#244 - John Finney - Overvue and how it creates client and advisor efficiency

0:00 In this episode of the Wicked Pissa Podcast, we speak with John Finney, the co-founder of Overview, a software company that helps financial advisors streamline their client onboarding. We discuss John's background in wealth management and how it shaped his business, Overview's mission to create a better client onboarding experience, the functionality of Overview, and how it creates client and advisor efficiency, and much more. It's time for a Wicked Pissa Podcast. Wicked Pissa Podcast. Wicked Pissa Podcast. It's time for a Wicked Pissa Podcast. Welcome to the Wicked Pissa Podcast, a production of the Financial Planning Association of New England, intended for financial planning advisors.

0:43 Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Wicked Pissa Podcast. I'm Michael Conanton, co-founder of Lead Advisor, and I serve on the Partnerships Committee of the New England FPA. Our guest today is John Finney. John is the co-founder of Overview, a software company that helps financial advisors streamline their client onboarding. Before starting Overview, John spent over five years in wealth management at two national RIAs. During that time, he played a key role in the overhaul and sale of an advisory team managing 750 million in assets. As a certified financial planner, John's worked in both client-facing advisory roles and behind the scenes focused on improving operations. Now he brings that experience to Overview, building solutions from the other side of the table.

1:29 Welcome, John. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for having us. We're happy to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So why don't you just tell us a little bit more in detail about your background and your journey to the launch of Overview, and we can take it from there. Yeah, excellent, sure. Graduated college with a degree in finance. From there, I quickly got on the CFP track. My first job out of college was with a very large wealth management team, but it operated much more like a small business, which was great for me and my career because my day-to-day was very ad hoc in the beginning. And at times, I was even given jobs or roles that were above my experience.

2:09 So I got to really hold many positions, but also experience a full client lifecycle. It was in that initial role that I was able to gain the trust of my team members, which led me kind of into that second phase that you mentioned in the intro, which was improving the team. And my team was gracious enough to participate in it with me. They kind of agreed that we were still operating as a team that was small, and that was still trying to very much just, I guess, keep up, or I'd say, with the current flows that we had. So what we went to look to improve was everything from onboarding, client service, our internal workflows ourself, trying to make it so that we can actually service 400 clients or more.

2:59 And then that led to my final role on the team, which it kind of happened naturally because I knew so much about the team itself. I had fixed everything from kind of the P&L all the way to client scheduling. It was kind of natural for me to help lead the sale of the team. When questions came up about anything particular or whether or not the firm that we were merging into was a good match, I just had a lot of good insight to provide there. That was also an amazing part. Learned a lot there. And that was kind of where my career with that team and the wealth management industry on that side came to an end. Landed at the new firm, I kind of experienced the same problems of these inefficiencies, and said, poor, they weren't my problems to solve anymore.

3:44 So I kind of had three options, and this is where overview starts to come into play. I had option one, climb the corporate ladder and hope to get the chance to help them with their inefficiencies. Option two was to leave and join another small IRA, kind of run the same playbook that I just ran for my previous team, or three, start my own business. I obviously chose option three because overview exists, but one of the main drivers of why that existed was because when I was in wealth management, I can kind of feel that the pace was starting to change and revert more so back to sales. So I told myself, if you're gonna have to do sales in your career, do you wanna do it with a large entity or do it for yourself?

4:27 Sales is hard, it's tough, and I ultimately decided I wanna do it for myself. So that's where overview started. Overview in the beginning was actually a different idea than it is today, and the markets changed it. We're happy that it's here. We're happy to help clients. It's really what we do now. We fall in love with the problem and we wanna fix it. Excellent. So John, you highlighted that you had perspective from many different angles, working in different roles and serving in different capacities on a couple of different teams at different size firms. I know now overview is seeking to solve the client onboarding issue and streamline that process. So talk us through the overview background and its history and how you've developed the software and where it stands today.

