Episode 26: Revolutionizing Client Collaboration in Financial Services with Ali Qureshi

Sam 1:30

Hi, everyone. I'm your host, Sam Sivarajan, and welcome to today's episode of The Future Ready Advisor. Today I'm here with Ali Qureshi, fintech entrepreneur and former capital markets executive. Ali, welcome to the show.

Ali 1:45

Thank you very much, Sam, for having me.

Sam 1:46

Pleasure to have you here and looking forward to our discussion. Let me quickly introduce you to our audience. Ali is the co-founder of Sidedrawer, an innovative platform for document storage and collaboration. Sidedrawers clients include large financial institutions and many advisory practices. Previously, Ali was a capital Markets executive for CIBC and UBS. For full disclosure, I'm an investor in advisor of and big fan of Sidedrawer. So with that disclaimer out of the way. Ali, can you share with us a little bit about your business, your journey and the inspiration behind Sidedrawer In particular, I'd like it If you could elaborate on the philosophy behind Sidedrawer and how it differentiates perhaps from some of the other competitors or other firms that offer, I would say, competing or similar type of services in the marketplace.

Ali 2:41

Sure. Thanks so much, Sam. Appreciate the introduction. And, you know, it wouldn't be a proper conversation between two financial executives, let's say, in capital markets or equities if there wasn't a disclosure statement somewhere along the line. So it's a good one on a good one for you on that one. So, yeah, you know, we have a really interesting business. I'll start off with the origin story. Let's say I was on a flight and, you know, being an accountant myself and a CFO of the household, let's say I was worried that if my plane crashed, I would have no idea. My wife would have no idea where any of our financial documents were, our investments, our will, all of those important things that you take for granted stuffed somewhere. You wonder if something were to happen. How would people find out where they are, how they're organized, how they're kept? What are the important milestones or markers to be aware of? And that's that's what really started me on the journey. I wanted something for myself and for my family. And when I started asking people what they did to organize their important documents and important information, there was really no solution out there. I have about 130,000 emails in my Gmail account. I have over 10,000 files in my free Dropbox, Google Drive. I cloud all of that stuff. But if, you know, if I had to pay a lawyer 100 bucks an hour to try to find the important documents, we probably wipe out all of our net worth in order to get to the few things the, you know, the fewer diamonds in the rough. Let's say. Right. Tha have to find or the needle in the haystack. So I think that's why I really started the journey on discovery of what is a good solution for something like this. And as we started to explore, but we realized that this is a problem that every single individual faces and you have an overload of information. How do you keep track of it? How do you basically organize it? But we also realized that the biggest beneficiaries of this would be financial advisors, because they are typically the quarterbacks for these families that they're working with. And whether you're financial advisory practices, ultrahigh net worth, high net worth, mass affluent or you're doing financial planning for the mass market organizing, that information is critical to helping your clients with this value add host That is absolutely important and they find it extremely valuable because so many of our clients clients actually are relieved that their information is now organized in a way that they can use it with their own family members. So there's so much of a win win scenario here with our product that we just get extremely excited every time we have the opportunity to talk about it. So we've been helping a lot of advisors with our product and they've been able to bring on additional clients and help their families in a very significant manner. So that's sort of the path that we took. Obviously it wasn't a straight path, it was a number of detours along the way, but this is essentially what we're trying to solve. And our client base ranges from an individual advisor with no admin staff, just one person all the way up to, as you saw the announcement with TD Bank recently. So it's a it spreads all the way to large enterprises as well.

Sam 5:55

yeah, congratulations on the TD deal and press release. It shows that your solution, as you say, resonates on multiple levels. And it's also recognizing that this is a real problem that needs to be solved. And on that note, you make a great point about Gmail and all of the digital solutions. And as you were talking, it struck me that a lot of people aren't aware that those digital assets are not readily accessible by your successor. Right. I

Ali 6:26

Yeah,

Sam 6:26

think there was a story of I think Bruce Willis, for example, that had this huge i-Tunes collection of music, etc., but that doesn't belong to anybody. It's not his to bequeath

Ali 6:37

that's right.

Sam 6:38

you or,

F5 S2 6:38

That's right.

Sam 6:39

your Kindle book collection. But more importantly and more relevant to what you're saying, just because you have all of this stuff in a Gmail or in a Dropbox, etc., doesn't automatically give your spouse or your heir access to these kind of documents, let alone trying to find it, in a timely fashion.

