How AI is Transforming Advisor-Client Relationships & Document Security

Mark Mersman, CMO, USA Financial - All right, welcome. I'm joined today by Kristian Borghesan from FutureVault. So, I want to get started with you giving a little bit of a backdrop on FutureVault - and the point of today's podcast isn't to sell FutureVault, it's to talk about some of the challenges and problems that you help solve and opportunities inside of our industry. Can you give kind of a quick commercial for FutureVault, especially from the context of what inspired the creation of it and what problems you're trying to help solve with it inside of our industry?

Kristian Borghesan, CMO, FutureVault - Yeah, for sure. So FutureVault, as a basic kind of overview, we refer to ourselves as an AI-powered digital vault. If you're unfamiliar with digital vaults, think of a digital vault as the virtual equivalent of a safety deposit box. So a digital vault sort of houses, contains, and manages all of your critical information. And in this respect, we're mostly speaking about the documents and the data inside those documents. We consider ourselves "the vault guys". We live and breathe in this space. We do everything with documents. You know, it may not be the most glamorous side of the business or technology, but it's certainly a very needed space. And what's cool is we are seeing, from a macro level, the need of a digital vault just start to explode. We're seeing a lot of these use cases that we had anticipated play through and come to fruition. And so I think the industry is ready now. We were certainly ahead of our time when we launched this back in 2017, 2018, 2019 in the U.S. market, but now it's kind of all coming together. And so when we look at the challenges we're solving for, it's really the unsecure document handling practices that take place between clients, their advisors, the firms they're working with, and even third parties - maybe an accountant, a lawyer, maybe there's other family members in the mix that need to share and manage information. It's about centralizing and having that one spot. We call it the single source of truth for all the documentation in a client's life. And actually, kudos to the RIAs that work with you at USA Financial. We see a lot of them just nail that down perfectly where they're really centralizing all of their client information. The benefit of that is they now centralize themselves around the client's life. So they're becoming that single most trusted advisor in that client's life. And that's really what you want to work up towards.

Some of the other challenges are even basic things like delivering documents. We're helping some firms automate the delivery of documents, moving away from manual delivery of documents to automating things like monthly statements, tax docs at the end of the year, things like that. Working with third parties, how do you bring in third parties into the mix when advisors are working on a client file? Maybe it's tax season, maybe there's some sort of litigation and a lawyer needs to come into the mix, maybe it's an estate plan or some sort of trust and you've got to have counsel come in and review documents and look at documents. Those are some of the more prominent use cases. And then more recently, and this is really due to the proliferation of AI and these large language models that exist, is what are we doing with the documents once they get in there? How do you provide more value at the firm level or the enterprise for the advisor? And how do you deliver more value to a client? Well, we're using AI and we're tapping into these LLMs and some pretty cool ways to summarize documents, extract critical data from documents - those could be things like expiration of renewal dates of contracts, drivers licenses, passports, even simple documents - we've got some use cases with trust documents where we're seeing firms strip out and pull out beneficiaries automatically through a combination of OCR and AI at mix too.

Mark Mersman - Who's your typical client? Who do you guys typically work with? So, obviously, you know financial advisors listen to this series, but if you want to get more granular within that broad definition, who are you seeing typically engage your firm?

Kristian Borghesan - Good question. We're heavily concentrated in financial services and, in that, wealth management tends to be sort of the lane we play within. It's sort of a mix of multi-family offices, single family offices. When our founder Scott Patterson started it, he had his own family office, so he actually built FutureVault to solve for some of the challenges he was facing himself - which is managing a plethora of documents spread out across different brokerage accounts and firms he's working with. How do centralize that information? We work with a ton of RIAs, as you know, and then in the independent broker-dealer space as well. And we're actually just getting into more of the enterprise level, you know, banking institution and credit unions. But I would say the product is a great fit - and I'm speaking just purely from an IBD and an RIA perspective here - for those RIAs that really are starting to offer more comprehensive services around their clients, because you've got this vault that contains all of the information related to those services. Even if you as a firm or you as an advisor are not directly offering that and you're more so working with third parties in your network, maybe there's some sort of referral agreement in place there. The benefit is you now start to wrap your arms around your client more. You've got all that information contained in the vault. It's intelligence, it's understanding the household, understanding your client, understanding preferences. And at the end of the day, you're making sure that they're coming to you for advice. And I think that's what a lot of clients want. They really want that single trusted point person in their life that can direct them to service A, service B, service C.