5:13 A lot of times for companies like ours, where you start with an initial idea and it evolves over time, typically the market pulls you if you're able to let it. And initially we started out having conversations around investment proposals. When I had left my previous job, I said I wanted to build something that I would ultimately use myself if it didn't work out. And my idea was investment proposals. What we found when we started talking to advisors was investment proposals were actually very hard to fix. The reason being is because everyone kind of has their own opinion on what a client needs during that initial sales phase. So it's very hard to convince advisors that their problem can actually be solved in one way.

5:56 They wanna have it be solved in multiple ways when it's in the sales process. So we quickly needed to pivot. But while we were having those sales calls, I was talking through the solution and going step by step. And there was one solution that they really gravitated towards and that was data aggregation. So there was a step in our process where we'd mentioned, oh, and we have the ability to receive clients' data extremely easy by connecting with their prior bank accounts, investment accounts. And they really started taking interest in that. So we started to explore that option was, okay, why is this interesting to you? And we discovered what we kind of coined now is called the rule of three. That right now it takes about three meetings, three weeks.

6:40 And if they have the capacity, typically three team members, a lead advisor, a pair of planner of some kind, and then a client service associate, doesn't mean you can't do it with one person, but typically it's three, to onboard a single client. And I immediately realized and resonated with that, that I would oftentimes have these initial calls with clients, and then I would step away, hand it off to someone else, and I would be back in the office with that same person three or four weeks later, not really questioning why it took that long. So that's where the idea has come to, that's the overarching problem. We can get into the two main problems if you'd like, but right now that is it.

7:23 Onboarding is slow for all parties, and there's some ways that we speed that up. Yeah, I like the rule of three there, interesting concept talking about team members, time elapsed. And when you developed Overview, obviously the aim was to, I assume shorten the onboarding client process, streamline it organizationally, so maybe less manpower is necessary to get a client on board. Tell me how Overview helps solve some of that. The problem is broken into two parts. There is the client's end, which is a problem, and there's an advisor end, which is the problem.

8:04 Largely the advisor end is what gets talked about the most, and that's because we're oftentimes at conferences together with our peers or in things like FPA meetings, and we're talking about our problems. That's what we like to do. And that problem largely persists around outdated custodian tech, things like why are we still filling out our own paperwork and poor communication among team members even maybe, so on and so forth. And that's all our problem. So for the large part, we always say onboarding is an internal issue, but that's actually not the case. And the real problem persists actually with the client.

8:46 The client has a major issue. Clients do not like onboarding. They don't typically even leave an advisor sometimes because of the fear of how much work it takes to get to that next advisor. And it's also their problem because they get sent out by the advisor on what I call the choose your own adventure, meaning the initial conversation ends. We say, we want you to become a client. And I get sent out to basically go and mass together all my information and data for them, my statements, however I deem necessary. And I just hope that it's a great, I'm getting it in a way that the advisor is actually getting use out of.

9:28 So that's the client side problem, which is that it is stressful, not enjoyable, takes a long time, it's a lot of work. Why that's also the advisor's problem is because it's actually how you solve the whole issue. It's how you solve your own issue. And the way, and the reason why we know that that is how you solve your own issue is because the major DIY shops at Vanguard, if you want to work at Schwab, if you want to do Robin Hood, they've already solved this problem for themselves by starting with the client. You start with the client, then you could do whatever you want in the back office with the information, whether that's get that information into a call center, like you are at Vanguard, get that information into paperwork, like you are at Vanguard.

10:16 But the client intake process is standardized. If you log in on the East Coast, you log in on the West Coast, I've standardized the workflow. That's how we know that that's where you need to start. No one, there's been ways to kind of get there, things like PDFs to fill out or maybe like a client portal to drop in your statements, but no one's really standardized that intake. If you can standardize an intake, make it easy for the client, then you can worry about that second problem, which is your own, which is the back office, and that could all be done. In my own life, I even have banking relationships that I've probably held on for longer than I wanted to, just because there was fear of having to go through the changes and setting up online banking again, not to mention the undertaking it takes to work with a new advisor and certainly the impact a new advisor is going to have on somebody's financial objectives, but maybe something that's holding them back is just the fear and undertaking of the process of going through the change if they're working with an existing advisor or it's just gathering all the documents and getting that together.

