Name:
Title: Founder and CEO
Company: Carson Group
Web Address: www.carsongroup.com
Ron Carson is founder and CEO of Carson Group, which serves financial advisors and investors through its businesses including Carson Wealth, Carson Coaching and Carson Partners, which have more than 120 partner offices throughout the country, including 24 Carson Wealth offices. Ron Carson is a Barron’s Hall-of-Fame wealth advisor, a New York Times bestselling author, and is often recognized as one of America’s most influential wealth advisors.
What does your firm do/offer within the fintech sector?
We provide advisors with coaching and partnership solutions that help them grow their businesses and simplify their lives so they can focus on being the CEO of their firm. In February 2020, we announced that as of April 1, 2020, we will cover technology costs for all of our partner firms—meaning advisors have no-cost access to Salesforce, Orion, Smarsh and Egnyte for their clients.
What we’re seeing in hundreds of firms across the country is this abundance of choice and options available to advisors at every turn. From fee compression to implementing technology and reinventing their value proposition to attract more clients, it’s paralyzing for advisors to know what path to choose. By engaging with Carson on any number of levels, advisors can re-focus on what matters most: attracting new ideal clients and serving current clients with value beyond a doubt.
Carson also has an in-house product development division composed of several experts who are committed to identifying needs and building out solutions for advisors based on what our advisors tell us they need most to differentiate, serve and grow. Recent updates include the Gameplan, an interactive digital tool that shows the lifespan of an advisor-client relationship and showcases pivotal decisions where the advisor added value and guidance to a client. Recent updates have also been made to enhance the Carson CX (Client Experience), first launched in May 2019. New features simplify the account aggregation process, and enhancements have been made to improve readability and accessibility, especially for visually or auditory impaired users.
What are the biggest problems facing the fintech industry in the future?
The financial services space is so utterly new in many ways, built on new business models, dressed in new technology, tasked with making intangible value tangible—all with the goal of serving the evolving modern-day investor and their ever-changing expectations. Expectations are high and will continue to go higher, and I’m not fully certain they’ll ever crest. So the biggest challenge I see for fintech companies – and advisors trying to fulfill those client needs – in the next decade and beyond is that they’ll be expected to continue innovating and delivering on their promises for better, faster and more captivating experiences to consumers. Unfortunately, not everyone will rise to the task.
How do you feel consumers (or if more relevant for your firm – businesses) are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
Advisors in the Carson Partners network are really seeing value in the fintech integrations we have made. We have committed ourselves to delivering the client experience via a ‘single pane of glass’ so that advisors can show clients their complete financial picture, versus logging in and out of several platforms with varying levels of functionality and sophistication, not to mention an inconsistent look and feel.
Additionally, our recent commitment to cover the costs of our tech stack for partner firms gives them the financial freedom to use the money they would normally spend in those areas and instead reinvest the capital into the growth of their firms. One of our longtime partners, Bob Huntley, who is the Founder and Wealth Advisor of Texas’ Wise Counsel Wealth Management, said he is already making plans to reinvest 100 percent of the tech stack savings back into growth in 2020.