Financial technology is going through a new wave of change, with artificial intelligence – or AI – taking the world by storm. But the wealth tech space is already incredibly complex, with literally hundreds of tech providers battling for market share across the advisor workflow. So, what does Ezra Group, a prominent WealthTech consultant, have to say about this? How can we get ahead of this change? We're delighted to be joined by Craig Iskowitz, Founder of Ezra Group. Together, we’ll dig into his latest technology predictions, covering AI, integration opportunities, fractional outsourcing, and more. A key takeaway: "Meet once a year with your team and talk about your technology."
Stay tuned for additional important disclosure information at the end of this episode.
Jonathan Linstra: The financial technology landscape is ever-changing, that's a given. But even in recent days, the pace of change seems to be accelerating all the more. One example is the evolution of artificial intelligence, or AI, that is now taking the world by storm across all industries. But the wealth tech space is already incredibly complex, with hundreds of technology providers battling for market share across the advisor workflow. So, what does Ezra Group, a prominent wealth technology consultant, have to say about all this? What technologies are having the greatest impact on advisors, their workflows, and how they can keep up with this dynamic landscape of change?
Hello, and welcome to Simple But Not Easy, a podcast from Morningstar's Wealth Group, where we turn complicated financial developments into actionable ideas. I'm Jonathan Linstra, Managing Director of the Americas for Morningstar Wealth, and today, I'm excited to be joined by Craig Iskowitz, a long-time respected industry veteran and founder of the Ezra Group. Together, we'll dig into his latest technology predictions, covering AI, integration opportunities, fractional outsourcing, and more. If you'd like to know more about how we can support advisors with technology capabilities, we welcome you to email us at simple at simple@morningstar.com.
Now, let's get started. Craig, thank you for being with us here today on Simple But Not Easy.
Craig Iskowitz: I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Linstra: I really appreciate it. Look, we know, Craig, those in our audience are probably well aware of you, obviously. We've got a large advisor base, but just for those that may not be as familiar with yourself and/or Ezra, can you just start, taking a few minutes, just tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe your journey on how you got here today as far as what you're doing and the work that you're doing, and then your team at Ezra? Tell us a little bit about that.
Iskowitz: Absolutely. So, I run a consulting firm called Ezra Group. This is our 18th year in business, and all we do is wealth and asset management. I started out with a degree in computer science. I was a lowly programmer for many years, and then slowly migrated myself up the food chain into network engineering, into management, then into consulting, and have bounced around a bit before I founded Ezra Group doing just these types of projects, and it really seemed to be an interesting niche to me. I was always in financial services. So, I worked for the precursor to Broadridge Financial, if you're familiar with that, a very large company. They were spun off from a division of Automatic Data Processing, and I worked for that division of ADP, their brokerage services group for 10 years. So, that's where I got my start in the business. Merrill Lynch was our first customer rolling out real-time market data to the 15,000 brokers around the country, and then went from there, moved on to investment banking firms like Goldman, Salomon, Lehman Brothers that don't exist anymore, rolling out market data on their trading floors and to their analysts and other members of their company. So, we were really in the cutting edge at the time of technology on Wall Street. Then left to become a consultant, and I've been pretty much doing that ever since.
Linstra: Fantastic, Craig, and thanks for that, because as we look for the next generation of leaders in this industry, as a matter of fact, there's so many varied paths. And so, I think the work that you and your team do at Ezra is fascinating and might just open the minds of some path that they may want to pursue. So, thanks for that.
So, as we think about the work that you and your team do at Ezra, Craig, you're engaged by just a myriad of firms, I'm sure all shapes and sizes as far as what they're trying to solve for when they come to you. Is there any commonality that you see in those requests, and what kind of common themes are there, and are those related in your mind to the size of their firm, whether they be the people, numbers of people, numbers of headcount or assets under management, or maybe their maturation stage of the business cycle that they're in? What are they trying to solve for? Anything you can share there?