11:25 So that streamlined process makes a lot of sense to me. So I guess when you're talking to advisors and practices around this solution, and I know that, as you mentioned, they're going about it in different ways, gathering the data, there's different processes, I'm sure. How does Overview aim to streamline that and how does it stay, I guess, consistent with your product, installing that in a firm and making it easier for all team members that are involved? Absolutely. So it starts with what we were just discussing, which is the client-side experience.

12:05 So what we've built is a way for the client to essentially onboard slash share their information with you in a way that feels like they've experienced it before. So maybe they've applied for an online mortgage or maybe they do have a Vanguard account that they manage themselves. Or we always use something like signing up for Venmo or signing up for Uber, something that has a little bit more of that identity verification layer. And that is the same workflow that we've built out for them or at least the feel. So a advisor is allowed to send the onboarding workflow to them either via email or via text.

12:45 So they can open it on their phone as well. When they open the screen, there's no login, there's no need to save a username and password for them. It starts instantly the same way it would if you wanted to sign up for anything else. At the end is when you get captured to create your username and password. But what it starts with is step one is identity verification. So we've partnered with Plaid in this section. And what that will do is it will first search to see if they have a Plaid account. Oftentimes there's a good chance that they do have a Plaid account because Plaid is advertised as that one in two US adults has used the platform before.

13:27 It works in the background of a lot of things. The largest thing that people know it of is Venmo. It helps power Venmo. But what it will do is see if they have a Plaid account. If they have a Plaid account, it offers a single sign-on flow, kind of similar if you've ever experienced like would you like to sign up with your Gmail account? It's kind of like, would you like to sign up with your Plaid account? And in that initial phase, we'll capture all their personal identifiable information. That's name, date of birth, address, social security number, so on and so forth. And what we'll also do is verify that, run it through databases to ensure that when it gets back to the advisor, it's actually correct and that it's satisfied some level of know your client compliance as well.

14:11 So you don't need to worry about things like them missing a digit on their social security or getting their social security wrong or one of your team members doing that. It's coming back verified secure that that is their information. Step two, and it will work them through this process naturally. So step two then would be connecting their accounts. The client will connect any of the investment accounts that you've spoken to them about or that they wanna additionally share to you. At that stage, we'll get the standard information to kind of recreate those statements that everyone wants. Statements are a big pain because people get them in all different formats that include things like taking a photo of a statement and sending it to your advisor. Some people mail them in with coffee stains on it.

14:54 They come in a variety of ways. So what we're gonna do is recreate those statements, get the holdings, get the account numbers, get the account names, and that will really help you start to move into that second line of paperwork, which is your transfer forms and so on and so forth. And also allow your investment team to start their investment proposal process and maybe their sales pitch a little bit further. And then the final section is really up to the advisor where they can ask any additional question that they might need for particular custodians they might work for. If they have multiple custodians, if they have any additional compliance that's just done on their end, they can ask those questions as well. And then the client will click submit, get sent securely back to the advisor.

15:36 But that's generally the whole workflow that the client goes through. We've kind of found that a client can get it if they're with Plaid and familiar with a workflow like this they can generally do it in under five minutes themselves and get it back to you. And that's the standardized process that really needs to be first set in place before you can do anything with the information because getting information like they do right now, which is in a whole variety of formats causes someone to then standardize it themselves on the backend, which just slows everything down and makes it so that you can have those other things that people want, which is the word of automation and so on and so forth.

