Podcast → Episode No. 34

Creating the Perfect CRM

With John Rourke and Dan Ferranti

October 07, 2026

Featuring

John Rourke

Wealthbox

Dan Ferranti

Wealthbox

What does it take to build a customer relationship management (CRM) system that advisors want to use?

In this episode of Behind The Advisor, originally recorded for XYPN Radio, I sit down with Wealthbox co-founders John Rourke and Dan Ferranti to explore the decisions, lessons, and technology behind building a CRM.

John and Dan share how they met, what they learned from their first CRM, Upswing, and how selling their second CRM to Constant Contact helped shape their next venture. We follow that journey to Wealthbox and dig into what it takes to turn an idea into their flagship product.

Dan walks me through the technical side of building a CRM, while John shares his predictions for financial technology. Along the way, we explore the thinking behind the tools advisors rely on to manage relationships and keep their firms running.

If you've ever wondered what goes into the software you use every day, join me for a behind-the-scenes look at how Wealthbox came to be and what its founders learned along the way.

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Listen to the Full Interview:

Watch the Full Interview:

What You'll Learn from This Episode:

John and Dan’s journey to working together
How Dan and John went from working with LPL to creating a social CRM
Why is financial planning so technologically behind
John’s CRM Industrial Complex
How user experience plays into technology development with financial planning
What an API is and why it is important for integration
The future of Starburst Labs

Featured on the Show:

Wealthbox CRM | Blog
Connect with John: Twitter | LinkedIn
Connect with Dan: Twitter | LinkedIn
XYPN Ep #18: The Career of Brittney Castro – From $0 to $250k Revenue in 24 Months with No AUM
LPL Financial | BranchNet
Constant Contact | BantamLive
SalesForce | Chatter
FinCon
XYPN VIP Community

This Episode Is Sponsored By:

Read the Transcript Below:

00:00:01

welcome to xypn radio where your host Alan Moore brings you into a community of Fe only financial planners who want to profitably and successfully serve Gen X and geny clients if you're ready to get the knowledge you need from leaders in your field learn from Forward Thinking advisors and take action on your own goals xypn radio is the show for you here's your host hello and welcome to this episode of xypn radio I am your host Alan Moore and I want to thank you so much for joining me today

00:00:28

today's episode is an interview with a co-founder ERS of wealthbox CRM John RoR and Dan fan now I've known these guys for several years now and every time we talk I walk away feeling like I've learned something new about technology you know when you interact with most tech vendors you're only talking to the sales folks so it's kind of fun to hear from the lead developer who in this case is Dan and be able to learn more about the inner workings of Technology development in this interview we started

00:00:53

out by hearing some background in the careers of John and Dan and how they ended up meeting and teaming up for their first CRM development called UPS swing they went on to create a second CRM that was later sold to Constant Contact and have now created their third CRM which they consider to be their Flagship product wealthbox CRM which is a CRM specifically for financial advisers so I dug in a little bit with Dan on Integrations and financial planning what apis are and how they work along with a host of other questions

00:01:20

honestly meant to educate myself and any listeners out there that are curious about technology and really how all of this works also talked with John about what he sees as the future of tech for financial advisors and then we closed out with a sneak peek of two major applications that they are rolling out called investor say and wealth base later this year now remember you can access the show notes and any additional resources mentioned on the show at XY planning network.com sl34 and also remember to join our VIP

00:01:49

community at XY planning network.com slvp now this month shows were brought to you by wealthbox CRM which is a technology partner of the XY Planning Network designed for financial advisers wealthbox is simple beautiful and a collaborative CRM as their tagline says wealthbox is a CRM you'll actually enjoy start a free trial in 30 seconds at wealthbox tocom so without further Ado here's my interview with John and Dan hey John and Dan welcome to the show thanks so much for being on thanks for

00:02:19

having us Alan this is great thanks for having us so just so we know the first voice is John the second voice was Dan listeners will get very accustomed to it rather quickly so John and Dan are the co-found ERS of wealth box which is where most folks know you guys from cuz that's kind of the I guess the most recent addition to to the financial planning world but I kind of want to take a take a trip back in time just a little bit because I think it's always interesting to hear how people's careers

00:02:47

kind of lead them to this place so John I guess we'll start with you what has been your career path that kind of led up to the point to where you and Dan started working together sure I've been in the tech space all my life and in 1995 I get into the internet web scene and uh have been here ever since doing lots of different things whether it was uh Consulting and building websites and apps for other companies but in the last 10 years it's building 10 12 years actually it's building um web products

00:03:17

on our own and all that kind of thing and about eight years ago Dan and his buddy Alex were down in a little basement building upswing CRM a financial advisor CRM this is back in Dan I guess it was 200 6 2007 is that right y so one thing led to another and I had I was in New York City and I had a bunch of people around me in a big Loft down in SoHo when we were just building anything you know was this after the dot com1 explosion another technical friend of mine and I got together and we just said W this this isn't over this's going

00:03:49

to be a whole Resurgence of this so we started building apps and met Dan and uh they were well underway with upswing at least the first iteration of it and one thing led to another said Gee this is interesting want don't you come down to The Loft and I'll put some money into this and and provide some guidance and I got more and more involved in it so we kind of really formed the company upswing uh CRM LLC so um this is back as you can imagine in h a different day and age if you will in terms of yeah in

00:04:16

terms of um what was going on then but that's how Dan and I met so Dan how did you get into I guess I programming and and app development and that sort of thing so I've always been in technology and programming since I was a teenager I've been programming I just enjoyed it back in the dot one days um 99 20 1999 uh I was down in rest in Virginia DC area and I was working on uh one of my first startups we were a managed service provider so we were actually streaming live desktops through the web