Iskowitz: It's an excellent question. I was talking to someone asking what I like about my job, and it is solving problems. So, we solve a wide range of problems. We have, broadly speaking, three client segments. One is wealth tech firms. So, we've worked with some of the largest providers in the space, including Morningstar. And those types of projects are firms that could be very mature in their software, like Morningstar has very mature software products, but are looking for competitive analysis, or product strategy, product road mapping, and ideas of how they can improve their product, become more efficient, compete better in the marketplace. So, those types of firms come to us for that. We also work with startups and smaller firms that maybe are moving into different client segments. So, that's a common request to ask us to, hey, we sell very well in the RIA space, but we need help selling to broker-dealers and enterprises. How do we do that? Who are the competitors? What are the buying decisions? What kind of features and functionality do we need? And vice versa. Those are common requests.
We get requests around market research, so asking us, hey, if we're looking to move into this new client segment, what is the potential revenue? What types of products should we sell there? Is this an attractive area for us? Or will our product play well in that area? Another request we get from firms is, we're looking to acquire a vendor that provides XYZ technology. Who is out there that does this on a standalone basis? Which ones do you think would mesh well with what we have, knowing our feature functionality set, as well as our company culture and technology? So, those are the kinds of questions we get and problems we solve for wealth tech firms.
Our second client segment is wealth management firms, broker-dealers, RIAs, TAMPs, the wealth divisions of banks, anyone who employs advisors and provides advisory services, including robo-advisors. Those problems are different. They are asking us how they can improve their technology. And depending if they're mature or if they're new – if they're new, it's easier because then everything is fresh, and you just start with a brand-new platform. But most firms we work with aren't brand new and they already have existing technology that could be either 10, 20, or even older than that, have been around for a while. So, they often have – they're building up what we call tech debt. Their technology is old, they have legacy systems, and they've slowly started building manual processes around their tech to do certain tasks, either tasks that the tech couldn't do or the tasks the tech does do, but they're not aware it doesn't. That's often the case. So, we often come in where they've got a lot of tech, the tech doesn't integrate very well, the experiences are poor for the advisors and the clients, operations is pulling their hair out with all the manual processes, and management wants to know why they're not scaling and why costs are going up so dramatically. That's another area we get asked about. Those are a lot of our projects on the wealth management side.
Also, selecting new vendors. So, they might say, look, our portfolio management platform is old, our CRM is old, our billing reporting system is old, it's not scaling well, we need a new platform, can you help us? So, we'll run an RFP process. We're experts in all the vendors and all the processes and all their products. So, we understand the space. We do not sell any software. We do not take any finder's fees, revenue share. So, we're completely agnostic as to what software our clients use and our clients like it that way. So, we help them run the RFP, but we have a proprietary methodology for vendor selection that we train our clients on, because it is a skill to be able to review vendors and understand what they do without being overwhelmed by their demos and the bells and whistles.
But another big benefit of our methodology is helping the clients, the wealth management firms, understand their own needs and getting everyone, all the stakeholders in the room, and getting them to talk and agree on what their needs are and what their priorities are over the next three, five, seven years. That is a big part of what a lot of firms don't do well before they look for new software. They haven't achieved consensus internally as to where they're going with the business and what they're doing and what their needs are. So, that's a common theme. The third area is private equity firms and other investors. So, people coming into the space looking to buy either an RIA or a broker-dealer or a wealth tech firm. So, they bring us in for due diligence.
Linstra: Really curious into that decision-making at the firm level, when they're coming to you with this, again, perhaps perceived challenges or problems, and then maybe when you and the team get in there and do some early discovery work, I guess if there's any insight that you have or that you could share as far as the perceived challenges versus the actual real challenges when you're done with the engagement, how closely those were aligned? In other words, do firms really know what they need?
Iskowitz: No, but they know they've got a challenge. They may not know exactly what they need to solve that challenge. So, you're right about that. They realize there's a problem. So, it's not a perceived problem, it's a real problem. They may not necessarily know what to do to solve it, which is why they call us, because we do this all the time. Not that they couldn't solve their own problems, but they only have their own experience to go on. Well, we have experience from hundreds of firms and hundreds of projects, and we're providing best practices in the industry that they don't have access to.