Ali 7:00

No, you're absolutely right. So there's the one, you know, being an accountant myself, there is a test for I think it's completeness, which is am I, do I have everything that I should be aware of in order to make the decisions here. Right. So when you're doing someone's balance sheet, do I have all my liabilities recorded? Do I have all my assets recorded, etc.? So there's a whole test that you have to kind of go through. And that's the problem now with the digital world is that there are so much scattered information that we're not staying on top of. So how do you provide some sort of grounding and anchor? You know, it's not going to be 100%, but as close to 100% as possible. That's what the objective should be for every advisor or working with their family or their clients. Right. And the clients families. So you're absolutely right. And that's one of the missions that we're on. And we're seeing a big impact on that because usability is very important. Once you start using the platform, you want to be able to make sure that you're coming back to it to add and update your information. And that's where the workflows that we provided for the advisor that actually help streamline their day to day, that is really what powers it. And that's what we've found is we can save an advisor 1 to 2 hours a day. We can drive about 40% productivity growth in their practice. That frees up time to service more clients and that frees up time to service the clients in a more deeper matter. And so it's really understanding the workflows and understanding how you can end up driving that efficiency so that you do have time to think about, Oh, I actually have these assets sitting here, do I do have points that are worth something here? I do have this, you know, what's increasing now or is obviously like Bitcoin and altcoins, right? Like keeping track of your wallets that you might have. And also those websites that you might have made on GoDaddy, there might be actual value attached to those. Right. And so you actually have the thought that, hey, let's think about these assets that I have and bring them into the equation as well.

Sam 8:58

Yeah, you make a really good point. The efficiency aspect, is obviously core to advisors as they get more and more I would call admin type of work. The

F5 S2 9:08

Right?

Sam 9:08

other thing that you talked about and I'd like you to expand a little bit because I think it's core to side draws

philosophy, but also success is this idea of collaboration and how the tool allows, an advisor to put themselves in the center of their clients call it financial or broader life that they can actually, not just be quarterback in name but quarterback in, actual reality, etc.. Can you talk a little bit about that and how your approach to it as differentiated from other cloud firms?

Ali 9:43

For sure. So when we looked at the market, what we saw was that cloud storage on its own is a commodity, right? You get to gigabytes for free from Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and so on. And and that's not something that we that we really position ourselves as what we really focused on is the collaboration, as you mentioned. And the reason why this is important is when you're sharing information with people outside. So, Sam, let's say you were an advisor and you have your admin with you. Between you and your admin, it's easy. You both have access to your OneDrive folder or something like that. But if you wanted to share information with me now you're going outside of your organization and you're in the digital space, let's say, right, the digital desert, you're sending something to me. It's going through email or a link or something like that that becomes vulnerable. So there is a cybersecurity issue there that you have to be aware of. And now the financial sector has so much regulation on it and there's always new laws that are coming through on how you have a responsibility to safeguard your client's data and their privacy and so on. That onus is on you. So when we looked at the business, we saw it. We thought the this the storage itself is not the issue, it's how you share that information. And if you can start bringing people into your network and sort of inviting them to your house, that is where it actually starts to have a multiplier effect. So a typical use case for us is a financial advisor that's working with a client, but also the client's accountant, their estate lawyer. Right. And maybe the financial advisor has an external insurance specialist that they rely on to give some specialty guidance around the situations. Well, all those folks need access to those same sometimes similar documents or the same documents. So you're not going to be sending six emails out to different people. You're saying, Hey, the file is here, access it here, and maybe you want to limit the exposure that the insurance person to you. They don't see all of the documents, only see certain. You have so much flexibility there. And when you start working on collaboration that way, what happens is you're making the lives easier of all the professionals that you're working with and also for the client, because now the client doesn't have to be the middleman forwarding emails around to all their different professionals. They're all accessing them in one spot. And that's where we've seen a huge amount of productivity boost because a significant time is spent on moving things between one person and another person or re forwarding it. So now not only have you save time by avoiding that shuffling of information, but you've also made your practice that much more secure. Now I'll give you a crazy stat in the States there's an E there's an email security company called Egress, and they monitor your inbox for viruses and phishing or malware and things like that. And one of the stats that they had was that 85% of us lawyers have had a data breach. Right. Think about that. 85%. The are lawyers. Right. And they have so much information and so when they've had a data breach in their mailbox, that means all that information becomes accessible. But now what we've started to see is a shift in liability to the origin source of that information. So if even the client's mailboxes hacked and some information got exposed, they can actually come after the firm for not providing a safe, safe and secure means of getting and providing that information. So now, because of all this multiplier effect that you can have when you start dealing with collaborators and professionals, you're exposing your clients information that much more. So we built a very strong collaboration. Pillar You invite people to the platform to access on a permissioned basis and any updates. It can change documents, sign documents, fill out forms, whatever it is, all within the platform. So it streamlines that workflow and then it adds a tremendous amount of security to your practice.