Mark Mersman - And I think a big part of it right now too, and I can speak to this for myself, for me and my wife, we have accounts in different places. I mean, we all have policies here or there or whatever. And a big fear I have as I'm getting a little older, that realization that, hey, anything can happen tomorrow. And my wife isn't the one typically that deals with a lot of the financial stuff, just with me being in the industry. I have this fear of organization and my goodness, you you get stuff shotgunned everywhere. And I think advisors intuitively know that and want to bring things together for their clients, but finding the right tools to do it to, in my mind, you start to implement solutions like this and you immediately begin to de-emphasize the importance of performance. Obviously performance is important, we know that, but if that's the only thing that you offer is an investment, that's the only thing that you're gonna get to be graded on, right? And you had kind of joked when we were emailing back and forth before, one of the kind of central themes about the idea of "Advisor 3.0". When you said that, what are you referring to there? What comes to mind?

Kristian Borghesan - Yeah, so there was actually a report published by McKinsey and it was this evolution of the modern advisor. I reference it often when I give presentations and when I'm talking to firms and advisors, I've got some LinkedIn posts about it, but it was that the modern advisor, Advisor 3.0, will become more like an integrated life coach of sorts. So you're still gonna have the advice delivery perspective and you're still gonna stay in your lane with offering financial advice or investment advice, but you are going to establish more of these services around you to deliver it to your clients. So it's really just about how do you provide more value to your clients knowing your clients are looking for things like tax and accounting services, estate planning, putting together a trust. Retirement planning is a big thing that a lot of advisors already do, but maybe if you're not, clients are looking for retirement planning. They're looking for succession planning for their business. So it's really about understanding the different pillars in a client's life and how do you offer those services either directly or through some sort of channel where you've got a relationship with a professional where they deal with those. That's sort of what we refer to when we speak of Advisor 3.0 is you're moving away from this investment-only or retirement-only approach to a more comprehensive offering. And sometimes that will also spill over into just everyday life advice. What you said actually was perfect about the organization of your life and your information and your documents because that plays so well into what we do here. And I don't want to be too promotional here, but I had a good friend of mine, Mike Betts, he's in the industry and he said, "Look, I've always said that if you as an advisor can offer even something as simple as enabling or empowering your clients to better manage their life and organize their life, then you've just added 10 times more value to that client than the next advisor". And so I think it's something that has always been overlooked because it's always been the need to focus on my core competency. I gotta stay in my lane, which is absolutely true - they come to you for financial advice first and foremost. But if you can add that on and bake that on, my gosh, are you gonna deliver a lot of value. And my gosh, are you gonna lead into referrals, understand the rest of the household dynamics, get conversations going with a spouse there that you haven't talked to yet? Maybe the spouse will come into play and then that'll hopefully snowball into G, G2, and G3 conversations.

Mark Mersman - Yeah. And I think that's a great segue, because this is a marketing podcast. So, as you think about the role that FutureVault plays with helping an advisor make that connection into that next generation, that wealth transfer - and we know it's coming. The stats are out there. We know that there's going to be billions and billions of dollars transferring hands in the coming years as the Boomer generation works their way through retirement - what role do you see FutureVault playing? How do you see advisors using your tool to effectively bridge that gap?