So, the real challenge, as I mentioned earlier, is getting everyone on the same page. And that's a problem we find. It becomes a people problem. The fact that we understand technology is very beneficial, and it's one of our strengths. But one of our other strengths is helping our clients, understanding people and understanding who the stakeholders might be. And it's probably not who they think they are. There's probably other stakeholders in the business that need to be involved, and helping explain to them what the problems are, and explain to them how different technology could and couldn't work for them, and giving them some understanding of how different technology plays out, what different benefits there are to, for example, in all-in-one solution versus a best-in-breed solution, where you can integrate, where you couldn't integrate. So, we do a lot of that hand-holding, and a lot of that educational part. It's just as important as the technology part.
Linstra: Well, Craig, as you mentioned, we've obviously enjoyed our engagements with Ezra and yourself, and found them very beneficial. And I'm kind of curious maybe to look at the other end of that and think, if there's somebody listening to us right now, maybe it's a smaller RIA or a smaller BD even, who – perhaps they've gone with the do-it-yourself method, right? They've gone DIY because they're not big enough yet maybe to consider engaging a consultant or some help in this area. I guess, what are the dangers in the do-it-yourself approach to this, and is it not a question of if but when they finally do reach out for some help in this area?
Iskowitz: Yeah, it is a case of just when. Clearly, as a consultant, I'm biased. I don't think anyone should do it themselves. You should all call us. But it's certainly possible for anyone to spend the time and learn and understand the industry and get an understanding of the clients if you have the time to do it. The problem is most people don't have the time because they've got to run their business. And the people that do make their own decisions oftentimes are making a snap decision. They pick a vendor that maybe gave them the last demo, that was the one they saw last. They don't do a full review, or they don't really understand what their needs are, and they pick a vendor based on incomplete information. And it winds up being a vendor that either can't scale, doesn't mesh well with their business processes, or just can't deliver on what they promised, which is a common theme with, unfortunately, a lot of vendors in our space. But the issue that we find is that there's always a point in time where firms grow to a certain part, a certain level, and they plateau. Now some firms are fine with that. They're fine reaching that level and plateauing. Others that are looking to grow faster are frustrated by that plateau, and that's when they call us.
Linstra: In our preparation too, Craig, I thought it was really interesting what you shared as far as perhaps even some of the technology that these folks already have within their systems but maybe just don't even realize the power of what they have, and they haven't fully unlocked that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Iskowitz: Absolutely. Most firms never use more than 10% or 20% of the functionality of any software that they have in-house. It's a commonly known number, 20% is often thrown around, and also in most industries. Because the software has become so robust, layers and layers of features over many years, there's less and less of the software that firms are actually using. But the problem is not that the software doesn't have other uses or that the other functionality isn't useful, it's that there's no incentive for the staff to learn it. And also, a lot of times you think, well, software is like a Band-Aid, I put the Band-Aid on, and I can leave. Now, you've got the Band-Aid, you're fine. Or it's like aspirin. Take the aspirin, now your headache will go away, and we don't have to do anything else.
But software isn't like that. Software is a never-ending process of education and learning. And once you get software installed, giving the team a week or two of training and then having them go off and never coming back to it is a sure recipe for not using those capabilities to the fullest. It's a constant process where you need to continuously train your staff, continuously encourage them to use more of the software, monitor what they're using, and remind them, hey, this software has these other features that we want to be using, and all of us, we want to take advantage of it. And annually, at least, calling your vendors and saying, hey, here's how we're using your software. Is there something we're not using? How can we be using it better? And putting that little bit of questioning and a little bit of talking back to your vendors will pay huge dividends for most companies.
Linstra: Importance of reinforcement. That's really a good point. So, Craig, as we pivot out just a bit, advisor efficiency is such a big trend that we're hearing a lot about these days. And as we look at what's going on now, forget about just across our industry, across the world right now with AI and artificial intelligence, the adoption, potential usage. How do you foresee this? What implications are there in the near term and longer term here?
Iskowitz: There's more and more technology available, as we were just talking about. It's coming out in all different methods and all different categories. And it's great to see this innovation as founders launch new firms with new software that can do things that we never thought of doing or never thought of offering to advisors. So, there's tools for meeting automation, software that helps advisors automate the prepping, the execution, and the follow-up of meetings. And that saves many hours a week because advisors are constantly meeting with their clients.