Sam: 13:37

Look, to your point, not only is there legal liability on firms, etc., there is the reputational damage and everything else that is associated with that. I want to dig in a little bit in developing Sidedrawer. I mean, and you talked about how your client base ranges from the solo advisor to large enterprises.

: 13:58

But

Sam: 14:00

You know, what were some of the I guess and you said that the success wasn't a straight line, that there is always a back and forth. What were some of the unexpected

: 14:08

right,

Sam: 14:08

challenges that you would have encountered that you can talk about, especially working as a startup that you're trying

: 14:15

right.

Sam: 14:16

to establish, that you've got all of these processes, the cybersecurity, etc.. what were some of these challenges that you encountered and how did you navigate these obstacles?

Ali: 14:29

It's a it's a great question because we faced a number of them. The one that I'll talk about was around trust. So as a start up, you have you don't have history behind you, right? You just have the people who are client facing and their reputations. Right. And when you're dealing with the nature of our product, which is the kind of information that we're safeguarding for our clients, let's say that is very sensitive information. So folks have to trust us, and specifically me, my CTO, our our, our customer service reps and everybody that they interact with, that when we say that we've taken these measures to actually secure the information and have we follow these processes, etc., that they that we actually are right. So establishing trust is probably one of the most difficult things for a startup, for the nature of what we're doing. If I was just selling marketing software for you to do some LinkedIn ads, you know, whether I follow a process or not, it doesn't really matter as much. I'm kind of just posting stuff for you on your behalf whenever you want, right? That's a different situation. This is safeguarding information about your will, your beneficiaries, your investment statements. There's a

Sam: 15:39

Mm hmm.

Ali: 15:39

lot of sensitive information. So we have to establish trust. And in establishing trust, you do that with it. It just requires a lot more capital. Earlier on because you have to build in processes, you have to have people, you have to have compliance certificates, you have to have all these regulatory, you have to check off a bunch of things. And that. And I think when you're building the platform to realize, when do you do that? When do you build it for ultimate scale? Those are the lots of those are important questions that you have to answer earlier on so that you don't trip up when it comes time for the right sort of enterprise client. And we were fortunate that we got into discussions with very large firms very early on because we made those difficult decisions early. We decided that we're going to invest heavily on making sure that we were credible, that we're trustworthy, that we have the processes in place that went even even a large organization comes to us. They feel the confidence in dealing with us, knowing that we're going to pass through all the hurdles that they're going to throw at us along the way. So I think that that building a platform for scalability and to have that trust earlier on is a very difficult decision process to go through. But it's one of those that we have fortunate good partners, good investors, and we had the support of advisors like yourself and others to actually guide us through those decisions earlier on and kind of overcome those hurdles.

Sam: 17:01

as you're talking, it just so resonates with me and I think will resonate with the advisors listening in. It's very much about how I think that there they are building their practices, the good ones that they're thinking about, the

: 17:12

But

Sam: 17:12

foundations that you need to put in place. And it's not often sexy or it takes work and it takes money, etc.,

: 17:20

right,

Sam: 17:20

but it's

: 17:21

right,

Sam: 17:21

things that are kind of absolutely critical for you to be able to kind of scale that growth going forward, etc.. And for you guys

: 17:29

Correct.

Sam: 17:30

for doing that, it's partly, I guess the reason for your success is that you've made that kind of difficult decisions and difficult investments upfront without knowing that it's going to pay off. But, if you hadn't made those investments, you wouldn't have had the press release and everything else that you've talked about.

Ali: 17:50

That's right. Yeah. If we hadn't done them, there'd be 100% certainty that it wouldn't

Sam: 17:55

yeah,

Ali: 17:55

have paid off

Sam: 17:56

exactly.