Kristian Borghesan - It's great question. We've thought about this a lot, as I'm sure you imagine. And I think maybe even you and I back at Chain-of-Secrets might have talked a little bit about this. There's a couple of things at play there. One, it's playing into the expectations of the next generation from a technology perspective. So having the right tools and technology in your firm adopted, rolled out, that can certainly help you better serve the current generation because without serving the current generation, there is no access to the next generation. But having the right tools in place that speak to what this next generation of a modern client, new client, young client investor looks like. And the second one is we're in a unique space because we have a lot of critical information about the client, about the household, about the family. So what we see playing out really well is when advisors start to, or the client themselves, start to provide permissions to certain areas of a client's vault where they're allowed to access so that this next generation slowly gets a drip feed of some of the documents and information that are there. Now, a client may not want their next generation, their kids, or even grandkids to have access to all of the information. But certainly, over time, there's going to be access that opens up to this next generation. So I think it's just it's ease of access to information. And when you provide that, you open up a channel not only to retrieve information, look at information, download, share it, but you open up that channel for communication. And then the other thing, too, is that sort of in the same vein, is even starting as early as possible, what we recommend for advisors, if they have the opportunity, is encourage your clients to use the vault as a secure repository for their personal documents, if and when applicable. And so even things like driver's licenses and passports, if you can encourage the family to start uploading those things, you can add reminders to them, getting their kids passports on there and then setting up their children as what we refer to as an entity - think of it as a way to just tag documents or tag folders - you can then provide permissions to those entities. So only the documents and only the information tagged to the entities are going to be visible to whoever has permissions for those entities. That's sort of two ways that we see the vault being really unique in that regard.

Mark Mersman -  So are you saying that you're seeing the clients set their kids up with their own vault or just giving them access to...

Kristian Borghesan - A bit of both. So we're seeing more so the latter where you were going is, "hey, there's a vault for the Johnson family and maybe Mary and Joe, they have a shared vault between the household. They want to start adding their kids as an entity and then providing permissions through the contact mechanism so that maybe little Jonathan and Susie can start accessing just their driver's licenses". But we have heard of cases where clients are going back to their advisor and saying hey, can you just set up a vault for our kids? Is that something you can do? And then the children can go in there and just store their information in the vault.

Mark Mersman - I mean, in my mind, I think I'd try to make that an intentional effort if I'm an advisor. I mean, it definitely gives you that pathway into that relationship with the kid. We've talked to advisors for years. They're oftentimes having client conversations and they'll say something to the effect of "I don't want the first time I meet your kids to be at your funeral." Right. The sooner you can get that meeting and start that conversation. And I mean, the nice thing about this too, just given by its nature, it's something that can be done virtually. So they can be across the country and you can help them get it set up and you can facilitate conversations and meetings around it pretty easily. Are you finding, so obviously as you've brought AI into your tool, are you finding it's helping to identify opportunities?

Kristian Borghesan - Good question. We're working towards that. So we're introducing AI in a couple of different phases, let's call it. So phase one is sort of what we have in the product right now. We're close to phase two, like very close. Maybe by the time this podcast goes out, we'll have phase two. Phase one is, on a per document level I can do things like summarize the document - and I'm talking documents that are even 50 pages. Hey, summarize this into a few paragraphs so that I can understand it. That's both for the advisor at the firm, and then even on a client level if it's enabled for clients. Imagine the power of now providing your clients with this almost like a virtual assistant embedded in their vault to help them better understand their document. You can glean what we refer to as actionable insights off of a document. Let's say a mortgage document goes into the vault. Well, show me three of the next steps I should be taking based on the context of this document. We can extract data so you can actually pull out different data points. And then there's a chat-based interface. So you can actually just prompt with the document. You can ask it questions. Then you can copy it, send it somewhere. So it's pretty cool. We've had a lot of fun just playing around with that, seeing what the art of the possible and we're constantly improving the efficacy of the AI in the background. So we're using a foundation model, and then what we're doing is everything's in a secure container. Everything's contained in our Amazon instance. Nothing leaves the environment. We're not training the model on any data. Just because I know you may ask that question. It's completely private. It's ring-fenced. No data is being used in training the model at all. 

Phase two is where we get into the juicy stuff. Hey, you've got Kristian's Vault or Mark's Vault. You know what? I've got all these documents. I want to select 10 documents and I want to query all 10 of those documents. I want to know precisely the amount of insurance, what type of insurance Mark has. I can query that. So that's when we're getting into some really powerful stuff and we can roll that up into a dashboard as well.

Mark Mersman - How else are you seeing, and I'm kind of leading the witness here. I don't know what you're gonna answer, but I have a use case to share. But how else do you see this being used as a quote unquote marketing tool for lack of a better term?