16:20 Excellent, so if I heard you right, John, you said as quick as five minutes on the client experience side, right? They could put this together, follow the proms, gather their sign-on information towards the end as you mentioned, but also get all their investment details, connect everything through Plaid on the onset and get everything to the advisor in as quickly as five minutes, is that right? Yes, you could even go as far as to say if they have a well-organized Plaid account, meaning they've used Plaid in the past and maybe their investment account has been connected to Plaid in the past, you can get them onboarded with just their phone number. So they'll put in their phone number, Plaid will search this database, it will make sure that you exist, you are who you say you are, and that information can be immediately sent to the advisor.

17:08 So the same way that you can get a sign-up for any other platform with like your Gmail account that I previously mentioned, same thing, put in your phone number, we'll see if you exist. If you exist and your information is correct, immediately sent. So in some cases, especially you'll notice that as you go like younger and younger down, typically they have a well-organized Plaid account and it could just be sent right back to the advisor. So I say five minutes when it has to take things like, oh, let me go to my password finder to find my password for Schwab and so on and so forth. But really, if you have a well-organized Plaid account, it's onboard with a phone number, share your information with just that. Wow.

17:50 So client goes through this process, I would assume there's an alert on the advisor side confirming that what they need from their client has been completed. And then from there, they can run with their standardized process. How does the advisor work from there, John, I guess? Yeah, absolutely. So there is an advisor side portal and the advisor side portal will track your prospects for you. They'll have their own little profile with the general contact information. You'll be able to manage any forms that you wanna send to them. So you can start to save your templated forms. So if you always ask the same series of additional questions to them, you can save that as something like, the Schwab onboarding form, because maybe Schwab has different questions that you need to know.

18:36 That can be saved in the advisor side portal and it will also then track when you sent a certain questionnaire and to who and when they responded, so how long it took. And then all that information that they'll respond to gets rendered on their profile page and it will be separated out into their personally identifiable information that all came back, all their investments that came back and then they can continue on to do their normal workflow. So right now, as it stands, that's where it ends. And that's mostly because what we're doing to solve this, as I previously mentioned, is start with the client, ensure that we've standardized that process for everyone.

19:18 And then we can start turning on the other pieces of our roadmap, which people are asking for, which is things like connecting to my next CRM or can I get this to auto-populate this PDF for me? All possible. They're not asking for things that do not already exist, but step one, you got to standardize the intake for us. Once I know that you can do that, you can have any automation you want. If you want PDF fillers, that can be done. But yes, right now, the client-side portal lets them pick up where they currently have their flow. Hopefully clients are responsive and get this done. Sometimes we know clients need a little nudge to keep them going.

19:59 So assuming the details go out through your tool and a client has a snag on their end just because they are unfamiliar with Plaid or just maybe aren't as tech-savvy as you'd like, can they look at, meaning can an advisor or a team member look at the client-side portal and see status updates and then do the necessary follow-up to kind of make sure these things are moving through the workflow and forging ahead to cut down on that timeline like you mentioned? Largely the way that it's done is by monitoring when you've sent it, it will alert you if it's been a certain amount of time since you haven't sent it. And of course, then when they respond.

20:41 What we've kind of done to help alleviate what you've kind of mentioned is like pushing the client along is we've really built it as a consumer product to start. So we asked ourselves and asked people who are just general consumers, like what are the things that we don't like? Why do we not complete the thing that someone's asking us to? And it's like friction. Any friction needs to be absolutely taken out, removed in some way. So for us, the easiest thing that we could remove for someone was, okay, I've had experience with other providers that offer client portals and not for onboarding, but for other reasons.

21:23 And the thing that's always kind of stopped our clients, username and password. You click a link, you get presented, please create an account. You've lost them, right? They will say, that's not for me. I have enough accounts or maybe they don't wanna share their data with one more person or anything like that. So that was kind of our method of what you just said, which was how do you get clients to push along? And it was to not have username and passwords, do not make this a platform for them to have to worry about to come back to so on and so forth. And then finally, how we kind of help clients push themselves along. And we got this feedback from a lot of advisors was that communication is getting approved and going towards text in some regard.