Ali: 17:57

right. And if we did the investment, there wasn't a full certainty that it would pay off. So you're right. But but it was asymmetric in that sense. So I think, you know, we were able to convince people that there was a need in the market for secure collaboration, for workflows, to save people time and for ultimate value for the end client. And I think a lot of people recognize that. And and yeah, we're in a much better spot today than we were three years ago when we started three or four years ago.

Sam: 18:24

I want to ask a question, and I'm curious as to the answer. Your solution is one that is used and championed by individual financial advisors because they're the ones that are day to day using

: 18:36

But

Sam: 18:36

it. But you need buy in

: 18:38

correct.

Sam: 18:38

from their firms, right? From everything from,

: 18:40

Yes.

Sam: 18:40

like senior executives to compliance to,

: 18:43

Yes.

Sam: 18:44

all of that. How do you manage what I would say that, the user demand and feedback with the call it like the infrastructure and support, kind of a buy in and and sign off.

Ali: 18:59

Right now, you're right. It's in some firms, it does become a committee decision, let's say, because we actually touch in a number of areas. Right. So there is compliance. So compliance, what you're doing through us is most likely better than what you were doing before. So that becomes an easy sale in that sense. And from a security perspective, sorry, not sale, but conversation. And from a security perspective, whatever you do through us is more secure than what you were probably doing before. So that becomes an easier conversation. The other part of it is client experience. So the client experience is where now you have our platform that a client will be exposed to, which might be different than your client portal that that they might be logging into to see their equity fixed income balances. Right? So if they want to click on documents and they have information exchange, it's opening up a window to our platform. So that client experience is something where they will have a big say in. But, you know, nine times out of ten, to be honest, at this point, this is far superior to the other alternative experiences that they would have, which is secure email. Right. Which is a I think, a universally hated user experience.

Sam: 20:10

Yes, absolutely.

Ali: 20:13

And for those on audio, Sam just raised his hand right? And if we're in a room full of people and they would all probably do the same. In fact, there was actually a stat I saw from about six years ago that said even i.t. Managers recognize that secure email is a bad user experience. So, so so that i think gets a check off. It's just a point of the sales cycle. It gets affected based on who has more say at the table and where are we in the technology implementation. Right? So we've been very fortunate to have referrals sent our way from very significant consulting firms as part of their technology implementation. So we do we get slighted in the beginning, in the middle or towards the end of this process. That's where things can get hung up because, you know, something took longer on some other project that they were working on. Right? But those are for sort of medium to larger sized firms for smaller firms, we find that we're able to get to a decision within a day sometimes or within a week, and things move along pretty quickly.

Sam: 21:17

To your point, this is important. I mean, all of these things about compliance, security, customer experience, I can understand why, especially larger organizations, that there is an importance in terms of keeping that consistent, etc..

: 21:32

Sure.

Sam: 21:33

in my sense where you've got the momentum is that this isn't solution. Looking for a problem. It's a problem that, needs to be solved.

: 21:42

But

Sam: 21:42

You've got buy

: 21:43

right,

Sam: 21:43

in from the day to day users of it, which are clients and advisors.

: 21:48

right.

Sam: 21:49

And as a result, there is a willingness, I would say, on the part of, compliance, security, client experience to say, okay,

: 21:57

So

Sam: 21:58

we're willing to listen, show us how you're going to solve the problem without creating other problems for us right?

: 22:06

right.

Ali: 22:06

Right, right, right. There's and, you know, we listen to our clients quite actively and we'll take feedback because ultimately what we're trying to do is be more secure and save them time and give them give their clients a better experience. So we always listen to feedback on all three aspects and how can we add additional workflows to save them time or improve the layout or or a workflow that goes right to the client's experience, improve that? So I think from many of our clients, they really appreciate the fact that we're constantly improving the product and also listening to their feedback. You know, I was a software user at a banks for many for a very long time, and you know, your feedback as an individual user never got hurt and you never saw the improvements being made. But I think from our clients perspective, they see the impact that their feedback is having on the platform and they're able to recognize. At one point we actually joked and said, we're going to start calling new features based on the person who recommended it, right? Like, like, like this is the Natalia feedback.