Kristian Borghesan - We see it, from a beginning of the relationship, I'm using this as an example because I do know there are RIAs that you guys work with that use it in this regard quite well too. So from the beginning of a client relationship, let's say, hey, it's a qualified prospect. We're going to move forward with working with this family. It becomes an effective marketing tool in demonstrating that you have the right tools and technology in your firm to work with this type of client or these types of clients, but also you're you're exposing them already upfront to what the future of the relationship will be. And so we see a lot of firms using it from the onset of prospecting, to the moment they sign papers and become a client, to the ongoing life cycle management of that client relationship.

Mark Mersman - We didn't rehearse this dude, but I'm telling you that's where I wanted you to go. And I'm glad that you did because I know that we have an advisor or two, for sure - there might be more that I'm just not aware of - but if they do seminar marketing, let's just say they're literally starting to demonstrate it and show, "Hey, here's something that happens when you work with our firm. Here's the cool organization." What's funny is I think advisors will lose sight of what's really truly important to the client. We all think that it's well, save me money on taxes, or make me a bunch of money in the market or whatever, right? Protect my money, like all those things. But at the core of it, clients just want their lives to be made easier, less complex, they want to feel organized, they want to have that confidence. And if you can demonstrate that on the front end at a seminar event or whatever it is to give them a little taste for here's really the benefit of working for us, because guess what? They can go down the street and somebody is going to tell them that they can do great performance and they can save money. They're going to do that, right? And if we can demonstrate all the things, the ancillary value that we can bring to the table. To me, what's interesting is, and I guess I'll ask you this, as advisors have gotten introduced to FutureVault, I think one of the stumbling blocks or hurdles that they wrestle with in terms of do I want to do this? It's not price because candidly, you guys are priced very competitively for what you bring to the table. I think it's the workload and they're scared that, boy, this is going to take a lot from me and I don't know if I want to do it. Is that a safe assessment?

Kristian Borghesan - Yeah, that's a safe assessment. I think it's sort of one of the glaring things in front of you as you look to take on new technology. But also technology that has to deal with information, data, and documents, right? It's sort of, my gosh, there's a lot of change here that needs to take place. And what we always say is, well, change is good, especially when it comes to FutureVault. But you know what, you nailed something like precisely well that ties back to Advisor 3.0, which is the notion of the next advisor down the street is going to be talking about performance returns and saving money. It's the nature of the business, the nature of the industry for sure. But I think what truly separates the good to the great, let's call it, is all of the ancillary other things that you can do when you're actually consciously thinking about what do my clients want? Everyone wants to make more money, they want to save more money, but they want to feel like they have time back. They want to feel like they can lean on their advisor for all types of advice, right? And so I think that just plays really well into that.

Mark Mersman - I think one of the biggest challenges for a good advisor or great advisor is to really communicate all the things that they do that aren't really investment/financial related, right? And to really start to stack on all of the value that comes with a relationship with you. And, probably one of the most important things from an advisor perspective for integrating something like this is it creates stickiness like no other, right? And I mean, anytime we can find a piece of technology or a tool or a service that is going to make it painful for that client to disassociate from the advisor, that's a win. And if a client goes through and you go through setting up their vault and you get their life completely organized in this single app, at a single place that's branded to the advisor, it's a painful thing. They're going to think twice before they exit and it might buy you an extra six months or a year to sort. I mean, we know returns are going to be up and down. You're going to have stretches where it doesn't do what you want it to do in terms of your investment performance. And if you can have the other things that come alongside that are going to buy you that time in that relationship to ride out some of that. Because we know it always typically does come back and, you know, all is right with the world again after the market re-corrects. But we need to have that. We need to have some of those tools that extend beyond just that single relationship.

Kristian Borghesan - Absolutely. I'll give you a quick example too, just of a very basic feature that we built probably as one of the earliest features in the FutureVault platform, are document reminders. You know, these documents that have an impact on a client's life for everything they do. So a driver's license or a passport. Imagine a world where you encourage your clients to upload those types of documents. Maybe you need them during the onboarding process or they're filling out some sort of application. You've got the information secure in there. You've got the driver's license or the passport in there. You have the ability to put a reminder on that document for your client so they're not worrying about, when is my driver's license coming up for renewal? Or when is my passport expired? You're already doing the work for them so that they get a nudge 3, 6, 9, 12 months before that date comes and arrives and wow, what a nice little tidbit of value to add to your client's life.