So those types of tools are very efficient in giving back time to advisors, which they can then use for whatever they want. They can use it to grow their business. They can use it to build strong relationships. They can use it for prospecting. Or they can just take a vacation. Now, they've got some extra time. So, we're seeing a lot of these tools that are automating more and more of the advisor's tasks. Now, the downside of that is, once you can automate more of an advisor's task, then robo-advisors and other digital advice firms can do some of the things with software. So, it's pushing advisors up the value chain. They have to keep looking for more ways to offer more value to their clients. And some of it is just spending more time with them. Some of it is spending time with their children, G2 and G3, and building a stronger relationship with the entire family. Some of it is offering different services. Maybe they're offering insurance products as well that are more holistic. Maybe they're offering tax advice, which can be also delivered via technology. Maybe they're offering estate planning, also technology-enabled. So, all these different technology tools give advisors a lot of options in how their business should be run.
Linstra: That's a salient point there, Craig. And I think you nailed it as far as what technology is ultimately doing. As advisors, they're trying to improve client outcomes and the advisor experience and giving them back more time to do that in whichever manner they wish is fantastic. So, I don't know – I've been in a number of different recent discussions about AI and advisor workflow and some fear around it, frankly, in some cases. And I think you really nailed it with just automating workflow where there is not large value perhaps in some of the more menial tasks or administrative tasks is a potential big implication to the business. So, I appreciate that thought.
Iskowitz: It's a low hanging fruit, all those what you mentioned as a menial tasks is low hanging fruit. Those are the things that we should be looking to automate quickly because it's something that doesn't necessarily provide direct value to the clients or their tasks that have to be done but can easily be automated and provide value all the way around.
Linstra: Yeah, fantastic. And like you said, moving the advisor up the value chain, technology alone is not enough, right? It takes some wisdom to know how and when to apply it in the proper sense along these tasks.
Iskowitz: That's true. Sure. As advisors get more efficient, they can also support more customers, more clients, or offer more services. So, that, by definition, if you're adding more services, you're providing more value to clients. And we've always been concerned that too many advisors are too focused on investments only, assets only, and aren't thinking holistically. There's a number of surveys out – I think Fidelity did a survey that showed that a lot of investors, potential investors, want their advisors to give them advice outside of just investments. And some of it is even around healthcare. And there are tools, if you look on the Kitces Ezra Group AdvisorTech Map, there are healthcare software tools that help advisors with healthcare planning, Medicare planning, and others. So, this is becoming more of holistic technologies allowing advisors with the same amount of effort and time to deliver more holistic financial advice.
Linstra: I think I really appreciate the Michael Kitces Ezra Map that we all use. It's on everybody's desktop or close therein and how to navigate all of the wealth tech across the landscape and really appreciate all the work that goes into there. But also, understandingly, that really illustrates the complicated nature of navigating that as a sole practitioner out there for an advisor and the need for some guidance. Any thoughts on how that's evolved through the years as you've seen that in real time?
Iskowitz: I have a lot of thoughts on that. So, Michael and I do that together. And every month we spend about an hour, an hour-and-a-half reviewing the map and reviewing products that want to be added to the map, and also reviewing the map overall, looking at the categories and seeing how they're changing. And a lot of it has to do with how the products themselves are slowly morphing over time into different things. We had an example of the advice engagement category, which was a brand-new category we added last year, it didn't exist before, because new products were coming out, like, Asset Map and Lumiant and ForwardLane that didn't fit in any of the other categories. They were tools that improved the way advisors work and talk and interface with their clients. So, we created the advice engagement category, and now there's 10 products in that category.
So, it keeps growing. So, we're constantly trying to make the map more useful to advisors and they can use it as a guide. So, it's a reference guide. It's not the only thing. It's just the place you start. There's a lot more that goes into selecting a vendor because we put every vendor on the map. We don't tell you, well, this vendor is better than that vendor. You have to decide that for yourself. So, it's a great resource, but there's still a lot of work that goes – that's why we work with a lot of RIAs that are usually $5 billion to $10 billion in AUM and a lot of broker-dealers, and even they have issues and need help selecting vendors. So, it's not a problem that's only limited to small advisory firms.