00:04:49

so they were originating in the cloud and we were streaming desktops to people and that was great we had a really great experience doing that and I really just saw how much I enjoyed software as the softare as a service platform and then you know around 2006 2007 I connected with a buddy of mine as John mentioned who was in uh the financial world and uh and we just saw the lack of crms right there there were desktop based crms at the time but no one was really providing a web-based CRM solution at that point

00:05:22

in time there people were still asking the question should it should a CRM be web- based or should it be desktop based and so we started off with upswing as John had mentioned and we really had some good success with it we were Joel brookstein named us uh Rookie of the Year back in 2006 and it it was a a really great product that was coming to be and then we connected with John and uh from there John brought his skill set and everything he had with the modern technology and development approach that

00:05:51

we brought to things and uh kind of continued on but you know to this point you know for seven years now it's awesome because if you think back I you know when you say web streaming of desktops I mean we think about that now you just log on to join. me and no big deal you know we can see other people's screens and you pick up an iPhone you can FaceTime it wasn't like that 15 years ago you know we were it was a very difficult uh thing back then you know we we were getting down and actually

00:06:19

compressing the um protocols you know that would send the data from the cloud down to your your desktops on our own with our own algorithms because we needed to just eek out every bit of performance that it would actually work well over you know DSL or fractional T1 or even people you know back then still would use dialup and would stream these desktops you know over a dialup connection so that really um has kept us always thinking about performance and and the speed of a page load right well and also to be looking at if that was 15

00:06:52

years ago and they say technology doubles what every 5 years or whatever it is you know where are we going to be in another 10 to 15 years especially in financial planning because you know I I'm the first to say just how far behind we are as a as a profession as an industry and we'll talk a little bit about that on this show but it's exciting to see just how big of a change you know from when upswing was was Rookie of the Year in 2006 2007 like how far we've come in just 10 years so and

00:07:21

again if we take a step back just 10 years ago the even today 50% of advisers don't have a CRM I bet I can only imagine what the number look like then yeah I mean it was interesting and to be fair to the people who were out there with webbased CRM systems obviously you know Salesforce was there red tail was a great Pioneer in the space and and some others but it was a fun time it was a fun time and it was also a crazy time because as you can imagine you know 2008 and N when we really created the company

00:07:50

did a big redesign started to rebuild the product and get out there those were very bad years so with upswing you know a lot of LPL advisers were coming on to it and corporate called us up and said this is interesting let us come see you so a whole group from LPL came down to uh The Loft in New York City in SoHo and wanted us to integrate it into branchnet so we did this pilot program and that was all great and a lot of LPL advisers seem to love it the big problem was in the background though that the world was

00:08:18

collapsing the financial world was collapsing in 2008 and 2009 and we had gotten our feet wet enough as a team with this CRM world and we all kind of had a better idea which was making CRM social so what we did effectively was orphan upswing CRM we put a feature freeze on it we continued to support it and support the customers that were on it but we put a feature freeze on it and I took the employees and the capital and we regrouped uh the entirety of it and we created a new company called Bantam

00:08:46

networks we had a a quote social CRM product called bantom live and we'll talk about in the second I suppose but just parenthetically what what happened with upswing was we literally just laid it to rest about two months ago we took the remaining customers that we had always supported and uh transfering them over to wealthbox CRM but bantom live was really targeted was our second CRM system that we built and was really targeted to small to mediumsized businesses and the Dynamics of social CRM were such that we would integrate

00:09:19

Bantam into Twitter LinkedIn Facebook so with one click you could create a new contact record and note history from social networks and the other element of social CRM as it applies to that product and wealthbox today was the activity stream so you could collaborate as you do in a private social network among your team in the activity stream so you'd see you know new tasks and calendar events and notes recorded and others who had permission to see that could comment that and and collaborate

00:09:50

on that you know it's really interesting because I I think that for the business owners that are out there people that are looking at starting a business I think there's some really interesting nug nugets there just from a business owner entrepreneur perspective to be able to say hey upswings been great it's working but ultimately maybe right product wrong time whatever it is to be able to Pivot like that and pivoting is really hard once you're in it because you feel so invested in what you're

00:10:20

building but to I mean what ultimately drove the decision to not just I guess iterate on upswing why not just make it a social CRM or did it really require a total rebuild based on what you were seeing it's a really good question and and I don't use the I'm obviously familiar with the term pivot but this wasn't a pivot right I wouldn't pick that metaphor it was really switching horses meaning we created a whole new company we restructured both companies and decided to move on and you know to

00:10:48

this day I I don't know if that was a good decision or not you know I I admire red taale and I've told him this much on even on stage that hey they they soldiered on during that difficult period and they to be sure they started a lot earlier than we did back then but um you know it was just a difficult period but we just made a gut judgment that there was a much bigger CRM and Market in the small to mediumsized business and we were first with so-called social CRM I mean Tech crunch wrote an article about us called you

00:11:17

know bantom life CRM the ultimate social CRM and this was fully one year nice before well this was fully one year before Salesforce launched chatter and so you know we we're kind of ahead of the game with it partly through skill partly through luck and the the product really took off so bantom live we started it and sold it in a two-year period we had two publicly traded companies vying for it after a thorough vetting and uh the winner was Constant Contact up in the Boston area and we literally sold it to them about five

00:11:46

years ago um next month it'll be five years so the switch was not just I mean so it's not like you pivoted in in the financial planning space you really got out I mean with bantom you really got out of the planning space went small medium business kind of changed this landscape and and it sounds like part of it is using upswing almost as a pilot to see what the market was and to see where the weaknesses were where the gaps were in the market and the Gap that you exposed was hey we need to do the social

00:12:13

CRM but maybe not just for financial advisers but did you get Traction in the financial planning space with Bantam or that was just totally outside did not you know intend to get any traction no we didn't it wasn't directed at all in the financial advisor space like upswing was and like wealthbox now is it was purely SMB product small to medium-sized businesses and it it competed with Salesforce at the larger level for their small business product and Zoho and 37 signals high-rise and and so forth okay

