The Institute for Innovation Development believes that the Holy Grail for innovation resides in creating a client experience that both engages and delights. Accomplishing that feat does not come easily. It has to be carefully crafted. To explore this further, we sat down with Adam Holt, CEO and founder of FinTech company Asset-Map, a cloud-based software and service platform designed to help financial professionals visually facilitate more meaningful financial conversations with their clients and deliver advice faster and simpler in an engaging experience.

Hortz: Reading testimonials from your advisor clients about Asset-Map, you get comments like: “everything I wanted in a process with my clients,” “brought back a passion for me,” “the client experience with Asset-Map is fantastic.” What specifically in your service is inspiring these kinds of accolades?

Holt: I think that most financial software that advisors and professionals use are built around solving a specific technical challenge like retirement funding or portfolio allocation. These calculators and planning tools are designed to communicate a problem and illustrate a potential course of action. However, they are geared for the advisor as an expert tool and so the audience is not the end consumer who has to digest these reports and experiences with often no knowledge or skill in the field. Ironically, many of the advisors we work with shared that they were creating executive summaries and handwritten diagrams of what their own software was trying to convey in order to help their customers. So when we designed Asset-Map, we started with the drawings and executive summary. The goal was to compress complexity and force it to one page or screen. That required an enormous amount of design thinking and testing. The outcome was an expert system that was consumable by everyone.   

Hortz: How did you go about proactively designing this client-advisor experience? What kind of steps did you take to build a product and service around this deeper type of user engagement?

Holt: I think like most innovations, sometimes it's born out of necessity, and sometimes it's born out of an accident. My background is in art and architecture, and although I got into financial services because I had done an undergraduate degree in economics, I always thought visually and tried to communicate problems and the way relationships work visually. I would draw on a screen, on a blackboard, a piece of paper or anything I could get my hands on, to help people understand what was going on in their life and how certain financial concepts worked. I would draw the relationships of the facts that clients were sharing with me in the early stages of providing advice, instead of writing them down on a tablet, or a yellow pad or a fact-finding form.

When I would draw them, I would draw them in a way that was readable by my staff and my colleagues so that we could all get acclimated very quickly on a case. I used it as an education and recall tool and the visual catalogue was the way that our staff started to understand the household dynamics that they were helping to service. We honed this process for the better part of 10 years and it kept evolving as households became more complex and their needs changed over time. 

What then happened is a client actually saw the drawing in my file and said, "I don't want your 80-page financial planning report. I want that! That simplicity is what I'm looking for from you." I kind of knew that it would be valuable, but compliance approval would be required. It took about two years to get it compliance approved with my broker/dealer back in 2006. After that, the rest is history. 

Hortz: Tell me about how you made the step in your mind to go from being a financial advisor and having a profitable practice, and then making the decision to become a FinTech entrepreneur. That's a big, big jump! How did you make that step?

Holt: Well, I would say that I didn't make it in one big leap. My original IP goes back to 2002. Post the compliance approval I obtained with my broker/dealer we all had great success in growing the practice with it. It wasn't until 2008 that I actually funded the building of the original technology platform. Being that that was 10 years ago ... not having a background in technology I paid for a lot of expensive learning experiences ... I kept that Platform within the firm and we kept innovating it all those years testing it in the field with our team which had grown to 10 professionals. 

In 2012, we allowed 20 of our peers to use it after a best-practice meeting, and they had great results in terms of engagement, as well as new business and referrals that they earned from the process. By the end of the year, we had 90 professionals, and then the next year, we had 300 entirely virally.  It wasn't until the last two or three years that I spent a majority of my hours away from the practice, which only was possible because I had built in partners, junior advisors and a written succession plan. Zoom forward to the end of 2017 and Asset-Map Platform 4 has over 3,200 advisors using it globally.

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