know, the cost in half for them. And then a lot of the other competitors I was looking at that had these long-term enterprise contracts where the fees kept going up were you know, it's early your early entry fee is lower, but your two it's higher. You're three, it's even. It's like triple of what you initially paid for it. So I'm always like I, I built products to number one, help consumers be financially fit or to solve a problem where other entrepreneurs and companies could be successful as well.
Right? I'm not here to price gouge. You could be successful by charging, but you don't have to charge too much. Sometimes I, I think I'm guilty of not charging enough. Oh, man.
Which is fine. which is fine, but it is what it is. I yeah, that's just, you know, the way. The way I'm built.
Richard Walker: 24:21
Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so one other type of question going back to market, because you're a newer entrant into the market and you're up against incumbents. What kind of pushback do you get from companies saying, should I trust you? Do I know you?
Etc.. How hard is it to be a new entrant at these days?
Larry Shumbres: 24:39
It's always hard being a new entrant anytime, right? You get the pushback of, well, we really like what you're doing. Call us in a couple years, right? Because they don't want to take the risk on, especially if it's a larger, larger enterprise firm. If it is a large enterprise firm, the first thing that they're going to ask for is do you have your SOC two type two.
Right. They're more concerned about security than anything. If you have the right security in place and cybersecurity and the right insurance and you have clients and you're growing, you're doing well and they feel that you're a fit, then you we don't get any pushback. But if you don't have your security, your licensing, your insurance, everything to protect your company and protect their company, they're not going to take that risk. Right.
So that's like that's a you know, number one. And then number two is sometimes they just want to wait to see how well you do. And then the third the other thing that comes up is so I really like what you're doing Rich Quik is awesome. But you know you've been around for a year or two years. Am I going to have to go find another product, another quick in year three because you're going to sell the company?
Yeah. Their third thing. Yeah.
Richard Walker: 25:51
Yeah. No, man, we went through that for the first decade. How do I know you're going to be around? I kept saying we're going to be around now. We're in year 23.
24, I don't know, we're 23 years old. So we've done it. We've proven ourselves. We're still here. But I mean, you know, this actually plays out to all the different private equity transactions that happen, right?
And I see that when they happen, there's like a 5050 chance in a lot of ways that the companies, if it's being rolled into a bigger company, may not last, or they're going to lose all their people or their service is going to die and go down a lot. Yeah. So I'm just curious, what's your ambition with this?
Larry Shumbres: 26:29
Yeah. We want to continue to grow because I see every it's funny every time we see a competitor be acquired by a private equity firm, we kind of celebrate because we're like, well, we don't have to worry about them anymore because we see their customers. The first thing that goes is the customer service, right? When a lot of the not all of them, but the majority of private equity firms that come in and buy them, customer service dies is gone right away for a while. And then we see the product doesn't advance for a while so you can take advantage of it.
I'm not saying all private equity firms that come in and acquire firms are like that. I saw at Evestment when Insight Partners came in and acquired the majority of that. They continued to invest and grow that firm and kept the founders in place. And it was a very successful exit, even long term, to Nasdaq. So there are the positives of it.
But in the compliance space, I haven't seen a lot of positive acquisitions with the private equity firm. So it is a benefit to us.
Richard Walker: 27:33
Yeah. And I think I think well, look, I from my own experience because our customer satisfaction score was over 99% for all of last year. I know when you give excellent customer service throughout your company, your customers love you and they'll stick with you and they'll work through challenges with you, which gives you more breath, more air to breathe, and how you're trying to run your business and move forward. So it sounds like that you have that philosophy that you're really focused on building the best experience and customer success as part of your business.
Larry Shumbres: 28:06
We are. We? Yeah. We're early. We know that.
We have a lot more work to do. You can't build you know, they always the that analogy. Rome wasn't built overnight. And you know we know we can't build the best compliance solution suite overnight. So we started with the e-commerce.
We're continuing to hear feedback. We're making changes and adjusting the workflows to make them even more efficient. Small things like hey, when you first log in, we have a client that has a testimonial on our website. And the last conversation I had with them, they were like, can you change this on that? Like when you first log in, it just doesn't seem that intuitive.
And I'm like, well, what are we and what are we missing? And then when they walk me through it, it was like eye opening, like, why didn't we think of that? Like, right. So it's small things like that that we're going to continue to improve on early on and then start to develop and build out, you know, more modern compliance suite to cover all the bases.
Richard Walker: 29:00
We heard something fascinating from one of our Newer customers in the sense that they there, they came back to us. They were our customer for like ten years, got acquired, etc. that kind of story. But they told us that their users were afraid to e-sign because we didn't give them a chance to review the form one more time before signing. In their mind, they were going to click a button, goes to a black box, and they didn't know what was going to happen next. And it was astounding to us because we're like, wait a minute.
