Gabe Rissman is the Co-founder and President of YourStake, a firm that provides technology solutions that power personalization for advisors. He holds a BS in computational astrophysics from Yale, where he also led Yale's fossil fuel divestment movement and managed the Socially Responsible Investing Fund. Under his leadership.
Gabe is a board member of the Intentional Endowments Network and a member of the Adasina Social Justice Index Committee. He was named 30 under 30 in Socially Responsible Investing and is a WealthManagement.com 2022 Ten to Watch.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Gabe Rissman introduces YourStake and how it helps people
Benefits of using YourStake AI-powered software as an advisor
YourStake’s business model
Gabe shares his entrepreneurial journey
Recommendations for businesses to create an environmental impact
How YourStake measures and improves its customer experience
AI's impact on customer experience in financial services
In this episode…
As a financial advisor, growing your practice can be a challenging endeavor. With ever-changing market conditions, shifting client needs, and the pressure to stay on top of regulatory requirements, it can be hard to focus on growing your business. However, leveraging AI can be a game-changer.
With the right tools and technology, you can streamline your client prospecting, reporting, and portfolio analytics, freeing up more time to focus on providing personalized service to clients. However, finding the right tools can be a hassle. Gabe Rissman recommends working with a firm that offers a suite of tools designed for advisors.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Gabe Rissman, Co-founder and President of YourStake, to discuss how advisors can thrive through AI. Gabe shares the benefits of using YourStake AI-powered software as an advisor, creating an environmental and social governance impact, and how YourStake improves customer experience and satisfaction.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
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 0:16
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 our past guests have included Rick Williamson of Redtail, and Aaron Klein of Nitrogen. Today I'm speaking with Gabe Rissman, president of YourStake. 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 reviewing the forms instead, get Quik! Using our Form Extract API, simply submit your completed forms and get that clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Now before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Paul Rankin of Adventro for introducing me to Gabe. Go check out their website at adventro.com. All right, let's meet today's guest, Gabe Rissman is the president of YourStake. He holds a degree in computational astrophysics from Yale, where he also led Yale's fossil fuel divestment movement, and student-managed socially responsible investing fund, which actually became the first student investment fund to file a shareholder resolution. How cool is that? Gabe is a wealthmanagement.com 2022 tend to watch as a board member of the Intentional Endowments Network, a member of the Adasina Social Justice Index Committee, was named 30 under 30 in Socially Responsible Investing and has published academic papers on ESG Investing. Gabe is also the author of a monthly series for wealthmanagement.com highlighting the top ESG trends of the month. Man Gabe, you are busy. Welcome to The Customer Wins.
Gabe Rissman 2:00
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on, Rich.
Richard Walker 2:03
Oh, my pleasure. 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 build and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenge is to grow in their own company. Gabe, we want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Gabe Rissman 2:19
That's the only question that needs to be asked. I love that one. YourStake helps people really buy making advisors supercharged, we try to make them more efficient, so they can be better, faster, and we can be a cheaper tool in their alternative. What that primarily means right now is advisors that have a brokerage statement that maybe a prospect sends over to them, they upload that statement into their system. And instead of needing to manually type everything from PDF into a spreadsheet, it automatically extracts all the holdings information that they need, into a formatted spreadsheet and runs an incident analysis on that portfolio. And then as part of the analysis, they're able to interact with and understand what's going on with the portfolio very quickly and generate a client-ready proposal, all from the click of a button just by uploading that statement.
Richard Walker 3:12
Wow. So I'm going to put this back in terms of 2001. When I was in a financial advisor, one of the ways in which we grew our business in a down market was to ask all of our customers tell us all the accounts you have. And we'd say oh, you have eight joint accounts and four individual accounts each. And we say, Wow, you must love receiving statements in the mail from all these different companies that you're working with? Wouldn't it be great to consolidate it to one and that's what they did. But we had to capture that information. So you're saying your software would read those statements for us and put it into a system? Exactly right. So how are you doing that? Is that all AI? Do you have a bunch of people in the background looking at statements and figuring out where to map information?