Mark Mersman - And it's all automated. So it's not a heavy lift that you to remember. How do you see client expectations around transparency, information access, cybersecurity for that matter? How do you see client perception of that and the importance of that? And as a result, how should advisors adapt and ultimately how do you help address that concern if and when it comes up?

Kristian Borghesan - I think in today's digitally and incredibly complex world that we're living in, I think clients are more and more and more aware of those things. They want transparency. They want to know the tools they're using are safe and secure. I mean, you have clients even asking their advisors to enable things like MFA and 2FA for them. I think everyone's adapted to these sort of things, right? And so I think from an advisor's lens, you know, choosing a technology provider that can really showcase that they demonstrate and that they have the right security protocols baked into the platform, that they are things like SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, they've got the internal procedures snuffed out, so to speak. And then they're also using technology that brings additional security to the table is always good. We always speak of putting forward the best image that you possibly can from a security front. Because I think while it may not be front and center for all of your clients, I almost guarantee that there's a subset of clients where that is all they're thinking about, especially as you've got things like SIM numbers and any personally identifiable information. You've got financial account details, you know, really critical and complicated documents related to a client's life secure in a spot. So, we always extend the notion that you want to really communicate the security of the vault, but I think it speaks more broadly to any type of technology, any type of tool that advisors are taking on or looking at.

Mark Mersman - What is the workload? For an advisor that's thinking about this, how much time gets invested into working with a client on this sort of thing? How much is put on the client versus how much is sitting on the advisor and their team?

Kristian Borghesan - I actually had a conversation exactly like this earlier today. And it was an advisor that we work with and we were sharing some information with the rest of the firm. And he said something that was really great to hear. He said, look, it was a tiny bit of work upfront. I had to work with FutureVault on providing the branding information, what the initial folder structure will be, getting to work with FutureVault on uploading the staff list or the client list, getting them onboarded there. They said, but once we got all of that done, pretty much good to go. And I was saving seven to 10 hours a week easily. So I think it's really just like any new technology. There's a bit of a hurdle upfront. I'm not going to say there isn't, there always is, but we've got our process pretty down pat. We can move as quick as we need to or as slow as we need to, not to say anyone wants to work slowly, but if they want to take the time, they can take the time and we'll take our time with them. But we like to move quick. As long as we've got the right information we need, we can get things up and rolling within a couple of weeks easily. And then at that point it's pretty much just getting familiar with, we always say like sort of crawl before you walk and then walk before you run approach with using the vault because there's so much you can do inside of it. But start slow and then start ramping it up with clients.

Mark Mersman - What percentage of the advisors that you're working with there are using the private labeled app versus just using the standard FutureVault app? Do you have a rough idea of what that is?

Kristian Borghesan - It is about 50%, I would say. It's a huge differentiator. It's a huge brand play, which again is the marketing, right? Coming to the marketing piece of this podcast is, you get to tell your clients. And again, that next generation, if they've got documents in the vault related to them, "Hey, go to the app store, you can download our app." And now they've got their firm's name on the G2 G3 phone. I mean, that's pretty powerful, right? They've got that right at their fingertips.

Mark Mersman - Candidly, I think it's a huge mistake for those that don't do it. It's worth the extra few bucks to do it. I just think there's something to that. "Hey, it's mine. It's our firm. It's our brand. It's our colors, the whole shooting match." It all of sudden feels like something that you've built. You get a little more credit for it, even though there's fundamentally no difference to what they're getting behind the tile, so to speak. I want to shift gears with you a little bit. I have a couple of fun questions for you. I know you've been with FutureVault for four years or so. I don't know if you were in the financial industry before that, but obviously four years is enough time for anybody to form an opinion. What do you think's wrong with our industry? What would you like to see changed if you could wave the wand? What's wrong with our industry?

Kristian Borghesan - That's a loaded question. Before I joined Future Vault, I was head of marketing at a company called Saveology based out of Utah, an online financial planning platform. And then prior to that, I was with a company called Planswell in Canada, where I was a marketing manager there. So I've been in the fintech space and the financial advisory space for a little while - not an advisor, do not give advice myself. When I take a look at the industry sort of from a bird's eye view, top down, it's still very much a push product type of play. Now I think we're moving away from that. There's a lot more personalization. There's a lot more really sound, advice-first delivery of a product. But I think, you know, first thing that comes to mind is sort of pushing product versus pushing necessarily what's absolutely right for clients.