22:09 And if we can get it so that it's not just an email to a client, but a text to a client, that that would greatly improve open rates and onboarding rates. So yes, there's a method to track how long something has maybe gone stale with a client, but the ultimate goal was to get it so that it never goes stale. And how do you do that? It was those things that I previously mentioned. So John, say you're an advisor, a decision maker at a practice, and you wanna integrate in a tool like Overview, what would be the steps in doing so? And then once you have it launched, how are you presenting that to the client?

22:51 What we've really tried to do is build it so that it's geared towards the workflows that already exist, from the ones that we've spoken to with advisors, and then the ones that I've experienced myself. It's a standalone platform as it is right now. So you would get your Overview subscription as you would any other SaaS subscription, and it would be divvied up by advisor. So if you have advisors that are comfortable sharing the same database, meaning like they can see each other clients, well, then you only need one. But if there may be two separate practices and they're doing something more of a revenue share model, you would have two subscriptions. Process to get it worked in is pretty quick.

23:31 So right off the jump, you'll be able to create a prospect on day one, and that happens after your initial meeting with the client. So generally what we'll do during training is get the advisor to understand that we are not here to change your workflow, and it's just here to improve it. So what we want you to do is go through your normal process of having a client meeting with the prospect, getting their, for us, their name, their email, and their phone number, because we're gonna need to send them this link, and just upfront let them know that we're gonna send them an onboarding tool to them. It can be slightly white-labeled to the advisor as well.

24:13 We didn't wanna disrupt that to enter in who is Overview and why are they contacting me. It's white-labeled more so towards the advisor. And that's largely the, I'd say the work it takes to get it off the ground is really that it's just a conversation between you and the client and letting them know that they should expect a text from you with further onboarding instruction. As you progress here, maybe there's an opportunity to integrate with a CRM down the road or integrate with other tools and tech that might be helpful. I guess what's the vision longer term, John, how you feel like firms might use Overview initially as the onboarding tool that integrate it with other areas of their practice?

25:00 Right now, some of the big pain points that we also hear in wealth management is we just don't want another tool, right? We have enough tools, we want one platform. And that's very cyclical in a lot of businesses and in tech especially. It's kind of like get the bundle and then we de-bundle it because we don't want that anymore. Get the bundle, de-bundle it. And we are currently what we'd call de -bundled. The benefits of de-bundled platform is you're very niche. You are very in love with the current problem that you solve. And oftentimes those are the products that really have the greatest edge against the big bundled platforms.

25:41 So right now we're focusing on ensuring that we are first solving the problem that we're setting out to do. And then too long-term, as you mentioned, is getting into, okay, yes, you need to have integration long-term. You do not want many applications that do not have the ability to talk to themselves. Luckily though, everyone has kind of come to that conclusion. So a lot of tech is becoming to the point where integration is more of a, I would say it exists. So it's not something that can't be done. So long-term, once we're ready for that feature in the roadmap, it can be turned on, things like connecting to a CRM or connecting into something that's even more robust like client reporting, so on and so forth.

26:32 It's not an ask that's impossible. It's just a matter of have you first solved a problem for the client? Because tech integration is a problem, but a whole nother problem is separate from the onboarding problem. Yeah, that makes sense. So evolvement over time as things change with practices and the first onset is to solve the onboarding side, but then maybe there's some integration that can happen beyond that. Tell me a little bit about the ideal practice for your tool and what's, naturally, I know it could probably fit many different practices, but is there an ideal practice size or team that you're looking to get in front of and think you can really help?

27:21 Yep, I think the ideal practice could really just be boiled down to if you're a team that is experiencing growth. And that's because if you have growth, meaning you're taking on new clients, there's a strong likelihood that this idea and this problem really resonates with you. And if you're otherwise not, you might view it more as that would be nice to have, but not a must. So really the ideal practice that we're searching for right now are the teams that are pursuing growth in some way.

