Swift Chat with John O'Connell: AI in WealthTech + Custodian Research Reports + Cyber Training

In this Swift Chat conversation, Marie Swift speaks with John O'Connell, founder of The Oasis Group, a leading consultancy for the wealth management industry. Their leadership position includes identifying, reviewing, and discussing new technologies and capabilities for the wealth management industry. The Oasis Group offers award-winning consulting services, industry-leading research, and compelling on-demand training for wealth management firms and the service providers who serve the wealth management industry.

Wealth management firms can unlock new levels of efficiency, personalization, and client engagement by adopting AI. John strongly recommends that firms begin to leverage AI to gain familiarity with its capabilities and concerns, to learn new skills like prompt engineering, and to clearly identify how they plan to leverage AI in projects. Leveraging AI now enables firms to discuss their compliance posture and to develop their AI policies. 

Check out this AI WealthTech Map, which can serve as a handy reference tool. 

The Oasis Group also recently launched a new research series called Vantage Point Peaks, which provides in-depth reports and competitive analysis on a range of service providers in the wealth management industry. The reports are designed to help wealth management firms become more informed buyers when breaking away or looking for new wealthtech solutions. The first study of the research series, available now, is the Vantage Point Peaks for Custodian Platforms, which focuses on the registered investment adviser and broker-dealer custodian market and is available to RIA and BD executives, as well as family offices and private wealth firms, interested in new custodian relationships.

If you are going independent, looking to add another custodian, or just interested in the RIA ecosystem and how the various custodians compare and contrast, check out The Oasis Group research on custodians.

As cybersecurity risks grow more complex and the SEC introduces additional cybersecurity regulations for financial services firms, it’s critical to ensure that financial advisorys teams are well equipped to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities while maintaining compliance. O'Connell, who is an industry veteran and cybersecurity expert, talks about the issues and refers people to his comprehensive course aimed at helping them gain an understanding of the evolving cybersecurity landscape in financial services, as well actionable strategies for protecting their financial advisory firm and their clients.

Click here to learn more about the cybersecurity training course.

Learn more about John O'Connell and his award-winning team at https://www.TheOasisGrp.com

listen to the podcast / audio version

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Transcript of Conversation

Marie Swift: Welcome back to another great Swift Chat. Todays guest is John O'Connell. He is the founder and CEO of The Oasis Group. Hey, John.

John O'Connell: Hey, Marie, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Swift: Happy Friday. It's always good to see you.

O'Connell: It's always good to see you as well.

Swift: One of the things I want to talk about is the latest and greatest. I'm really interested in your new research series, let’s start with that.

O'Connell: Thank you very much. The Oasis group has consulting research and training. The newest piece of research we're releasing is The Oasis Group Peaks report for custodial platforms. This report is designed to help wealth management firm owners or principals look at the products available to them in the market. In this study, we're covering the custodial platform space. We're really lucky to have ten custodians who fully participated in it. Schwab, Pershing, Fidelity, Altruist, Apex Fintech Solutions, Goldman Sachs, TradePMR, Hilltop Securities, Innovayte, and RBC Clearing & Custody.

A lot of research is survey-based today, which is great because you get to hear peer perspectives on what the platform offers. We've taken a slightly different approach. We wanted to rate the platforms against one another and then recommend which platform may be better, depending on your situation and what your business is trying to accomplish. We started our research with a 219-question questionnaire across twelve focus areas. We sent that to the custodians, and they completed the questionnaire. Then, we met with the custodians to get demonstrations of their products to confirm that what they said in the questionnaire is what we're seeing in the demo.

Finally, we were able to talk to at least two customers for each of the custodian platforms to confirm the support you're getting from those platforms and how they've delivered on their product roadmap over the time you've worked with them. What you get with our research is a well-rounded view of the capabilities validated by demonstrations and customer references.

Swift: I love that.

O'Connell: I think it's going to be very interesting.

Swift: Custodial services are such a big part of the wealth management profession. You must have a custodian if you're going to be managing money.

O'Connell: Absolutely. A lot of the custodian platforms have come so far. You can do account opening and performance management. They have client portals associated with them that you can leverage. In many cases, the custodial platforms are beginning to offer functionality that you would typically have found in a portfolio management system like Orion, Envestnet, or Advyzon. They're offering a lot of those key services. Smaller, single custodian firms can implement a CRM, financial planning, and a custodial platform and do well when they start.

Swift: Many of the other entities that you just named, the Orions, Envestnets, or Advyzons of the world, are integrating with many of these custodians if not all of them. It's infinitely configurable.

O'Connell: It absolutely is. In fact, the research covers the integration capabilities of many of these custodial platforms. Unsurprisingly, some of the larger ones have more integrations. Beyond the number of integrations, our research goes into depth into what those integrations look like. Are they one-way integrations? In other words, the custodian sends data to the platform. Or are they bidirectional? In other words, the platform can send data like account opening data to the custodian.

Swift: What are some of the other findings? Does anything else come to mind that would be helpful for our listeners today?

O'Connell: Absolutely. We do an in-depth analysis of the alternative investment capabilities for many of these custodians. Like what trading capabilities and alternative investment support they have. Many RIAs today are increasing their use of alternatives. On the broker-dealer side, it's all about access to different alternatives for trading. Those areas are very important to many of the growing firms. We wanted to go beyond the integration with a case or an I capital. What do you truly support on the platform, and how do you support that on the platform? I think that people who look at the research will enjoy that we focus on alternatives pretty strongly.

Swift: That sounds fascinating. I'd love to get a copy. How can our listeners get a copy?