Gabe Rissman 3:52
So it can feel that way sometimes. No, it is using AI. So we're using kind of a series of different techniques. It starts with OCR, which a lot of people are familiar with just literally how do you read the statement the document, and then the real challenge that we've run into is, OCR is actually pretty fairly commoditized from a lot of the major tech providers, but you just get this big soup of all this data that is never looking the same. Every single brokerage statement is different. And we've also used AI to process that information and take every quack of every brokerage statement and make sure it can still format in the correct and structured way. And that's actually something that was impossible before the major leap forward in generative AI that happened this year. So that's how we're able to move into that direction.
Richard Walker 4:44
Man, Man, this is so cool. So many things are going to change for us. Now, what do you think is or how do you describe the core benefit to a user who gets your product? I mean, is it simply they don't have to do the work? How much time are they saving? What is the overall impact to them?
Gabe Rissman 5:00
Yeah, time-saving is a big one. I mean, time-saving is the key thing that happens it's efficiency. But so many things happen when you save time. And time saving is really something that we see as more of an opportunity than cost savings. For example, I don't know the exact stat, but there's something about if you respond quickly as an adviser and have fast follow-up, that's like the number one thing that you can do to increase your chance of winning a prospect is by responding quickly. And by moving that process along as fast as you can to get from initial consultation, to signing on the dotted line. So if you can speed up your analysis process, you now have a better chance compared to competitors, of, hey, getting back to the client with the analysis, and moving on three steps down the road, while the other advisor is still extracting all the information from your statement and gonna get back to you soon. So it helps you in business from that perspective. And we actually had an advisor a great story a couple of weeks ago, they had this giant foundation that had 150-page brokerage statement with almost 1000 holdings, they were not even going to try to serve that client, they were gonna give up on that prospect because they just didn't have the resources, they didn't have the time to do it. They loaded it into our system. And that actually now opens up the opportunity to win new business because you have the time to be able to serve them.
Richard Walker 6:26
Oh, man, I love that. So we're all about that two here real quick. How do we give you back your time and power you to do your best work? Because paperworks nobody's best work. Typing in statement data is nobody's best to work. Yeah. So how do we give them back that time? Because I do think that they can go put that time to more productive use. But also, I think it's really cool. You're helping people open up opportunities they didn't have before. So when you get that 1000 records from that statement, what happens next? I mean, an Excel spreadsheet is one thing, but I mean, what really happens next?
Gabe Rissman 6:57
Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. So it's an Excel spreadsheet is always a part of it. Because we know that advisors like use other tools as well, easy format to just uploaded anything else that you want to use. And then we automatically I mean, we have all the holdings, we have ways to be able to collect risk tolerance information, as well as, as an optional step, a clients or prospects values. And that's really what our background is, is being really, really thorough and transparent, and not polarizing in the way that we present values-based investing information. So you're able to basically collect the prospects goals from a risk values, whatever perspective, collect their holdings information. And then you're able to essentially find the best fit of your existing portfolios based on all the preferences and what's selected, and then automatically, again, just with one click of a button, run a really pretty side-by-side analysis, to be able to show current versus proposed on risk alignment on values, alignment, on performance, on volatility on diversification on asset class, really everything you need. And then one of my favorite things is the ability to also use AI in understanding that portfolio as well. So one thing you see on every single page is a have any questions bot, where you can type in a question, hey, why do I have so much real estate exposure on this portfolio? What's going on here? How can I improve the performance there? And we have, it's not chatGPT, but it's easy to think of as chatGPT, because that's the term that everyone's most familiar with. So we have a chatGPT-like thing, that instead of just coming up with the answer, which is really dangerous from a hallucination perspective, what it does is it says, hey, that's a great question about real estate exposure, I know exactly where to look into your state database for the answer. So it calls our database for the answer gets the exact actual numbers. So it gets the correct information, and then interprets that into chat response. So it's kind of AI to be able to extract the information and present you with an analysis, and then AI for you as the advisor to ask any questions and really understand things. And then the final thing is you just click a button and generate a PowerPoint proposal, which advisors have really loved because how many times have you had a when you were an advisor, you run a report from some tool, and like, I wish I could just change that one word, but it's in a PDF, and you can't do it in a PowerPoint, it's really nice to be able to kind of customize it and make it your own as well.