28:01 But size-wise, no, we'll work with really any size firm and we're capable of, again, as I previously mentioned, segregating out advisors as well if they need that growth. Those are the people that we love to talk to. Yeah, so it sounds like the pain point you're aiming to solve is really somebody that's onboarding a significant amount of clients regularly. So they're in growth mode, they're in business development mode, they're out there adding new clients on a regular basis. That's where this tool can really have an impact for, I would assume, efficiency processes, helping create capacity for different team members. That's really the key.

28:43 Yeah, we really wanna be able to make it so that the advisor who is actively in a sales-type role or mindset can either get back to that next prospect in front of them or at the very least nurture and improve the current relationship they have with their clients. That's the goal on their end and we think that we can really do that if we can get it so that the client has a great experience, advisor has a great experience and just pick up time through that whole process. John, what did I miss? Anything that we should have asked you today that we didn't, that you wanted to cover as it relates to your product and how to best position it?

29:27 I think you did a great job asking me a whole bunch of follow-up questions and really getting down into it. I think the biggest takeaways really are the rule three. I think people understand that onboarding takes too long. It involves oftentimes too many people. I think another takeaway is if you can agree that the client experience isn't where it should be. You have advisors out there that have 98 % retention. I can't imagine that everyone can be that good. There must be something else going on there and I think we do believe that it has to do with the idea that it's painful to move and you brought that up as well.

30:08 And then I think finally, the big takeaway is that this problem has been solved. It's not a problem that cannot be solved or won't be solved. It just, you just need to come to the agreement that it gets solved in the front end of the funnel. It gets solved in the intake process, not in the back office process, but it gets solved first with the client. And those are probably the three takeaways that it takes time, it's painful and that there's no standardization. That's really it. Yeah, solving from the onset, the first real onboarding process that the client's gonna move through to make that easy certainly sets the foundation for a good client experience.

30:55 Yeah, we really do see it also as an opportunity for advisors. I mean, those first year or even less, hundred days or so that you're with your initial brand new client prospect, that's when they're most excited with you. They're oftentimes sharing the experience that they either had, whether it was painful or enjoyable in making that move. And that's when I always found that we would pick up possibly the most likelihood of getting a referral. They would say, okay, great. Now that I'm here and I trust you, I wanna give your, pass your name on to a friend. And it would typically be in that less than one year window. And so I think really it's, you have to nail onboarding.

31:38 And if you can nail onboarding, people will start to leave their advisor, their current advisor and move to you. Yeah, I totally agree there. Not to mention the work that we do. I think one of the things firms are always looking for is to capture more capacity from some of their support team members. And I think one of the major pain points, I think, one of the things that maybe a client service associate or service advisor likes to do the least is probably all that client follow-up. They feel like sometimes they're being a nuisance. They're tracking people down. The client doesn't like it. They don't like it. So if you can solve that problem, creates capacity, take some of the tough aspects of the job away.

32:22 I think that solves for just a more efficient and productive firm too. So really cool that you're aiming to solve that and are starting to make an impact there with different practices. Happy to have you as a new tech partner, John, of the FPA of New England here. So excited to have you in overview on board. I know we'll see you at some meetings and you'll be involved in doing some webinars and things of that nature. But if an FPA member or listener wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in contact? Through any of our socials or through our website. On there, you can find plenty of contact information, even a link if you want us to reach out to you.

33:04 A lot of good resources on that website as well. You can even walk yourself through a demo. If you're someone who doesn't wanna be pitched to, you can go ahead and do your own sales discovery. So I would really advise going to the website. Excellent. So we'll put all those details in the show notes. So if somebody wants to visit the site or take a look at your socials, they can do so. We thank you for coming on today, John, and looking forward to seeing you at the meetings going forward here. Excellent. Thank you so much, Michael. And we're proud to be a partner. If you'd like to learn more about the Financial Planning Association or FPA New England, visit our websites, financialplanningassociation.org for the National Association or fpanewengland.org.

33:49 You can learn more about our organization and all the upcoming chapter events. We hope you'll join. That's fpanewengland.org. Until next time, have a wicked good day.