O'Connell: We’re releasing a summary that is free to the market. Or if you visit theoasisgrp.com and go to Vantage Point, you can buy the full report. The full report is called The Oasis Group Peaks for Custodian Platforms and is available for sale on our website. It covers all ten platforms with a couple of key sections. There's an overview of the platform that goes through the ideal client persona for that platform. In other words, if it sounds like you, it might be a good person to shortlist when looking at custodial platforms. It also goes through the strengths and areas the custodian platform can improve.

We also have in-depth reports for many of the custodians in our study. Those in-depth reports are available for purchase on our website. They're quite extensive, between 14 and 18 pages each. They cover the twelve focus areas that we talked about earlier. Each of those focus areas is available in those detailed custodian reports.

Swift: Wow. What a labor of love. Thank you for doing this hard work.

O'Connell: Thank you very much. I hope many people can utilize this to fast-track some of their review and selection processes. If you were to try to schedule demonstrations, you’d have to reach out to the custodian. The amount of time your team needs to be part of that, you're talking about personal weeks of work to meet with probably two or three custodians. This research can bring that down to just a few days and save firms a lot of money when looking for a new custodian.

Swift: Your site offers several other training courses. Let's discuss those.

O'Connell: We offer self-paced, video-based training on the site. We film that training at a television studio, so it's high-quality. We cover a variety of different capabilities. Some registered investment advisors and broker-dealers listeners will be interested in the cybersecurity training and our training about the wealth client journey. That covers the journey of a wealth management client, from prospect to annual meeting, and all the steps in between. In that training, we have best practice workflows based on the hundreds of RIAs and IBDs we've helped with The Oasis Group.

You can see the best practice workflow we’ve recommended for many of our consulting engagements. Finally, we have some classes covering different wealth management market segments. For example, there's a custodial video. We also have one for the banking channel and one for the RIA channel. There's quite a bit for people wanting to become more educated on the wealth management industry, what a client looks like as they go through that journey, or cybersecurity.

Swift: AI-enabled wealth tech is a time saver and all the rage right now. I love your new map. Let's talk about that.

O'Connell: Thank you so much. We came out with an AI wealth technology map. At The Oasis Group, we have a perspective on artificial intelligence, where artificial intelligence will go beyond what you're seeing today on note-taking apps. Those apps are fantastic, but many of those firms are adding more and more features on top of the note-taking capabilities. That was the low-hanging fruit: being able to save time for advisors as they go through meetings. The next step is going to be meeting preparation. How do I make it so an advisor can have much better meeting preps?

Of course, you've got copilot capabilities, where firms can search through data, for example, notes you've taken about a client or CRM data. It's beyond just the note-takers. Our AI map covers copilot capabilities, financial planning capabilities, and investment research capabilities because AI is infused in many of these.
 
We took the approach of having people on the map who have AI-first capabilities. In other words, their companies were built around AI as a premise, and wealth tech was built around that. You're finding now that many of the more established firms in the industry are adding some AI capabilities to their products, and we'll be covering that later in a different approach. The AI map has grown in just a month from 55 firms to 65 firms building AI-first technology around wealth management.

Swift: That's fantastic. The map is interactive, so clicking on a logo will take me to the website, where I can learn more.

O'Connell: Yes, you can click the logo and immediately jump to it. The Oasis Group has received demonstrations from every firm on our map. It's not as if they just emailed us and we put them on the map. We've gotten demos from those companies and know they are ready for prime time. They have capabilities that are production-ready and advisors can take advantage of.

Swift: You and I will see each other in Manhattan soon for The Wealthies, the wealthmanagement.com gala and awards dinner. Your firm is a finalist in a category, and I will ask you about that in a minute. You're also participating in the afternoon sessions, the CTO Roundtable. Let's start with that.

O'Connell: I'm really excited to be able to attend the CTO Roundtable at The Wealthies this year. The Oasis Group also does a CTO think tank at the wealth management conferences. We do it at Wealth Management Edge every year. Right after The Wealthies, we will do one at Wealth Management Edge West. I'm very excited about the CTO Think Tank and CTO Roundtable I will attend at The Wealthies. There are not a lot of areas where technology professionals in wealth management can get together. We tend to be a disparate group, and bringing all the technologists together is hard. The CTO Think Tanks and now the CTO Roundtable that will be at The Wealthies this year is a space where technologists can get together, talk about the challenges we see with the industry, talk about some of the emerging trends like AI, talk about compliance issues associated with those trends, and how we wrap our arms around that. I'm very excited to be part of it.

Swift: It'll be here before we know it. I hope to see you on stage accepting that award. Tell us about your initiative and why you think you deserve to be bringing that Wealthie award home on September 5.
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O'Connell: Thank you. We're up for the Disruptors award for our cybersecurity assessment. I think one of the reasons that we were nominated is our assessment approaches cybersecurity in a way that wealth management firms can really wrap their hands around. We assess your people, process, and technology. We look at all aspects of your cybersecurity, not just a penetration test or what kind of endpoint security you're running. Instead, how are you training your people? What are some of the processes you have in place if something were to go wrong? What does your incident response plan look like? We take a holistic approach, and that's very different from what you find with many other firms in the cybersecurity space.

I think one of the reasons we were nominated for a Disruptor is because of our unique approach to cybersecurity and how we look at your cybersecurity. I'm just very happy to be nominated. We've done a lot of work in cybersecurity and helped a lot of firms around it. To be recognized for helping people is fantastic.

Swift: Disruptor; what a great thing to be known for. Being in the company of others in that category is a big deal.

O'Connell: It's a huge deal. Some of the other firms in that category are fantastic. We've worked with some of those firms and implemented those products. Some of them are AI firms that are doing some really interesting things. I'm humbled by the company I have in the category; let's put it that way.

Swift: I can't wait to see you on the red carpet. We're going to have a ton of fun. John, I wish you well. Let's get back to work for the rest of the day. Good to see you, as always.

O'Connell: Thank you very much, Marie.

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