Day 3 of T3 Offers Array of Learning Opportunities, Along With Shrimp & Grits
In contrast to the first two days when the main ballroom hosted the overwhelming majority of presentations, the third day featured multiple, simultaneous talks scattered across three stages, granting visitors access to a flood of information through a self-customized educational process.
With a multiplicity of presenters, topics ranged from “Your Tech Experience Sucks … Now What?” by Oleg Tichkevich, CEO of INVENT.us to “Harnessing the Power of Technology to Implement Impact Investing” by Lydia Pinnell Lawrie, Senior Strategy Manager at Clarity AI.
Here’s a highlight reel of insightful presentation takes:
- Data is the new oil – refine it. Practifi’s Co-Founder and President Adrian Johnstone presented on “Navigating the Data Paradox.” Johnstone amended the famous quote by British mathematician Clive Humby that “Data is the new oil,” with his own view that “like oil, data is valuable but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”
Johnstone unpacked the “data paradox” that more data isn’t necessarily better, walking the audience through the steps that make for a data-centered firm that solves the problems of data isolation and stagnation to produce secure, robust, flexible and contextual data that drives firm success.
- Reach the younger generations now. Sarah Rasmuss, Chief Product Officer of CircleBlack led Noel Stave, Chief Technology Officer of RBC Clearing & Custody and Susan Michel, CEO and Founder of Glen Eagle, in a panel discussion on improving client experience through technology.
The participants discussed two eye-opening statistics:
- In the next two decades, $30 trillion in wealth will pass from the boomer generation to Gen X and millennials.
- 70% of heirs move inherited wealth to new advisors.
Merge these two data points and you have a wake-up call for the industry to reach the younger generations now or hemorrhage clients and risk marginalization.
- Kartik Srinivasan, Director Third-Party Integrations at Charles Schwab led a broad-ranging panel discussion on “Technology Trends and Innovations in the RIA Space.”
Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands. Panelist John Milne, Senior Director, Product Management at SS&C Black Diamond, noted that advisors with the personnel and skills increasingly take the lack of integration into their own hands, developing their own in-house solutions and connecting directly to wealthtech firms’ APIs.
Sustainability and Modularization. When asked about innovation initiatives for their firms, panelist Matthew Radgowski, Head of Advisor Solutions at Morningstar, highlighted sustainability, while Dani Fava, Head of Strategic Investment at Envestnet, stated modularization, in which the client portal contains various modules and clients select modules as needed.
- The Science of Neuromarketing. Snappy Kraken’s Vice President of Enterprise Development, Diana Cabrices, spoke on marketing methods to stand out, or “blend out” in her terminology, and get noticed, then moved into a discourse on the science of neuromarketing, noting that the “new brain” focuses on logic and information, the “middle brain” on emotion and the “old brain” on ego, impulse and reaction.
Cabrices challenged the audience to quit marketing to the cerebral “new brain” and aim at the impulsive “old brain” to capture attention through less words and more images, contrasts between before and after or your firm and your competition and an appeal to ego.
The third day lunch buffet featured the Southern staples shrimp & grits and chicken & waffles, no doubt leaving many newcomers to Texas asking what a “grit” is and which tree it grows on.
Many attendees extracted the full value of their entry tickets at the whiskey tasting at 4:00 pm and the evening T3 Fintech Party.
Meanwhile, your humble editor returned to DFW through afternoon traffic with new friends and expanded knowledge of the inner workings of wealthtech.
Julius Buchanan, Senior Contributing Editor at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at jbuchanan@wealthsolutionsreport.com