00:12:44

so why after you know you sold this company you know to Constant Contact why come back to the planning space what was it about kind of the financial advising space that attracted y'all to come back to it it's a great question and the short answer is it was just we sold off Dan went on to work for constant contact for a couple years I kind of fooled around for a year figuring out what to do next and when we looked back at the financial sector that we had started with an upswing we just looked back and

00:13:15

uh it just looked like a wide open field meaning there were Legacy products in there you know I wrote a blog post some months ago called the ultimate list of 25 CRM systems for financial advisers now obviously that's wonderful search engine optimization juice there but and it plays very well in fact it it goes back and forth with Michael Kit's the best crms oh nice it just looked like it was a wide open field meaning there are Legacy products with old technology and quite frankly a lot of old managers who you

00:13:47

know were just running these things and they're converting over from desktops and it just we were by then we were really matured not only in CRM but matured in creating software as a service products using the latest modern tools and marketing techniques and all of it and we just don't see that around in the CRM space quite frankly and the you know the new fintech folks you know the wealth fronts and betterments of the world you can take early their products but they've got wonderful great teams

00:14:12

there whether in the front end of marketing or the back end and engineering and we kind of put ourselves in a similar category of using modern tools techniques and practices to run our company and so we just thought that there wasn't only opportunity to go build our third CRM system in space but there were other products too so the name of our company really is Starburst labs and our Flagship product is wealthbox CRM but we're also launching later this year another product called wealth base

00:14:41

wealthbar getting Network for financial advisors and another product called investor say investors.com which will launch around April and that is a social network for investors you know what I remember hearing and I can never remember the guy's name that said this but he was a keynoting at a conference and he said that his job was basically to be a technology futurist was his job to basically tell people where technology was going so his strategy was he would go to South Korea once a year to their technology convention he'd see

00:15:07

everything that they were producing there he'd come back to the US and act like he could see the future tell everybody about all the technology that was coming in sure enough about a year later anything that was being created in South Korea appeared in the US and he looked like a genius and he was saying this in just about you know being able to kind of see in one area and then take that and apply it to another and I I feel that way a little bit in financial planning because of how far behind we

00:15:34

are just in general technologically and that you know by going into other spaces especially with technology and being able to see kind of what other Industries other professions are utilizing and bringing that back to financial planning you almost can't bring in the same level of Technology some other Industries have because it's too much so why in your opinion and I I guess I'll hear from both of you on this just from the technology as well as the business side like why is financial planning so far behind

00:16:03

technologically and do you agree with that statement that we are behind technologically I don't know you know I was asked by the market Council Summit as John speaking I was asked by the market Council Summit to give a presentation along with some other panelist uh last month and and the name of the presentation was was um you know it was part of their technology disruption session I mean disruption to me is an overused and almost trite word now but but the name of my presentation was an Outsiders View you know we're

00:16:29

Outsiders to this industry you know there's a big phrase in the industry by a lot of apps right it's built by advisors for advisors and I've always viewed that as giving short shrift to the Artcraft and science of developing true software as a service products and I just don't think there are many advisors out there and there are some exceptions but I don't think many advisers out there are going to Moonlight their way toward you know success in building apps on the side over here it's just a little strange

00:16:55

thing and again it gives um it kind of short changes what what we do here so sure we're in the space but what I said on stage there was that the industry tends to dis advisors right there's this whole industry if you will I in a riff on an Eisenhower phrase I call it the the CRM industrial complex where you've got you know self-styled CRM experts you've got CRM Consultants you've got TR CRM training organizations and CRM trade show promoters and and trade Publishers you know writing up ad sponsors articles

00:17:28

on how quote nons savy advisers you know should use CRM and the reality is everyone's making money off of this and I think the I think the industry I I mean I think the advisor should turn around saying Hey give us better product right because we're kind of blaming the advisor for being so far behind and I think it's beholden on the vendor community and we're trying we're not perfect but we're trying to do that to give advisors no matter what their age tools that intuitively make sense to

00:17:57

them because if if you're going to go try and you know have a profit Center for making training off of CRM well then you're probably disregarding user experience design right so again we're not saying we're the solution to all this but that's our mindset is that don't blame the user don't blame the adviser develop better products for them so a little twist on maybe the way you phrase your question I like that yeah and Dan so just from a purely technological I guess just this is I

00:18:27

guess my ignorance will come through in terms of how to actually you you know the the correct language to use but just from I guess the backend technology and and programming are our systems as far behind as they appear I mean just from you know a usability standpoint yeah that's a great question so it really starts with I think um there was a gap right there there was and it's closing but there clearly was a gap in the technology that the small business Market generally gets and what advisers get and advisors

00:18:57

wanting to run their practice practices efficiently said hey we have to fill this Gap so what are we going to do let's build software to do that and there's a lot of homegrown software and and that software some of it turned into products and some of them are great products and you know there and some of them haven't been as successful but that's really that's the where the designed by advisors for advisors has come from right so now you have a technology operation that you're running

00:19:23

and you're running your advisory practice there's a lot that's behind the the software side of things right we've matured is a software technology you know industry over the past 10 years in huge amounts like you said earlier Allan and it comes down to to things on the front end like user experience user experience is a huge term it's everything from you know it goes way deeper than make this you know this should look pleasing to the eye and pretty of course that that should be in

00:19:53

your software but there's other things beyond that like fatigue when you perform an action over and over again let's say you're adding followup tasks to clients the amount of clicks that it takes to do that right that's user experience the workflows in your system and making sure that it's easy to go from one action across to another action that you commonly do user experience how pleasing it is to the eye yes so those types of things it takes years to get good at that craft right you have to focus on