Sam: 23:11

That

Ali: 23:12

Our feature, the same feature, right? But then we realized that that's not going to go very far and you're going to run out of names at some point,

Sam: 23:18

I love that. I love that I look, you've been successful, in terms of penetrating different channels, growing different business. So business development is key, to Sidedrawer, but to any enterprise, I What are the

Ali: 23:32

right?

Sam: 23:33

lessons that you can share about business growth at Sidedrawer, p ones that might be applicable to financial advisors who are also in the same boat looking to expand their practice?

: 23:43

Right, right.

Ali: 23:45

So it's one. So I also we're the Chief revenue officer hat. And so that requires me to have constantly think about how do we get more business right and what are the more most efficient ways to get more business. And we have this really neat

webinar on our website where you can sign up and watch it. It's a sales webinar, and that in that webinar we ask a bunch of questions. It's a really cool product that we're using. This third party to provide those platform for. And actually I don't mind giving them a plug in webinar. If you want to try out something, definitely and give them a shout. But one of the cool things about it is that we get to ask questions and say, How did you hear about us? Right? And 40% of the folks that walk through that webinar have been referred by other professionals, so other advisors and could be an accountant who came across it because they were at it as a collaborator or a lawyer or another financial advisor talking to somebody in their peer group or community and and recommended our solution. So they came and watched it and you know, we signed up about six out of every ten folks

Sam: 24:49

Mm hmm.

Ali: 24:49

that come through our door. Right. And so it's a really neat experience to go through and to hear that 40% of the folks that came through were recommended by somebody else. And we did our own survey and we found that about 89% of our users would actually recommend our solution to other others in their professional network. So that word of mouth is very powerful because it comes with trust and credibility, right? You trust the person that you're dealing with, you feel like they're credible and they give you a recommendation. You're probably going to follow through with that. And we decided that as long as we build a good product that has happy customers, they will refer other folks to it. Right? There's there's no more efficient way of growing your business than than that. Then the other aspect is participating in relevant events. So we consciously focus on key key events during the course of the year that gives us exposure to our audience group, which are financial advisors, planners, wealth planners and so on. And and focus on on that market. So we've been we've been very fortunate to have word of mouth. We have some very good attendance in our events when we participate at different conferences. And we've been able to actually show the value of our product through just very simple demos. And that's really helped remarkably well. So

Sam: 26:12

That's awesome. And just from my own experience. the referral, the warm referral that you're talking about is golden. Right? And there's

Ali: 26:20

that

Sam: 26:20

the advisors that do it well and kind of make it a part of their practice, have

lots to show for it, etc.. The challenge of course, is putting that into your practice to say when is it appropriate to ask for referrals? Are you, encouraging your customers and where in the process are you encouraging them to make referrals to, potentially other people that might be interested?

Ali: 26:46

right, we've started a program for referrals and a lot of times it's just inbound, like they'll hit us up on customer support and say, Hey, I want you to talk to so-and-so and or I've told so-and-so to reach out to you. Another way is because of the collaborative capability, folks get added as collaborators, and then when they get, they start using the platform, they want to inquire and say, Hey, can I actually use this for my own business and come in? We're starting to see a lot of specialization in the financial advisor practices where some folks will only focus on a certain demographic, certain folk or another one will focus on a situation like folks that are maybe maybe across border, right? So they have their own issues that they're focusing on, but they refer out to others. And we have that happens quite often where somebody will refer a client off to another advisor. And so similarly in that situation, they'll get exposure to our product during that handoff period. Right? And that's where we get we get involved. And I think the same thing with family members of clients, like an advisor wants to grow their book of business. They have a client, but they may not know the extended family of that particular client. And so our product has been very helpful in getting the advisors to grow their network beyond the primary client through this collaboration functionality. And I'll give you an example. We had we had actually have a case study on this on our website where a client was one of our financial advisor clients, had a client who was about to pass away, and then they used our platform to add the different family members as collaborators to gather all this information about that particular client so that they could prepare the estate and so on. And then once the client unfortunately passed away, they picked up the kids as clients, right? And the kids got exposure to the advisors through the platform. So I'm not going to sit here. I'll be humble and say, I can't say for certain in our platform, but it definitely had a part to play in enabling the connection between the advisor and the client's family members. Right?

Sam: 28:51

And it was a practical engagement, right? It wasn't like, Oh, I'm a marketing engagement. It was, you know, let me solve a problem that we've got to deal with right now and get the you know, in that process, you get to know each other right?