Mark Mersman - And I would agree with that. I think that's a function of how people enter the business. You know, really, the entry point, the only door opening by and large was, you work for a big insurance company and you're selling their product or you're working for the warehouse and you're selling their thing. 

Kristian Borghesan - Yep, exactly. That's why I love being in the, you know, I'm sort of on the outside, but I'm in it in the independent space, because you see a lot less of that. My gosh, you see advice for what advice is meant to truly be.

Mark Mersman - Given where you're located, you're in Canada. You do work in the financial advice space with clients in Canada and in the States. What do you see is the biggest difference between...

Kristian Borghesan - So there's a couple of things. One, the States are a bit ahead of where Canada is as far as on the independence side of things. So Canada has got some catch up to do there. Even things offering like alternative investments is not quite as available as it is compared to the US. So those are two things that kind of stand out right away. Then Canada, even in the independent space is dominated by some big players. And so even the optionality of things like custodians or partners on that regard is there are not as much. And so again, playing catch up there.

Mark Mersman - Yeah, you know you can always be a 51st state and just come alongside, right?

Kristian Borghesan - Well, you know, you never know. You never know what's going to happen. I mean, we've got our election coming up October. So, who knows? There's a lot at play there and anything can happen from now until then.

Mark Mersman - We'll welcome you if that's how it plays out, Kristian.

Kristian Borghesan - Well, hey, I'm not too far away from you, right? I can just take a quick drive right over to Grand Rapids. Just give me a call anytime and I'll be right over there, Mark.

Mark Mersman - There we go. So if you weren't doing what you're doing in our space, what would you do? If I said you're no longer allowed to work for FutureVault or be in the financial advice industry, what are you going to do?

Kristian Borghesan - If that was tomorrow or any point in time? Yeah, okay. Now I'm rethinking my career right now. You know what, I love marketing. I love everything around growth. I love helping individuals and firms sort of find their niche, find traction in the right areas. So definitely I'd run my own shop. But not in financial services because I'm not allowed to do that. So yeah, no, I'm just kidding. If I could, that would actually be a sweet spot that I would focus on.

Mark Mersman - So all right, let's play with that. Because I know you go to conferences, you talk to tons of advisors, you work with a lot of successful firms. If you had to start from scratch tomorrow, how do you think that you would market your practice?

Kristian Borghesan - Yeah, I mean, 100% I would start a podcast and I would talk about all of the different challenges in connecting with clients, finding the right client, staying in the right lane, how to find your niche, and how to engage with that next generation of investors or clients. And I would focus on those themes, bring on prospective firms that I want to work with and prospective advisors I'd want to work with and I'd let them share their thoughts with me and then use that as a way to connect with them further. That would be one way that I would do it.

Mark Mersman - Okay. Favorite business book and why. Doesn't have to be business necessarily, but...

Kristian Borghesan - It's a book I read a long time ago now. It's probably Blue Ocean Strategy. I think it's just framing a different way at looking at industries to find that blue ocean, to find the open space, to find the white canvas. And really, from a strategic lens, what I like most about that book is sometimes we tend to get really tunnel vision in our day-to-day jobs. It's easy to stay in that mindset of thinking all about our industry. How does our industry do this? How does our industry do that? That book opened up for me looking across different industries and what other industries do well or not so well compared to some of the challenges we're faced against. So I think it's just taking a more comprehensive look at business and life and how do you bring that to your practice and learn how to market better.

Mark Mersman - Yep, okay. As we kind of put a bow on this, what are you most excited about in terms of where FutureVvault is going? As a good Canuck, you know, that you got to skate to where the puck is going to go. Right? So where is the puck going and where do you see FutureVault kind of skating there?