The user just finished filling out the form. They're reviewing it right there. So why is that? Why do they need that extra step? But that was such an eye-opening like remark.
Like, just give them one more chance to look at it and say, yes, this is where I'm this is what's going to happen next. So you can never, I think, can never not hear your customer. There's so much you can get from talking to them. And we just had heard that before.
Larry Shumbres: 29:50
Yeah. You're right. I mean, the one thing that has driven a lot of our success early on is when we first launched the product, we're like, all right, we have email, we have social media, we have some of the messaging and we have website, and all of our clients are like, well, the SEC, they're finding everyone. Can you do iMessage? Can you archive iMessage and WhatsApp and Android?
And we're like, well, we'll look into it. And it took a while. But you know, we figured it out. And we also figured out, all right, no one else is really doing this. Everyone's either downloading an app with a new phone number and calling their clients and say, oh, now you have to call me through this app on this phone.
Richard Walker: 30:30
Oh, my.
Larry Shumbres: 30:30
Gosh, on this phone number. Or they were saying, here's they were giving all their employees another phone and saying, here, here's your only call your clients on this phone and text on this phone, which is like just not a great client experience. So listening to our clients, we're like, well, what if you could just use your own phone, your own phone number, and then we'll segment your clients from your personal contacts. And they're like, that'd be perfect. That's what we need.
So that's what we built and pushed that out. And it's like the number one thing that everyone asks for now is like, hey, I love it. We want to use your iMessage.
Richard Walker: 31:06
Yeah. You took out a serious roadblock. Everybody's solving the problem with putting roadblocks in the sales process, and you don't want to stop the sales process by confusing the user or stopping the process. Wow. Good job.
Look, as we get close to wrapping up here, I have another question. But what is the best way to find you, Larry, and connect with you?
Larry Shumbres: 31:26
Yeah, I would say the easiest way to connect with me. In our company Archive Intel is go to our website archiveintel.com. If you want to learn more, we have a lot of information on our website. You can also schedule a demo. Take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes.
You can schedule it right on our website. We're very transparent. A lot of our pricing security information is online, and if you need more information, feel free to reach out to anyone on our team or our contact information is there. And you could also contact me directly through my email at Larry@archiveintel.com.
Richard Walker: 32:01
Nice. That's awesome. I love it when leaders are approachable and available. All right. I get to ask one of my favorite questions now, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?
Larry Shumbres: 32:15
Yeah, that is that's a big question because it wasn't just one person, right? It seems like you're as an entrepreneur, you're always trying to learn like how do you get better as a, as a leader, as, as in management and everything that you're doing for the company and for yourself. So I think it started back when, you know, early on I played, I was big into sports and I loved football, played football all the way through to college and in college. One of my coaches was Tim Lewis. And he just had he had the credibility and the knowledge to that.
You just wanted to you wanted to hear everything that he had to say? He. Yeah. He was all American. All academic at the University of Pittsburgh.
He was all pro-green at green Bay. The green Bay Packers. And then to have him as your coach, as a defensive back, it was just I just learned a lot from him from leadership to everything that that he did in his career. And then as I got into, you know, away from college and the fun part of life into the, the, the growing up and being more mature and responsible part I a few people that come to mind. One was Charlie Clark at Imani just how he how he led such a big team internal external sales, tying in marketing, customer service, really working with management and the employees.
I learned a lot from him. He was a great mentor. And at Imani. And then really where I got the knack in the I'd say the itch or I don't know the, the risk in me to take the risk to, to be an entrepreneur and start my own company was through Jared Stoller at Investment. He really gave me like a crash course MBA on how to be an entrepreneur preneur and start a company and build it.
And as I was building out smart vision for investment, he literally said, you need to pitch this to the founders. Like, this isn't something we're just going to. We invested in you, but now we need you to deliver. And instead of just putting it the onus on me, he kind of just kind of gave me the blueprint. Like, this is how it works.
Now figure it out. So yeah, I give a lot of credit to Charlie Clark and Jared Stoller.
Richard Walker: 34:46
And I had Charlie Clark on my show.
Larry Shumbres: 34:48
Did you really.
Richard Walker: 34:49
With FP Alpha? Right?
Larry Shumbres: 34:50
Yes. Yeah. He's with Alpha now. Yeah.
Richard Walker: 34:52
Yeah. So he's great, man. I really like him. And the brief moments I've had with him, I've learned from him and been inspired by him. Wow.
That's awesome. Larry. Yeah. Larry, thank you so much for being on the show. I want to say thank you to Larry Shumbres, founder and CEO of Archive Intel, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins.
Go check out Larry's website at archiveintel.com. And don't forget to check out quickforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thank you so much for joining me today, Larry.
Larry Shumbres: 35:30
Thank you Rich. It was a pleasure.
Outro: 35:33
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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