Richard Walker 9:30
That's awesome. That's so powerful. But I want to go back to something you're talking about, but not saying so directly. You're reading this data, but that means you're interpreting it as well to know the asset class to know the risk profile. So does that mean if you see they own Facebook stock, you go look up the standard deviation, the alpha, whatever, and find risk associated with that?
Gabe Rissman 9:51
Yeah, great question. So we have all that information in our database already. We have every stock ticker, we know the NPT statistics, we know the trailing returns all of that. So the way that we do this, again, we don't ask the AI for that information, we have the AI, take a PDF and turn it into a spreadsheet with all the ticker symbols. And then we map the ticker symbols to our database, which has, again, those same ticker symbols, but all this other rich data about it, that we can then use to run the analysis.
Richard Walker 10:19
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Because I mean, it's one thing that reading data, OCR can read data, but to make use of it, and that's the power of what you're doing is you're making knowledge and intelligence and action come out of this information. That's great. So who is your buyer? Who actually buys your product? Is it enterprises and users? What?
Gabe Rissman 10:39
Great question. And right now a lot of it is individual financial advisors that just want to speed things up. More and more, we're seeing larger advisors get really, really into this, even just for the statement extraction part, because they'll have entire teams where all they do is just type the stuff in from a PDF into a spreadsheet, and then perform that analysis and run the analysis. So they're doing it all the time. And this is a really, really big benefit and value add for them. And then actually, from the enterprise perspective, one thing that I didn't even mention overspeed use mentioned 99.9% accuracy. The accuracy is so huge, because anytime you have 150-page statement, you're typing stuff in, you're gonna make mistakes, right. And the AI OCR technology not only makes things faster, but it makes them more accurate, which makes it better because that's so crucial, you don't want to give the wrong analysis to one of your clients. So enterprises are very interested from the speed perspective, but really more the accuracy perspective, really large RIAs are really interested from the speed and accuracy perspective. And then individual advisors, maybe they're not doing it all day long, but they're doing a million different things. And just to not have to worry about this can be really, really helpful for them as well. What we're serving is any entity, any financial advisor that is looking to grow is our main target audience. There are some advisors that are not right, and that's great, they already have their clients. This is really for you have a statement from a prospect. So it's not already in your system. And you need to be able to perform an analysis quickly. So if you're a financial advisor, and you're growing, this can be really helpful.
Richard Walker 12:21
Are you then helping the advisor onboard their clients with this data? Because that's actually one of the challenges that they need to get prospect information into their CRMs. And one of the ways to do that is look at statements, right, just give me your statements, and then I have information that can work with you. So are you also using that data to populate CRMs or other onboarding tools?
Gabe Rissman 12:40
Right now we're not, it's a pretty clear roadmap item for us as something that can be really helpful. Another very obvious roadmap item is even going deeper in the custom portfolio creation. So you get risk preferences, you get values preferences, you get the existing statement, I mean, you have all the information that you need to be able to create, for example, a custom direct index with a tax transition plan. And that can just be spat out because you have all the inputs that you need. So that's something that a lot of advisors are really, really excited about as well.
Richard Walker 13:16
So Gabe, with this product being focused on enterprises, RIAs, independent planners, etc, do you ever see it going to a consumer because for example, I have my brokerage accounts with my financial advisor, but I also have my 401k, which is a different system altogether. I have my wife's 401k, that's a different system altogether. And I want to understand my own risk profile and how I'm allocating things without perhaps having to give it to my adviser and say, figure it out for me.
Gabe Rissman 13:41
I think the technology could be used from a consumer perspective, but the strengths of our team is not consumer-focused. To be totally honest, we understand advisors really, really well. We've worked with advisors for years and years, we have former advisors on the team, we understand that business, and we're focused on providing tools for advisors.