00:20:24

that with 100% of your time day and night you know weekend and do that right that's on the front end on the back end there's the technology that runs your software you know the are you a cloud-based technology utilizing the most advanced and secure services that are out there so that you can deliver interesting features to advisers that help their practice it's very hard I think for organizations unless that is 100% their focus to do that so yes I do think there's a gap and I think there is

00:20:57

a lag in the industry for things like usability and providing those modern development practices that translate to newer features for advisors you know interesting things that they didn't realize were even possible and um making sure that they have a consistent and reliable application so that's how we approach things that's where we like to come from and uh yeah we we really enjoy being here right now and being able to do that makes sense and you know you you made the comment that the Gap is closing

00:21:27

which is so exciting for those of us who like to just play with technology because it's fun you know but I'm a Believer in in the basic laws of economics and and supply and demand and that you know from the demand side I just wonder if we haven't had the demand for new technology because of just the age of our profession you know the average age of advisers pushing up into their upper 50s now the tendency to run more lifestyle practices than actual businesses as Michael kitus would say

00:21:55

people are basically building incomes they're not building Enterprise Value you know and so they're just not demanding these things because ultimately they're fine you know are you seeing that the older advisers are just not interested in new technology it's kind of what they've got's working so it's fine and it's the younger advisers that are really pushing it or is that just a a really bad generalization based on some anecdotal experiences I've personally had I don't know I mean I

00:22:21

understand the point and I don't necessarily disagree with it but it sometimes it surprises us the age of some advisers coming on to wealthbox CRM for instance and they everyone kind of assumes oh this is for the younger set because it's so modern and slick and it feels like a social network the reality is we we get a lot of people commenting that their older users in The Firm are using it you know we've got people in their 70s and 80s using wealth box so I don't know the answer to the question I

00:22:48

understand the the larger Dynamic of where the business is and the average age have been adviser but I think part of the lack of demand perhaps as you're suggesting Maybe that the products here for have just been too complex and there's an argument to be made there too it's a good point because you know a program like Salesforce is great in the sense that it does all things for all people and for anybody that listens to this show on a regular basis the word niche market comes up in every single

00:23:14

episode because if you serve all people in all ways it means you serve no one truly and so you know it's almost like we went through this period of like all these kind of more broad-based programs and now we're starting to get the more Niche based focuses it's like it's great to have something you can fully program for yourself but good Lord where do you start and who how much are you going to have to pay to actually get it where you need it to be that's right so where are you kind of

00:23:41

seeing the focus I guess in in the financial planning technology space changing you know I mean are you seeing vendors more vendors coming into the space that are interested in helping to close this Gap that are being a little more Forward Thinking or are you seeing existing vendors really uh looking to shake things up or just kind of a mix I mean what I guess what's your PS on the market right now from a technology standpoint I think it's thriving I I think I think the older vendors are

00:24:08

upping their game you know to the benefit of advisors I think newcomers like wealthbox and others are coming in to offer more choice and and more possibility for advisor so I I think there's a real energy in the business right I mean three four years ago I I didn't see it when we started this business we kind of looked around it was the same kind of amulance around and I think you know some of the hot fintech companies you know whether it's the robo advisors or or some other you know

00:24:36

companies in the space with really new products have have given it extra life and where you know our mission this year is is to really integrate with a lot of these new entrance and and new providers or companies that have just up their game in general so let's talk about integration because I think that this is a buzz word that I am I you know I'm so sick of hearing the word integration simply because it it doesn't mean the same thing to all people or to all products so just on the front end you

00:25:03

know advisers are always asking for Integrations and sometimes I think we ask for way too many Integrations because we end up with Integrations that don't actually help our lives at all but it makes us feel good to have the Integrations but why is it so challenging to build Integrations why can't you just is it not as easy as just kind of plugging into all of the various Technologies out there is it a really big deal does it depend on which vendor you're integrating with can you just

00:25:27

talk I guess more an education standpoint of just what it means to integrate with other providers yeah I I'll start the answer to this and Dan will definitely have a good answer to this too but um it's kind of funny it's interesting you know now that we've built three different CRM systems over the last eight years in this last one with wealthbox advisors really understand more how we work meaning advisors understand the plasticity of web-based software they know that they can ask us for a feature request and

00:25:58

they know we can do it technically right so we have this very triaged process of handling every single request and catalog them very fastidiously and then they go through you know a couple of other tools and Trello and all this kind of stuff that that Dan can go over but what's challenging for us is you know getting pulled in different directions so we have to combine you know the voice of the customer and what they want and we have to combine our vision and then we have to look at partners and

00:26:30

what they can give us to create more value in our product by making it more value but also giving us distribution from a marketing point of view so it's a really challenging effort and and you know what we have said was and and you know we were cautioned by lots of people like Jason wank who came on right away and we knew this it's we cannot muck up we cannot mess up our user experience just because we have Integrations right so we see other vendors you know coming in there you you'll log into their

00:26:57

products and all of a sudden you've got a bunch of Integrations that aren't live yet but you're wasting valuable real estate just to accommodate those someday we just don't want to do that we you know believe in more of a progressive disclosure approach if you're integrating with someone they shouldn't be you know right there the second you sign on for free trial for instance I think that's odd but um Dan do you have any thoughts on this on on more of a technical level yeah definitely I mean

00:27:21

from a future standpoint there is you know there is a a curated approach to making sure that it's that an advisor gets the Integrations they need but we're also not making the system so complex that they can't even find you know what they want to do in wealthbox but that this definitely is a big year for us from an integration standpoint and I I think it really starts when you get to the technology level it starts at at the apis and how modern and friendly the integration partner is right like we