Linstra: Fantastic. Again, I thank you personally. I've referred to that map numerous times throughout my – but to your point, I feel like every time I go in there, whether it's once a quarter or whatever, it's constantly evolving. So, well done and thank you for that.
Craig, as we think about now to a different role that seems to be gaining in prominence in the industry is this idea of an experienced officer or a CXO. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is this real? Are you seeing that as well? And what do you see as how that's evolved in the path forward?
Iskowitz: We've talked a lot about client experience. We've written about it on our blog. We've talked about it in our podcast, and we also talk about advisor experience. So, we refer to them as AX and CX, advisor experience, client experience, and there's also UX, user experience. They're all important. If you don't have a good experience, the advisors aren't going to be as efficient, they're not going to be as happy in their job, the clients are going to be frustrated. And the client experience is more than just technology. Client experience is basically all the interactions you have with your clients. How are you educating them? How are you communicating to them? A lot of people think, well, we have a client portal. That's our client experience. No, that's just one component of your client experience.
When the clients are onboarded the first time, that's a client experience. When the clients get their statements, that's an experience. When the clients get a call from their advisor or an ops person about an issue, that's an experience. Every interaction touchpoint should be thought of as part of the client experience. When you're sending out content, if you have digital marketing campaigns, that's part of the client experience. So, having a CXO, I think, for larger firms is definitely useful for someone to be thinking about overall the client experience, what kind of message we're sending to our clients, what message we're giving them about our brand, and about how to use the technology. If I can do it from a selfish point of view, from technology and operations, how the clients interact with the technology and whether it's improving their understanding and their brand awareness of your firm.
Linstra: Well, it's certainly a testament to how our industry has evolved over time, even talking about, frankly, an AX or a CX type role, I would say, Craig, I don't know if you agree. But when we think about the course of everyday life outside, for some reason, we're all interested in our experience with different firms that we engage and interact with, whether that be online or in person, and thankfully, we're now seeing that show up in greater prominence here in fintech and asset management. So, I think it's really a fascinating evolution.
Iskowitz: One thing, if I could add to client experience, one issue we have is we think about client experience backwards and upside down, especially when it comes to the client portal, which again is not the full client experience, it's just one component, but it's a commonly used component of the client experience. I've never heard an industry that looks at the number of interactions that a client has with the portal as a bad thing, except for their advisory business. Advisors, when they hear, hey, a client has been on the portal 15 times today, oh my god, what's wrong? Call him. He's got a problem. No one else thinks that way. Every other app, website is trying to get their users onto their website, trying to increase engagement, trying to increase time on the website. We're the only ones who think it's bad, and it's because we're too asset-focused. We have a portal, it's just their portfolio, maybe QPRs, maybe you can download – maybe there's a document vault, but that's it. There's nothing to engage them, there's no education, there's no interaction. So, that's a thing that I think the industry needs to get over and needs to think about ways to be more engaging with clients on the portal and provide more of an experience to them and encourage them to be on the portal more often rather than discouraging them because it's a problem.
Linstra: Really a great point and one that I'll admit, I think we've probably suffered for a little bit even here, frankly, is when we see that engagement, we would preemptively think that that might be a challenge rather than a great opportunity for engagement. So, fantastic point.
So, Craig, pivoting away a little bit, with everything that's going on – we talked a little bit about AI and the evolution of UX and CX, et cetera – but what do you think from your perspective that the industry is not paying enough attention to? Any insight?
Iskowitz: Well, one of my key go-to answers to respond to that question is integrations and we're trying to change that. We saw integrations as a huge problem as consultants because we work with both the WealthTech vendors, and the wealth management firms, and we were seeing across the board integrations were bad. They weren't done properly. They weren't built properly. They weren't documented properly, over-promised – delivered consistently and it was very opaque trying to find out what integrations existed between two vendors.