Richard Walker 14:02
Yeah. Now that makes sense. I mean, really, so are we. People ask me all the time, can you help me with that PTA form? So my kids trip? No, I mean, yes, but no. What led you to this? I mean, you have this background coming out of college, etc doing, you know, this type of investing work? Obviously, the investment portfolio is interesting, but what made you say let's do statements in AI?
Gabe Rissman 14:25
It's a great question. It's how much time do we have for a long line, the story? I'll try to make it concise. So YourStake started. So you mentioned in the bio that I was really a climate activist in college was my main thing. I had studied physics and the climate activism, and when I graduated, but most of the climate activism was around how investments impact climate change, and we realized that financial advisors really had no tools at all, not just financial advisors. No one had any good tools. really understand the impact of their investment portfolio on climate change, but also any other issue all across the value spectrum, right. And this is something that's, I really don't like using the word ESG. Because that is oftentimes pigeonholed into something very specific and means something that is not necessarily should mean. But we can serve really anyone's values, whatever you care about, from a personal perspective, what charities do you donate to? How do you vote politically? Do you want to see if your investments align with who you are as a person, regardless of what that means? That was really our mission to help people figure that out. And then what we realized at the start of this year, was that this AI technology is just leaps and bounds ahead of where things were in the past. And also, I mean, the technology was cool, but what we always do, customer wins podcast, we always really listened to our customers. One of the things that we write on our virtual whiteboard, because we're a remote-first company, is customer support is an opportunity and not a cost. We really, really love talking to our customers all the time and see it as something that like we can always figure out what people really need and what people are looking for. And we found two things. The first is values-based investing is still really popular for a lot of people. But people want it in the context of the entire portfolio analysis. And we're providing a pure play tool around values-based investing. What people were, again, really looking for is values alongside risk alongside financial performance alongside everything else, the bread and butter type of things. So we already wanted to move in that direction. The second thing, people just complained all the time about the fact that our spreadsheet uploader didn't upload their PDFs, they never expected us to do that, right. Like, we're a values-based investing company, they had no expectation that we would actually be able to convert the PDFs, but they just talked about it all the time, as like, a really annoying thing that they had to deal with. And so we kind of took those two things together and realized that we could solve a major problem and provide a more holistic experience all in one. And that's really what led to a lot of our focusing on exactly what we're focusing on now, where values is still a part of it. But you don't need to use the value side of things. We're just trying to build better general-purpose wealth management technology, to serve the broad need, and have values there as an opt-out instead of an opt-in. So that if you have a client that comes up with the values as well, you can still really easily you already have a page there. But you don't need to use it either.
Richard Walker 17:43
I love this about entrepreneurs like yourself, because you're looking at how do I solve these problems? And where's opportunity lie? And where you're getting it is from listening, by listening to what customers actually say to you, and realizing what they're asking about. And I actually have a funny story about this our new product Form Extract, I should have invented it 12 years ago, I was hearing the same question for 20 plus years. Now that I can use it on the form, how do I get data off the form? And I had an answer, but it wasn't the best answer. And as I changed my mind, and I shifted my perspective, I suddenly realized what they were asking, and therefore we came up with this product. So it's really fascinating to me that you were trying to solve a different problem. And you hear this over and over. Like there's something there, I got to do something about it.
Gabe Rissman 18:30
Really curious for you actually, what was your answer before? And then what ended up leading to that change?
Richard Walker 18:35
Well, truthfully, the answer before does work. And I have customers who adopted the answer is you're collecting data electronically through the forms process, use that data in your system. The challenge is this number one, collect all that data electronically in a useful manner. And not everybody has the methodology, even if the form supports it, to take that data and do something. The second challenge is, what happens if you want your user or investor to be able to change or modify the document. That is after you collected the data. And prior to signature? Well, now you have a different problem, you have to verify that the document you received electronically or printed matches the data you received, or go find the differences. And we have companies doing both but I have a handful of customers who have actually fully, fully automated the front end. And they know the data they're collecting matches exactly to the document because there's nothing else to be done except signature at that point, which was always to me the best answer like signatures an afterthought. That's really the last step that so many people think signature is where you actually do the work. And therefore they're doing the work still post the point in time the customer could have collected the data. So that's what it was. I mean, it just hit me like oh my gosh, this is what people really, really want. So therefore we find a solution. Gabe, there something else that you said, which is now eluding me, based on value. Well, anyway, we'll come back to that. With the advent of this product now, oh, I know what it is, it's the social side of things. Because I think a lot of companies would like to be social, and how some good to the world and make an impact, but don't necessarily know what to do or how to do it. What's your recommendation for how people should focus on creating some kind of environmental, social governance impact whatever it might be for them, that aligns with who they are and what they're doing, but doesn't take away from their core activity?