00:27:53

have Integrations that we've done in wealthbox that have taken us three hours hours like very fast one engineer an afternoon and can actually produce a meaningful integration for an adviser and you know meaningful is comes in all different flavors and you know some things are very simple but super helpful for an advisor like a single sign on you know launch into another platform it saves an advisor having to retype username password you know go to a URL and go log into another platform like

00:28:26

that kind of stuff is is helpful on a small scale but there's also larger stuff that we want to do and it can be really hard if the other partner does not have let's say an open API or they have an outdated or Legacy API that you have to work with and as an engineer you know myself when when I see an API that's you know is outdated or returns different results than the documentation States it makes things harder right it makes it much harder to integrate with them and it slows down the process and that's that's why some

00:28:58

Integrations take much longer or some Integrations just you know aren't as seamless as you'd like them to be because there are challenges connecting with apis and Alan I think you asked like why can't there be this TurnKey approach and people have tried to do that in the past but there's so many different pieces of data and there's no common data standards around you know certain things in in really in any industry but in fintech so um data models behind the scenes are different

00:29:28

between different providers and all of those things need to be mapped together and synchronized in different directions with different rules now let me ask you this you you mentioned API open API Legacy API and I think that is a term that gets thrown around a lot and I have no I don't even know what API stands for I kind of know what it does so for listeners what is an API I mean why is that important for Integrations y totally so an API is an application programming interface and what that

00:29:57

means is it's a way for um one engineer one firm software platform to communicate with another software platform over programmable terms right a user can go and access wealthbox and receive request data from wealthbox in a format that they can then program against right that's kind of the the fundamental core to the API and there's we're actually releasing our our API for wealthbox 2.0 towards the end of Jan January coming up soon here and it comes down to making sure that those apis are

00:30:34

consistent that's one of the biggest problems in the market today as I mentioned some apis you access them they're not even open so you have to contact a vendor and say hey we'd love to integrate with you can you provide us access with your API and some Legacy apis older apis will actually provide you with a PDF file or Microsoft Word document which contains all of the API information so how another access it yeah and pull down data right so it could be hey we'd like in wealthbox we would like to retrieve

00:31:06

Financial account data and bring it into the wealthbox platform so as an adviser when you're viewing a client record you can also see the clients accounts and holdings from some other system right so the way that we learn how to how to go and get that could be again as a you know Word document that's emailed but it could be as modern as you know what other Industries are doing which is a website that an engineer can go to and view all of the documentation so they know exactly how to get the information

00:31:35

that they need to so that they can display those account values and holdings inside of the the service and we are definitely way skewed towards the other end we can talk about maybe a little bit our documentation driven API which we're building because we want to solve those problems that exists in the market because ultimately that just makes an advisor's life better right the better an API is the better the features will be for the adviser that's using the product you know I thank you for that explanation

00:32:05

because that actually helps to to kind of just understand why Integrations one are a challenge and two I think it kind of highlights maybe the change in attitude in financial services in general over the last I'll say couple of decades and that we're starting to see even more so now which is kind of this movement away from this like high competition mentality to more of a collaborative what I call the abundance mentality which is really what drives xypn community in general is this belief

00:32:35

that hey there are so many people out there that need our help we're not competing against each other for individual clients so we can help each other um and so when you're talking about apis you know sounds like an API is basically just the access to be able to integrate with other systems which I would suppose most software vendors in this space want to be able to integrate with other vendors but the question is whether or not they've made it open or not open being anyone can come in

00:32:59

integrate anytime they want do it very easily but maybe they lose control versus having an API that that they control they can basically decide who gets to partner with them Possibly play favorites uh decide what you know kind of what the what the Integrations will be going forward and it seems like most of the newer companies that are coming onto the space many of which you know xypn has partnered with like wealthbox advisor financial planning software precise FP for data Gathering have open apis but I don't really see open apis

00:33:30

from more Legacy companies that have been around a while is it just that it's really hard to build that kind of API on Legacy systems or is there more of a maybe kind of two schools of thought when it comes to technology maybe kind of have the old school technology stack that operates the way they always have and kind of the new School Technology Stacks that you know that's more operating like wealth boxes yeah I think there's a little bit of both I mean there's when you go into the kind of the

00:33:57

broader Market into the small business space in general every application I mean that that we ever work with um in wealthbox like they have an open API all of the internal vendors that wealthbox uses we all have there's apis for all of them that's just it's a given right it doesn't matter what you use so as time has gone on and you know as we've gotten here is is a software development industry this is what SAS companies do and you know so any new entrant I think at this point um the modern folks like

00:34:26

us and others that are coming in it's not even a question really it's it's like that's what you do you do you build an open API for collaborative purposes on another point or on this point I'm open to integrating with other CRM systems right so how does how does that look I mean it's it's it's theoretical uh in part it's challenging in another but we just believe in data portability and the ease with which a customer can leave one CRM vendor and transfer to another I would like to make really

00:34:59

simple right we we would like wellbox would like to make super simple we don't care if you want to go or we don't or and we're Delight to have you come into the system so theoretically we're open to integrating our API into any of our competitors we're wide open to doing that and obviously that's you know from a business owner standpoint you're confident that your product is the best and that people will stay with you but it makes it easy to leave and and I think that's important I mean I I I

00:35:24

always ask you know technology vendors before I sign on how do I leave you because ultimately I'm assuming at some point I will leave every technology vendor I sign on with no one should be using technology they had 20 years ago and obviously as a technology provider you hope people stay but how you're going to leave one day is important it is and and and right now you know even without you know we're launching this open API in a couple weeks as Dan mentioned and but even right now it's

00:35:49

very easy to leave wealth box if you want to and if you need support we give it to you you can take your data and XML or Json whichever you want m but um on the matter of actually integrating with other companies you you know there are instances when a customer isn't right for wealth box right sure and that's okay you know we have people come and go all the time it's quite skewed right now to the coming but as different advisors move on to different places it there might be another CRM system right that's