Ali: 29:03

That's right. That's right. So they use it, facilitated that. And then we have folks that actually use our platform to help their clients to say, Hey, listen, you want to share information with your adult children, but you don't want to share all the information with your adult children. So start using these permission settings to add your adult children to certain segments of the of the side door vault. Right. And that's helps the exposure for the advisor to the client and their family member. So the network effect is extremely powerful. And when you think about your what your potential network can be from that multiplier effect, it' pretty profound, right? And so we benefit from additional business, but for clients can also benefit in the same manner.

Sam: 29:43

Well, the end client, but the advisor benefits from the business as well, right? Because they've got a more entrenched kind of relationship with the next gen. We keep talking about, that huge wealth transfer and the challenge that advisors have of how they build that relationship with, the kids or the inheritors

: 30:03

Right,

Sam: 30:03

of that wealth.

: 30:04

right,

Sam: 30:04

you're

: 30:04

right.

Sam: 30:05

providing an example on how that advisors may think about doing that in a subtler fashion.

Ali: 30:12

Absolutely.

Sam: 30:14

You gave that case study, which I think is very helpful. Can you give another example of where the adoption of Sidedrawer by a financial advisory practice, led to these efficiency gains that you were talking about? Can you describe that in a bit more detail?

Ali: 30:28

Oh, for sure. We have and this is very common where remember the stat that I shared earlier, about 40% operational capacity growth. Right. So to put that in context, we had a firm that had about seven advisors and they had about two admin staff, I believe, and when they added four more advisors and grew their business, they did not need to add any more admin staff. So the impact of that is pure profitability, right? Because you have no fixed cost, you're able to scale your practice even more and now you have all this additional revenue that's coming in and you're using the same tools. Our subscription cost went up marginally because it's on a per user basis. In that particular case. So so a marginal marginal cost. But, but you didn't have to bring on an additional body. Right. And so that's a, that's a huge impact. And and they still have time to focus on doing other aspects of their business. So we see this on a regular basis. We have one example of an advisor who has no admin staff and he's fully automated his practice. And he told me once that he was checking to see if he onboarded seven clients in one week, would it break the system? And it didn't. And so he was really happy and he kept on pushing the envelope as far as how many more clients he can onboard in any particular week. And we're an essential component of his of this tech stack. So everything kind of runs through our platform. And so it's remarkable to see how folks have used it and how folks are utilizing it in a fully digital manner and in some cases not fully digital, but hybrid manner, but still getting so much more on operational efficiency than other platforms.

Sam: 32:14

So that's an interesting segue to what I want to ask you next. Your solution sort of fits into wherever in the state of evolution, I think in advisory practices. Now let's look to the future. What emerging technologies or trends Are you preparing for or anticipating that you think are going to impact advisory practices? And how is Sidedrawer positioning itself to win in this kind of evolution?

Ali: 32:40

Now it's a good question.It's something we think about a lot Before I answer that is going back. You're right. Our product, the fit depends on where the client is in the evolutionary process of evolving their firm. And some folks are just on the just embarking on the digital process. And other firms have been in there for a while, but maybe they're not getting their efficiencies. What what the maximum benefit comes when you're able to sort of go back to the drawing board and say, what do I want to achieve? And then work backwards from there instead of thinking about how do I put cyber into a process, you think, what is the right process? And then how, how, how can how can I use side door to sort of facilitate that process that I want? Right. And that's the ideal way of sort of thinking about it. We actually contracted a firm that does a global it's a global firm that does process workflows, and they interviewed a number of our clients to uncover how our product was being used. And to be honest, there were many different ways across so many different firms that we didn't even know about like that they were actually using our product. And when we put an overlay map of the different firms that were interviewed, there were close to like 24 different steps in a workflow diagram where our product was used. And we didn't know because they found ways to actually use our product to help with a process that they wanted to implement. So it was actually a really learning, very enlightening experience for us to work with these clients and see the results from these interviews.

Sam: 34:10

Well, I might interject there. you

: 34:11

What

Sam: 34:11

made a very important point in my experience in working in wealth management firms when we were trying to go digital, etc.. the one lesson that I had learned over and over again is that, trying to digitize a bad process is going to give you a bad result.

: 34:26

is

Sam: 34:26

Right?