Gabe Rissman 20:34
It's a really good question, too. I think the first thing that you said, which I really like is, how do you find something that aligns with who they are as a person, one of the main critiques of this whole thing in general is that a lot of ratings firms will kind of have their analysts come up with what constitutes good, and then they will score your portfolio according to essentially their values. And what we try to do is break free from that and say, Rich, what do you care about? What are your values, and then we'll match the issues that you care about to the issues in our system to be able to let you know how your portfolio aligns with the stuff that actually matters to you. And from that perspective, I mean, people can go as deep as they want, some clients just want to like, it's not a criticism, they just want to sleep well at night, and know that they're not profiting off of industries that they don't believe in. Other clients want to have really more of a positive impact through corrective change, they want to vote their proxies, to be able to support corporate cultures and corporate improvements around issues that they care about. And then other people actually really want their investment dollars to directly impact a lot of the issues that they care about. And a lot of times people will turn to, for example, private equity or community investing for things like that.
Richard Walker 21:53
Now, that makes sense. In our company, I did not start my company to save the world, per se, I started to save people's time. And what I believe nobody likes filling out forms. So that frustration, right. And one of the things we realized is as people generate forms electronically, they no longer have to collect paper versions ahead of time, and or print them. So we started equating that to saving trees. And so we just did an estimate, we said for every page generated, that's one page that didn't have to be printed. Because sometimes people are printing multiple copies, or they're ordering stacks and putting on a shelf. So therefore, we said, That's how many trees and then we plant that many trees. But the irony is, I mean, the joke in my company was we'll go plant the trees, and then Rich is going to run over them. This four by four. I was like, I just want to drive the car like, Yeah, this is aligned with who we are and we love it. Planting all these trees is really, really awesome. What are you guys doing with your company? Have you thought about that? And what kind of impact you guys are having beyond just how you're saving your customers?
Gabe Rissman 22:53
Yeah, it's something that we think about all the time. And quantifying it can be very challenging from a lot of different perspectives. In fact, the tools that we use to be able to quantify impact of public equity totally does not make sense for a small business or a startup. A lot of the information is, for example, like what is our toxic air pollution? That's just not relevant to what we do at all. And actually, a lot of thinkers in the impact investing movement, say that for public equities, or companies that are large enough, a lot of it is figuring out what are other externalities. But for companies that are kind of in the private sector, small scale, it's figuring out, what's their general thesis and theory of change? And does that align, can that scale? And if it scales, what can that impact look like? So we don't spend too much time trying to quantify what our exact impact is today. But we definitely think about, hey, are we hitting the Northstar and making sure that we're doing something that's meaningful to our customers and to the world.
Richard Walker 23:58
So to me, that's actually the key. It's great that we plant trees, but I have not had a customer say, hey, I bought your software to plant trees. Like, that's not what we do. It's an oh, by the way, we planted trees on your behalf. And I think that's really the key is that as an operator of a company, you are trying to achieve a vision, you're pointing in a direction and you want to keep going in that direction, knowing that you're helping your customers along the way, and hopefully helping them have the impact you want. I do think it's also really fascinating, because I remember in finance classes back in college, during the 90s, talking about some of these mutual funds that were coming out that were trying to invest in very, very specific manners to achieve certain types of goals, helping children helping disease, or whatever. So I think it's really, really fascinating that you guys have taken another look at it and said, what's really happening, not just what's the idea of that fund manager, but what is they actually investing in? What's the true impact of that? That is so cool. You mentioned that you guys really listened to customers. I'm wondering, do you have any metrics that you follow to measure customer satisfaction, customer success, NPS score for example, what are you guys looking at?