00:36:15

right for them and vice versa so to switch gears just a little bit you know I mentioned earlier and I'd have to pull up the most recent statistics I still think we're at 50% of advisers you know say that Outlook is their CRM which you know anybody that knows anything about technology uh knows that the Outlook is not a CRM but advisers think that that's how they're using it what is the core purpose of a CRM you know as an adviser if you don't have one or we have folks that are starting firms that say like oh

00:36:42

well maybe I just you know won't adopt a CRM which is one of the reasons we provide wealth box for free to our members is is to ensure that they adopt a CRM from day one but why is it important I mean what kind of what's your pitch to advisers that are saying like not not only is is it between you know wealthbox and other competitors that are crms you know just between wealthbox and just not using a CRM in general yeah I think you know that we kind of were promoting other people's words recently I think Jill brookstein

00:37:12

and financial planning magazine came out in December just a month ago on some stats so I think it was I think it was 40% of advisers don't use a CRM and of that I think it was 21% are are using Outlook as a de facto CRM so same point you're making though Dan you can weigh this too but you use a CRM most advisors use CRM most for most advisers CRM is their Hub right we hear this kind of CRM centricity notion about and they use it to manage their business and you know so you have your core features in

00:37:46

CRM your contact management tasks opportunities a calendar workflows file storage right CRM reports you have all these kind of core functionality and I think I think what we've introduced is a humanized nature of a CRM meaning all the data is there but what do you do with it now well one I want to collaborate with my peers on that right so wealthbox is very collaborative with that activity stream and private social network and two you want to have proactive notifications coming out to them partly based on you know those

00:38:21

Integrations that we've got now and we're adding very soon where you can proactively be be notified of something but to get back to your question is you're basically using it to run your business so you know some advisers who are just kind of managing a book a business in this kind of Lifestyle way maybe all they need is a contact manager and some ancillary tools you know to be compliant run run their service but if you're out and you're trying to build a business particularly with a team you

00:38:48

really want to use a CRM tool to do that Dan you want to weigh in yeah I I definitely think um especially Alan you had mentioned um you know the X why Planning Group and and even um advisers that are either just starting out or continuing to you know still in that growth phase right they're still they want to grow their practice they want to grow their business they you and you need somewhere to put this data when you potential client you have to put them somewhere so you can keep track of that

00:39:16

so you know when to follow up you know it would be nice if you have the same tool so once you've followed up and you've actually established a relationship with that person and become a client you can transition them to a client in your platform and then as you communicate with them you can add notes when you speak with them you can attach emails as you correspond with them you can see their account data in in your CRM system all that stuff is really it's important because it will allow you to

00:39:43

be efficient as an adviser so that you can grow your business faster right nobody wants to do repetitive things or do things in a manual way especially when you're trying to grow your practice because that'll just slow you down so so having a CRM will allow you to take advantage of that right it'll allow you to do that and really use it as your central platform that you build off of as you grow your your business you know and I think this is one of those areas where a lot of new businesses if you

00:40:10

have three clients and and two prospects you know you can keep everything in your head but I remember it was about client 20 when I started losing track of like wait how many kids does this client have you know what what all outside assets are we talking about because you know and that's when you go oh crap I really wish I had all of that you know information sitting somewhere because you know in financial planning and we've talked about this in previous episodes growing of financial planning practices

00:40:36

is changing and it is becoming more sophisticated so historically it was Prospect calls you they sign on you know they schedule meeting they sign on that was the sales pipeline well now we're getting much much more sophisticated in terms of where are they at in your sales pipeline have they downloaded your freemium are they reading your blog do they listen to your podcast have they attended an intro webinar I mean there's so much that can be going on and you can use your CRM to track that to see kind

00:41:01

of what's you know almost predict future growth based on kind of your sales Pipeline and where people are in it but once they become a client what are the tasks that you're going to be doing and and you can create you know recurring templates and things like that in order to not only streamline and be sure you're actually doing everything you're supposed to be doing but also for a growing practice to be able to hand things off you know it's really hard to bring in a a pair planner one day and

00:41:26

say okay good luck you know if you could write this plan for me that'd be great and the PA planner has no idea how you operate but if you've documented all your task and pro tasks and processes and all of that it makes it so you can hand off things to other folks and make it you know so that you can actually grow your practice absolutely in addition to giving that consistent experience to every client that you have which is really nice you know you know what you're providing your clients

00:41:52

absolutely and like you said just storing that data just storing the history with that client you know so that when they call and they say you know hey I have a quick question you can just pull up their contact record and and all of the information is living there um like I said I do think there are times when when we try to over integrate and and I guess this is kind of the the argument with with financial planning technology and general is that we've had some vendors try to be the all-in-one you know it's no longer a CRM

00:42:17

and a performance reporter and a and you know a rebalancing software and and whatnot it's all one single system and whether or not you can do that really well uh is it remains to be seen I'm not sure that anybody has especially not in the space that that you know our listeners can afford like some of the platforms that are out there that have you know minimum fees of $20,000 a year and such but you know I guess in terms of Integrations and and making CRM The Hub basically being able to either

00:42:44

access enough information or like you said with single sign on to be able to push a button pop open another system if a client has a quick question about their portfolio you don't necessarily need all of that information sitting in your CRM you just need to be able to access it really quickly yeah and um you know just on the business landscape that's the tension right the the platform all in one place all in one solution versus Point Solutions or separate products that integrate with each other right and the

00:43:10

fragmentation that that we see in the small business Market let alone Financial Services of Point Solutions like wealthbox CRM that can integrate with a B andc company that's where the industry is still going you know you see this desire to create a platform and I think there is the business case for it only if you also allow advisers to choose from that platform on an all Kart instead of prefixed basis and so that's where I think is the big business opportuni is for a big company to have