Kristian Borghesan - This is a good question. I was thinking about something along the same lines of this, maybe anticipating you would ask something like this before we got on. And the reason being is we have entered 2025 incredibly optimistic, but with a lot of momentum behind us. And I think it's because when we had launched and rolled out the product, I would say we were a little bit ahead of our time as far as the industry waking up to it and really take readiness for this type of product. And I think we've seen a lot of maturity in the market. We've seen maturity with firms understanding the value of how this can really help their operations, their compliance, their client servicing, everything across the board. So I think we're in a good spot at the right time. And it's interesting the conversations we're having now about core capabilities, but also, you bring into the mix AI and LLMs and OCR and we call it document intelligence. And I think for us, that's really exciting because we are just seeing this narrative play out at large and come to fruition, that we're just gonna keep skating in that right direction. Because the conversations we're having now, I'll tell you, Mark, are fundamentally different than the conversations we were having three years ago.

Mark Mersman - Sure. You know, I'm wondering if a part of that is, so obviously there's other software out there that, you know, and I'm not going to pick on them. I mean, eMoney is one, eMoney is a great tool. They've got a vault. But I think a lot of advisors, if they're using that, they might think, well, I've already got a vault, so I'm good. Speak to, at least real quick, some of the nuanced differences between some of those baked-in vaults - you know, eMoney and their competitors - versus the use case for why a standalone vault with FutureVault, why you think it's a better move. I'm going to probably agree with you, but go ahead.

Kristian Borghesan - You know what, if you were to ask us what our biggest business challenge probably has been, it has been going up against other providers that claim to have a full digital vault capability. You know, eMoney has one, Orion has one, Black Diamond has one. And so, we're very used to that question. And the way we answer it is like, first and foremost, this is all we do. You know, we've invested $30 million into the platform to build a document vault at scale. We've thought about all of the considerations from head office and compliance use case down to advisors having their own vaults, managing their list of clients, down to that client experience, using it with family members, third parties, two-way document exchanges, bringing in documents automatically from different sources, whether it's API-driven, SFTP, through checklisting. And now with the use of AI embedded and integrated into the vault, I mean, this is a complete game changer for us and for the industry. I think, you know, and hopefully I'm answering this the way you were expecting me to, but it really just comes down to the level of diligence, care, and the functionality and the capabilities that we built into the platform compared to something pre-baked into an existing, let's call it an all-in-one platform, if you will, that is very limited in what you can do. It just displays a list of documents. There's no real structure to it. There's no tiering. It's limited on what the client can do, what the client can see. Can third parties come in? Maybe. And so I think it just comes down to what FutureVault can do, which is significantly more.

Mark Mersman - I'll give you the answer that I've given advisors that have asked me the question. I know you and I have talked about this, so it's not like it's anything new, but having been in the industry now for coming on 25 years, I know for a fact that technology is gonna change, and advisors' needs are going to change. They will likely, if they're on eMoney, if they're on Orion, if they're on Black Diamond, they will likely change at some point. Maybe one of them didn't keep up or there's a feature they're not happy with or something that one of the others does awesome. And the benefit to the standalone vault in my mind is when that change happens, which I know it will, it's just a matter of when. If you're doing it with FutureVvault and you make that change away from one of them, that's one less headache that you have to worry about carrying over.

Well, hey man, I appreciate it a ton. I love what you guys are doing there. You know, I think you are definitely ahead of your time and I think it's going to be cool to see how the AI and LLM stuff really starts to reshape your product even more. Obviously it's already started to, but where that can go, I mean, I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg when you really think about where we're at AI-wise and it's going to be fun.

Kristian Borghesan - Agreed. Yeah, likewise. And appreciate you having me on. Always good to catch up and chat with you. And I mean, always, always good to be in the mix with with USA Financial. We always appreciate it.

Mark Mersman - You got it, man. Hey, appreciate it a ton and we'll have to circle back in a year or two on this podcast and see all the evolution. All right, good catching up. Take care.

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The Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook is a podcast/video series for high-performing financial planning professionals that are committed to improving their craft, helping their clients, and growing their business. Hosted by Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial, this series contains a wide variety of content – from quick win ideas to long-form interviews, each episode provides actionable marketing ideas and insights that can be implemented easily into your practice. From digital marketing to traditional direct-response marketing, each episode delivers straight-forward and engaging content that any financial professional can use to improve their bottom line and grow their practice.

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