Gabe Rissman 25:07
A lot of times, we used to actually do that. And we used to do surveys and things like that. Now, what we really look at is just daily usage. Because no matter what people tell you, if they're not using the product, it's not actually helpful for them. And if they're using it all the time, then it's really helpful for them. So that's our North Star as the usage and retention rate and things like that and referrals as well. But the biggest thing is just, if they're using it every day, that's something that we're really proud of.
Richard Walker 25:36
That's great. I do think that's really important to consider. I mean, obviously, revenue talks, but usage, are they getting value from it? Are they actually deriving the value that you promised is a really, really important thing as for a software services company especially? What are some of the techniques that you focus on to make sure that you're delivering a great experience and using your product? It could be anything UI, little techniques? I don't know, what are some of the things that you guys do?
Gabe Rissman 26:03
Great. I mean, a lot of it is trying to figure out, if usage drops, understanding what's going on, did we add something that's too complex, are things changing on the outside, but a lot of times we do two things. Well three things. The first is every new user, we really love doing a complimentary onboarding session. And then we can always get a sense of what does it look like for someone that's just signing up today? Are they able to understand the system and know what's going on. The second is, we do periodic check-ins with all of our customers, we try to meet with them twice a year, actually. And then we can learn, hey, you signed up three years ago, we love building, let's make sure you understand where things are, and are using the things that you want to use. And then the third is we host a lot of community sessions. So that can be kind of a combination of office hours, and us just talking about best practices. And a lot of times, we bring on advisors, and they click around and show people, hey, here's what I do. Here's how I use YourStake. And then advisors can talk to each other. And I think that peer-to-peer interaction of advisors talking to each other with us listening really helps us best understand what people are frustrated by what people really like, and what we should focus on.
Richard Walker 27:17
That is such an awesome idea. How do you do that? You put them in a Facebook group? I mean, what do you do?
Gabe Rissman 27:22
A big zoom call with breakout sessions?
Richard Walker 27:24
Really? My gosh, that's so smart. Because then everything you said is about engagement. I mean, I love that you said it's a complimentary onboarding session to make them feel like it's optional. But it's part of this. And that is engagement. And then talking to customers and sensing things that watching you use. That's engagement, now you do this community things, oh, my gosh, I'm stealing these ideas Gabe.
Gabe Rissman 27:24
Go for it. Well, now I got to turn it around. What are the ones that you found the best work to really understand the customer what needs to happen?
Richard Walker 27:55
So we look at a few things as well. Number one, we do NPS score. Lately, our NPS score has been 100. It's strange that it's so high, because it doesn't seem like it's real but our latest score came in that way. We measure customer satisfaction CSAT, which is measurement of how people got service from emails and chats, how fast they got, et cetera, that score, we strive for a minimum of 75, which is an outstanding score. And we've seen it go from 85 to 98, just depending on the month, and how much is coming through. So we're consistently very high there. We also look at usage, we look at trends and forms usage and who's doing what we look at customer by customer, we have graphs that show trend lines with red or green in terms of are they increasing or going down? And we look at that. And if they're going down, we call them and say hey, what's happening in your business? Are you changing, and most of the time, it's just this is the cycle they're in, it's not a big deal. But some of the time it has turned into them saying, well, we're thinking about changing our system around because we're not getting the adoption we want. And then we get to reengage with them and bring them through. We also have a tech Advisory Council for our end-user product that we run. And it's invitation only, but your community thinks sounds so much better. It's just they come join if you want and let's have a conversation. But yeah, I agree with you 100%. It's about engagement and how often you can talk to people. And I think the challenge for us is that when somebody implements forums, and it's working, they're not anything to say, they're like it works. So this is really good. Okay, look, you have an AI driven product. But I still want to ask this question. How do you see AI changing the customer experience overall? I mean, in our industry or for things you care about?