00:43:39

both of those once they try and knit everything up in all of its technological laress it becomes clunky and overpriced and and misguided at times so I think your point Solutions are here to stay you know you see these startups sprouting up just around features right and uh that would turn into product and that's always going to be in the space I believe it is kind of the evolving nature of technology I mean we're seeing this in in you know I guess the world in general where Uber suddenly

00:44:07

has you know completely changed the landscape of getting a taxi and and now a sudden you can work for a couple hours a week driving for Uber if you so choose and you can have a bunch of different little jobs that that create a big job in technology we're kind of seeing the same thing where we're we see a lot of little pieces that are being created highly specialized tasks you know feature sets that sort of thing that then kind of get rolled up into products that that create more interesting and

00:44:32

more useful things it's it's just fun I think this is a fun time in fintech and part of it I think and again this is more of an Outsiders perspective because I'm not really in the fintech world other than buying it is that we've started to see some companies getting bought out for really big dollars whether that be things like e- money or learnvest or some of these other companies with hundred you know multi- hundred million dollar price tags depending on the platform sometimes up

00:44:58

into billions we're now starting to see Robo advisers getting eaten up and I just wonder if and maybe you can speak to this because because you know you have investors if all of the money that's being made in fentech is finally starting to make investors interested in putting more money into the fintech space which is going to continue to drive new and interesting and useful products I mean are you starting to see more money flowing into advisor facing fintech yeah definitely there has been

00:45:25

although now think we're at a a point where people are starting to get nervous just in the Venture Capital Community at large you know we're starting to see you know articles appearing about maybe these unicorns aren't you know a lot of these unicorns aren't going to make it and they're going to turn into donkeys and we're going to have lots of down rounds out there and all that kind of stuff so to be sure it's it's it's healthy I think there's a lot of because

00:45:47

Financial Services was held back for so long you know because of regulatory issues because of technological Legacy issues because of cultural issues because of managers who didn't understand what Young startups can offer now you do have or have had in the past five years this wave of investment into it the fruition of which is starting to Blossom and you know you can argue whether or not again whether you know betterment and wealth front and and some other Robo advisors are whether their cost of acquisition is too high or too

00:46:20

this this or that but those companies can move because they're very talented in my view they can they can move quickly so you know we'll see what happens with the betterman their 401K project and we'll see whatever happens with walfront but I just think it's it's for the good I still think there's money flowing into it I don't think the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater meaning if some of these big big unicorns falter I don't think that's going to impede little companies like

00:46:45

ours in any way so it I agree with the Allen it is a it is a fun time and and honestly you know I would not have wanted to be on the fintech side of things five or 10 years ago because I feel like it was a lot less interesting but now we actually get new technology to go see it at the T3 you know technology conference that's going to be coming up in February and and things like that which I'm excited to see as we're kind of wrapping up you've mentioned you know we've been talking a

00:47:08

lot about where kind of wealth box is today the CRM Marketplace that sort of thing uh you said that the open API is is right around the corner when that happens it kind of sounds like the you know that'll be wealth boox 2.0 the feature set that you intended to create is kind of there the core is there and obviously you always be iterating on it and adding New pieces but you've mentioned a couple of other projects that you're working on with wealth face and investor say so one why start you

00:47:35

know doing other projects is that kind of part of your philosophy in in terms of kind of creating different apps and then two talk a little bit about what those actually are and how they will potentially affect the advisory Community sure when we started Starburst labs and received funding for it what I said to the investors was we're going to build three separate but highly complimentary applications and the name of those which is I said three years ago the name of those wealthbox CRM wealth based and

00:48:04

investors say so there is a narrative to it in terms of them being complimentary and so I've got this metaphor that i' I've used that that incorporates the conversion funnel and combines it with the technology stack meaning if you look at the top in 2016 if you look at our company you're going to see three apps in the Market at the very top of that funnel or and also think of a stack is investor say and that is going to be Community content around investing Investments and investors right so you

00:48:37

got a hashtag a cashtag and an at sign for investors and and that'll that'll be something along the lines of maybe what Morning Star offers its people it be similar only it be an actual social network vertical social network in the investing space and editorially we're going to guide it to get into wealth management issues and financial planning issues and all manner of investing and Investments so look for that we hope to launch that around April below that if you will so that's the top of the stack

00:49:07

that's the top of the funnel now let's get a little thinner and come down to wealth base because some portion of those people who go to investor say will see ads and promotions and Q&A question and answer widgets that come from wealth base and wealth base for lack of a better term is a Q&A a question and answer Exchange that compliantly connects consumers of financial planning information and wealth management questions with advisers and it's a multimedia platform so we can do it through straight through

00:49:36

email through even text messaging it can spark and it escalates up into audio like what we're on right now and goes to full motion video in one click and forgive me for not fully explaining that but you get the gist of it what that that we'll we have we've already lined up some Media Partners to you know Place ads in relevant native and embedded content so if you're reading an article about college 529 plans embedded on that article on a thirdparty publishing site is got a question about 529 plans

00:50:05

advisors are live online now you can't get any tighter in the advertising world than that and and John one thing to um to add here too is that as an advisor when you sign up and join the wealth-based platform you can indicate your Specialties so you can say hey I would like to receive questions about divorce or I would like to receive 5 9 questions and and I would like to operate anywhere in the country or I would only like to receive those questions within let's say a 50 mile range or 25 mile range of my ZIP code

00:50:36

then as that question comes in from a consumer that you know is interested in and needs help it will geot Target to you as the advisor and you'll get an alert so you can then go in and have a conversation with that person it's again it's a private onetoone communication so this is not open over the Internet this is just like email in a way and we have compliance tools that are built in so we can work with your existing compliance email providers and then that conversation as John mentioned can

