Here are a few questions Levin’s team typically ask early in the first meeting.

1. What was it that brought you here?

2. What are you thinking about?

3. What are the things that you have experienced around money that you feel aren't productive?

4. What are the things where money has gotten in the way for you?

Levin’s team is trying to get to the “why.” They want to understand all the different whys that brought a person to their office. “It's not just saying, ‘I want to have two million dollars when I retire.’ It's, ‘What does two million dollars represent to you? What will that do for you? What do you think that's going to provide for you?’”

Through this dialogue, Levin begins to understand more about prospects and clients, but importantly, he’s also listening to what they’re not saying, and trying to engage them in that dialogue too. This life-centered discovery process is something that apps and robos can’t replicate, and so advisors who use this discovery process to create life-centered financial plans are providing a service that robos can’t provide either.

“But that’s not scalable,” you may be thinking. Too labor-intensive, too reliant on the human element, too slow.

In business, we often think that speed and scaling go hand-in-hand. But Levin makes a distinction between things that advisors have to be really fast at, and things that we have to be really slow at. Both are important.

“We're now in a situation where people can look at their phone and get an update on their investment performance every day, so it shows what their returns are, what each category's done, all those kind of things,” Levin said. “Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant. It's something that a certain subset of clients definitely want to be able to see, so you have to be fast at that.”

But as technology gets faster, the numbers component is going to be less and less valued as it trends toward commodity value.

Ultimately, it’s the slow things that will determine the future of the traditional RIA. “Those are the conversations and the life changes, and being on the front end of dealing with people through their day-to-day existence and through all the major things that go on in their life,” Levin said. “That, to me, is something that is really important, because that's the part that technology, I don't believe, can overcome.”

After all, there's no technology that is going to enable two humans to increase the speed at which they're having an in-depth conversation.

Levin does acknowledge that speed of growth might be a tradeoff advisors have to make in order to future-proof their practices against scale players like Vanguard and other technology-focused platforms.