Gabe Rissman 29:42
I think I'm particularly bullish on AI, even compared to other AI startups. I think it's going to radically change everything, and pretty fast. I think from just an experience perspective. I think that advisors are really going to be relationship managers and kind of do an initial sale, and really get the prospect or client to trust them, and then keep engaging with them to build that trust. But all of the analytics, and a lot of the anything that's manual entry is going to be gone, all the analytics will be able to be done, you'll still be able to turn the knobs, but it's a solved problem. So I think that it's going to entirely shift into relationship business. It's already going that way, I don't think AI in particular changes that more than just the slow progression of technology, I think it just speeds things up. I do think that a lot of advisors, I hear all the time, hey, AI is gonna replace financial advisors. And I do think that's true for advisors that differentiate themselves, but I can bet a lot of money that the vanguards, the Schwab's of the world, the Fidelity's of the world are trying their best to be able to build technology tools that can either a, supercharge their advisors or b, replace the most basic and standard functions, kind of bringing robos to the next level. So I think that the industry itself is going to change as well as the user experience and what an advisor does on a day-to-day basis, I think it's gonna happen pretty fast.
Richard Walker 31:19
One of the outcomes I take from what you've just said, and I've heard other people talk similarly, it's just more that you're saying it more clearly to me, that there is going to be an evolution that we can't really understand yet. Because it's going to automate or make things easier and faster to do that's going to free up time to do other things, we're probably going to be talking about whole new ways of analyzing portfolios or customer sentiment, or risk factors that we haven't thought of before. Because I don't believe we're ever going to change the rules of engagement, you need to still talk to your customer, you need to have an emotional connection with them to understand what's going on in their lives, right. I don't think anybody wants a mirror, mirror on the wall, give me a portfolio. There's a few I'm sure that want that. But I think we want to have that connection with people and AI cannot replace that yet if ever. Gabe this has been awesome to talk to you about all this. And I have another question before we wrap up. But before I ask that question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Gabe Rissman 32:16
Sure. I think the best way is through email, gabe@yourstake.org. And I'm also on LinkedIn. I think I'm the first Gabe Rissman that will show up on LinkedIn. So if you just search that way.
Richard Walker 32:33
Yeah, awesome. We'll have that in our podcast page, so people can find it as well. Awesome. Okay, so here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style? Or how you approach your role?
Gabe Rissman 32:46
Yeah, it's got to be my co-founder, Patrick. I think the biggest impact that he had the most specific change that he had was convincing me that anything is possible. I definitely didn't believe I thought I have a particular skill set. And that's what I should be doing. And I should be leaning on that. But he really changed my mindset that if you understand the customer, like that's the hard thing is figuring out what people need and what people want what people care about. And then like, you can pick up the skills and you can figure out what you need to do to be able to execute on that. So that is not something that I had in my mind before meeting Patrick, and he really helped bring that out is the mentality that anything is possible.
Richard Walker 33:28
I love that I really do. I think that's the journey of an entrepreneur, you're solving problems other people don't think are possible. And that's what makes it special and fun. So let's see, astrophysicist to investment portfolio management to AI. Yeah, I'd say you can do anything.
Gabe Rissman 33:49
I am. I'm really, really mad at myself that I'm gonna say this because I'm a really big Jets fan. But I just watched the Tom Brady interview. And I liked it. Even though I do not like Tom Brady at all, but one, the title of the interview was like, something along the lines of like, Thank God, I was naive, right? He started playing football late, and was not very good. And he wanted to be the greatest and didn't realize how hard it would be to get there. So he took the first step. And he took the second step. And he took the third step, when a lot of people see the mountain of obstacles ahead of them. I have no way I'm ever gonna get there. He was naive. And he said it was good that I was naive and didn't like psych myself out about it. And it was way harder than I ever could have expected. But thinking that it was easy, like, got me started and allowed me to do it. So I think that that kind of mindset. Yeah, he said it well.
Richard Walker 34:52
Yeah, I love that stuff. I love that. This is inspirational. So look, I want to say thank you to Gabe Rissman president of YourStake for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Gabes website at yourstake.org. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thanks for joining me today Gabe.
Gabe Rissman 35:20
Thanks so much Rich.
Outro 35:23
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