00:51:04

escalate so you can go over to video or to audio have a phone call escalate to video and that's a great way to form a relationship and get a question answered as as a consumer right and I have these types of questions all the time and and it would be great to have someone to reach out to like that it's almost the ability to test drive a financial planner and kind of filling the top of that sales funnel which is something that in financial planning we've not been very good at to be completely

00:51:29

honest I mean I remember going to fincon uh the financial bloggers conference for the first time in and seeing just how far behind financial planners are in marketing I mean if you want to see some marketers man go to fincon they make 100% of their money online and so they've got to be really really good internet marketers and so but I look at people like Britney Castro who's an xypn member we had her on back in episode 18 listeners can go to XY planning network.com 18 and she has built an an

00:51:55

ecourse in order to engage with a lot of prospective clients I'm trying to remember the exact numbers I think at the time she had had over a hundred people go through it or something like that and a few of those had become clients this is kind of a version of that it's not a course but it's a version of that in that it lets a consumer get a question answered usually it's something that's really really stressing them out get that question answered engage with an advisor kind of

00:52:18

test drive what financial planning looks like and then potentially be able to move on into being a full-fledged financial planning client yeah exactly and um you know Michael kitus talks about you know the no one solved the top of the funnel right right so we're trying to you know get engagements for advisors in a compliant manner you know Dan mentioned we have these tools that we have a what we call a supervisor's desk and it's like it's like a web-based help desk to triage and manage these

00:52:46

questions whether you're at a broker dealer and you want to do it for your network of advisers or whether you're at a firm there's lots of Tools around that so you've got investors say at the top wealth base just below that and at the bottom of this funnel or stack if you will Is wealth box and some portion of advisors will be in there now we do have coming out in wealthbox once we have those products released this year a new activity stream where you'll be able to see these leads coming in from wealth

00:53:14

base and claim those questions from wealthbox right so you can start that process so you can see how all of these products are separate you know when the time comes we'd be delighted to with any of our competitors or whichever on wealth base but these are complimentary products that cross-promote and even integrate with each other and that's essentially what Starburst Labs is all about because I think you know when I first I remember when I first heard you say that you were going to be getting

00:53:41

into their apps you know I'm the chase the shiny object entrepreneur and so I was like oh no does that mean wealthbox is you know you're moving away from wealthbox but really this was the the intent of the company in general was to create different Standalone apps that integrate but can stand on their own and if you're a red tail CRM user and you absolutely love red tail and aren't moving away from it you can still use wealth base assuming that integration gets built you know and so it's not like

00:54:04

you have to use all of weth Box's stack because they are Standalone but obviously there's going to be some pretty sweet integration since you control all of these different platforms to get underneath the same umbrella yeah definitely that that's the spirit of it but um for my part I'm I'm pleased with what we set out to do right down to the brand names and the product descriptions are the same as they are today than they were when we started the company two and a half years ago do I wish we could you

00:54:29

know move along a bit faster we all do we probably pre-announced wealth base a bit too early but we've done a lot of work on it's in working prototype right now as is investors say by the way but um we'll stage those out the release of both of those out this year but by the end of this year we'll have tested things and and you know next year we'll be looking for integration partners with those products too and assuming you know that you do the same thing with those products as you have with wealth box

00:54:55

it'll be open API and it would get really easy to integrate and you know we've talked about this offline before is that when you have an open API and a partner out there has an open API I can you know as someone who does not actually work for either company I can actually create Integrations and links between those two without having to ask for permission which is kind of cool as well so it would be interesting to see as more and more companies are producing apps like yours that are opening up

00:55:20

these apis that are making maybe standardizing the data sets a little bit just how C customizable we're going to be able to make things which I think is going to be so important going forward hey great well guys thank you so much for being on today this was a lot of fun get to hear I guess the technology side of things I think many times as advisers we take for granted what it takes to build tech and as you pointed out earlier sometimes that can be a little insulting to the Art and Science that

00:55:44

actually is software development you know it's not just throw some money at a problem and it fixes itself but to also kind of hear where you think as an Insider's view of the technology space kind of where things are going and I again I think it's exciting I I think that it's only going to make our lives easier as advisers to be able to serve our clients better and either you know serve more clients or ultimately maybe take some additional time off which is more uh the route that I push

00:56:12

absolutely well appr propo of that Allan we've got a blog post coming up that we'll probably put out in February but you mentioned time and time off and and what we're trying to really show is well Fox CRM gives you back time in with respect to the amount of clicks it takes to perform everyday actions with which at the end of the year is startling how much time it can take to do that and it's startling how much time you can save yourself from doing that so uh look out for that soon but uh we really

00:56:40

appreciate being on your show and congratulations to you and and Michael by the way on your whole xypn network it uh we hear about it all the time and it's great to see your progress too well thanks guys we appreciate it yeah thank you thank you I hope this episode was educ ational for you since I know it was for me I think as advisers we can take for granted technology and how it works and how easy or challenging it is to actually build Integrations and just to build software in general that works the

00:57:07

way that we need for it to work so it's fun to get a behind the scenes look at their platform now remember that if you want to ask John or Dan any questions you can do so in our VIP Community which is free to join at XY planning network.com viip and you can also access the show notes and additional resources at XY planning network.com sl34 this month's shows were brought to you by wealthbox CRM a technology partner of the XY Planning Network xypn actually provides wealthbox CRM for free

00:57:33

to all of its members it is a simple beautiful and collaborative CRM for the modern financial adviser start a free trial in 30 seconds at wealthbox tocom thanks so much for joining us today we'll see you next time you're not alone and you're not crazy it's scary starting building and growing your own financial planning firm and that's why we put together a free private Community Just For You The Cutting Edge financial planner go to XY planning network.com slvp or text xypn radio to

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Featuring

John Rourke

Wealthbox

Dan Ferranti

Wealthbox

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