Last year, we launched a research product that we're calling the Ezra Group WealthTech Integration Score, where we went through all the vendors on the map that you love so much. And by the way, that map is up to 434 vendors, I believe – 434 products on the map. We scored every single one. We checked every single one and all the integrations they have. It was over 4,500 integrations. So, an average of 11 integrations per product. Although that's the average. The median is much lower because it's skewed by a small number of vendors with lots of integrations. We scored every single one of those and we came up with a methodology to generate a 1 to 10 score for each vendor on their integrations.
And what we're hoping to do with this is threefold. One, provide more information to wealth management firms and when they're making choices between applications, it's another piece of data they can use to say, hey, we've got two applications, we'd like both of them. This one's got integration score of 8. This one's got an integration score of 6. We should lean towards the 8 because that will help us be able to integrate better with our existing applications. One area. Second one is other vendors. If you're going to look at working with partners, knowing which vendors have strong integration capabilities helps narrow down who you're going to partner with. The third use case is PE firms, as you mentioned, when they're looking to acquire companies. If you're going to buy someone, you want to be able to plug them into something else you have in your portfolio or something you would plan to buy in your portfolio. So, the PE firms have told us they use the integration score when they're evaluating companies to buy, and of course, they would lean more towards higher scores.
And another area we're looking for is to provide more transparency. By going to the score, you have more understanding of whether they integrate well versus just going to the website, which oftentimes doesn't have any information at all. So, I think in general, what firms aren't paying enough attention to is integration. Especially if they're doing a best-of-breed solution, they always overestimate the ability of vendors to integrate with each other, which we find is a huge problem.
Linstra: Craig, just wrapping up here, but we always like to ask our guests just because obviously being a leader in the industry and a student of the space, what's the best book you've read or books that you've read that you'd recommend that has had the greatest influence on you and your approach to your career and even this industry?
Iskowitz: So, I read a lot of business books, and I have everything on my Kindle, so I can always go back. I love to use the note-taking capability in the Kindle. It's really helpful for then going back and seeing things I highlighted, which I think is really helpful. So, a recent book that I read is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It's great for anyone running a business. It talks about the trials and tribulations of being a CEO and things you should look for when your business is growing and how to overcome some of these areas, these land mines you're going to run into. Another great book – and this is an old book – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's a classic book about how to – it's not a management book, but it's really a personal book on how to think differently, how to run your life differently, although it does relate a lot to business. So, I thought that one was pretty good. And I'm really into marketing, although I'm not a marketing person, I'm not a marketing expert, I do get involved a lot in marketing, and it's an important part of growing your business. So, I like books by Seth Godin. One of his is called Purple Cow. His blog is great. I learned a lot from Seth about marketing. So, I think that would probably be a great book for people as well.
Linstra: A true reader and not a listener. I didn't hear any audiobooks mentioned, Craig.
Iskowitz: Well, any book can be an audiobook, my friend, right?
Linstra: I know.
Iskowitz: Don't disparage people because they listen to audiobooks.
Linstra: That debate is over in our house. It was highly debated, highly debated in our house.
Iskowitz: Yeah, come on, man. Let them listen to audiobooks if they like.
Linstra: Well, fantastic. Craig, before we leave, if somebody's tuned us out here, a 10-second takeaway just on what's the one nugget that you want to leave everybody with, the most salient takeaway that they should take from this episode?
Iskowitz: Well, we talked about so many different things. It's hard to fit it in just 10 seconds. I would say that the best thing to do is to meet once a year with your team and talk about your technology. Even if it's just for an hour, but just go through it. Take a look at your technology. And this is for wealth management firms. Think about it once a year. Go through top to bottom. Look at what your tech is and talk to the stakeholders and say, what do you think? Are you happy? Are you sad? Is there anything going wrong? It's okay to say everything is fine. But just to do that quick check every year, I think, helps a lot of firms identify problems that they didn't know existed and gets everyone on the same page understanding how the technology is supporting their business growth. Anyone who wants to learn more about Ezra Group, please go to our website, ezragroupllc.com.
Linstra: We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Craig Iskowitz from Ezra Group, thank you again for being here and of course for your time and engagement. And there you have it, another episode of Simple But Not Easy. As always, we thank Craig for his time and engagement and insights. Once again, if you'd like to know more about how Morningstar can support you, please drop us a note at simple@morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks again from the team at Morningstar Wealth.
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