: 34:27

hundred

Sam: 34:27

You know, to your point,

: 34:27

percent?

Sam: 34:28

first, make sure it's the right process and then digitizing it is, you know, yes, it's work, but it's a lot easier

: 34:35

That's right.

Sam: 34:36

to digitize that and you'll get a lot of savings and everything else, etc.. But, if it's about approach whether you do it on paper or whether you do it on a

Ali: 34:44

That is, you're right. And I think the advisors will recognize that it's a process I have to fix, not the tool. Right? That's where they actually have the most success. And that's where we actually help out a lot of our clients

Sam: 34:56

there was a place where I worked where, we had account opening. I don't know how many signatures that we had and it was all paperwork, right, for

Ali: 35:04

right.

Sam: 35:04

opening up the account. And we did manage to get it digitized, but the first round of that digitization was we still had the same number of signatures. It was just

: 35:13

Right.

Sam: 35:13

on an iPad And so we had to work closely with everyone to sit there and say, it's a copy and paste kind of a thing. Can we not

: 35:20

That's right.

Sam: 35:20

create it so that there is one signature, right? So.

: 35:23

You're right.

Ali: 35:24

And then so to answer your question, as far as new technologies, I think you can't be in the financial industry and not mention what I impact is going to have on how we engage with clients. So there's some really interesting aspects here. One is obviously to speed up the analytical and maybe decision making process, right? So if I have all of your information, can I ask some interesting questions and it can read all of that and give me an output that I can then use it to a different decision making. But it does come with some risks because of privacy concerns, right? There have been a number of blogs written about how people were able to extract PII information out of these large language models. So it takes a lot of effort to do it, but it is doable. And then it's like, who's liability is that? So we have to be really careful as we go down that path because the financial sector, as I said earlier, is probably the most regulated sector when it comes to data privacy and safeguarding of information. So we have to be super careful. Bu definitely A.I. is is a top priority for a number of firms. And we are also exploring that and seeing how we can incorporate that into our product.

: 36:37

Now,

Sam: 36:38

Ali, this has been very interesting. A great conversation. We're coming to the end of our podcast. So have a few final rapidfire questions that I ask all my guests. So

: 36:49

yeah.

Sam: 36:49

if you're ready,

Ali: 36:50

In the hot seat,

Sam: 36:50

let's jump in. So, number one, professionally,

Ali: 36:53

the

Sam: 36:54

what is the most important lesson you've learned over the years?

Ali: 36:58

most important lesson you don't get anywhere in a parked car, so you have to make a decision and you have to move and you may not know fully where you're going, but you have to start moving.

Sam: 37:09

I like that. Number two, what is one practical

: 37:13

As.

Sam: 37:14

tip you would offer listeners keen on applying your insights?

Ali: 37:18

Maybe a bit of the first one that you have to act. But then the second one is you have to focus on the client experience. And and I think that's an important aspect for financial advisors. And what do they want to offer their clients? It's what kind of value are they offering? So all of that sort of fits in and that's how we ultimately drive product evolution for

Sam: 37:40

that's a very, very key tip. I mean, I've always taken the view that, there's lots of good financial advisors out there. an advisor needs to find a way of defining themselves or differentiating themselves from everyone else that's in the marketplace.

: 37:56

that's,

Sam: 37:56

So that can be, what's your specialty in terms of your subject matter expertise? Is it financial planning? Is it investments? Is it insurance? It could be the type of clients that you're looking for, etc.. But to your point, it's absolutely critical, whether it's for a Sidedrawer or for a financial advisory practice to get that clear as to what is your competitive advantage and do you want to be known for and who do you want to be serving?

: 38:23

that's right.

Ali: 38:24

Knowing your client and your ideal ICP your ideal client profile is super important because then you can hone in on your services, your experience, your processes around that. Everything stems from that.

Sam: 38:37

Ali, this has been very insightful and informative. If listeners want to learn more about you or Sidedrawer and your work, where do they go?

Ali: 38:47

Just go to our website side, Sidedrawer. com. Super simple, easy to spell. You can see everything that we can offer to you and that is a case study is there to learn more about how we're having a big impact in the financial advisor community.

Sam: 39:02

This is great. Ali, thank you so much for joining us today on the future Ready Advisor.

Ali: 39:06

Thanks for having me. So really appreciate it.