Hi, welcome and thank you for joining us today to discuss when to admit you need new tech. My name is Randy Lambert and I'm the executive Vice president of Orion Technology. I've been working with advisor technology for almost 30 years and I've listened to thousands of our advisors describe the problems they're trying to solve. With technology. But before we get started with that, a little bit about Orion, we were born out of the need of our registered investment advisory firm to improve its technology. So we might we're kind of maybe in that same situation that you might find yourself in today. We spent over two years looking for the right technology stack that would check all the boxes and determine that would make more sense for us to just build our own solution. And so Ryan Technology was launched in 1999 built specifically for independent RA's. As Ryan learned from the 2300 firms and 52,000 advisors we serve. We have just really focused on providing a technology that is for the advisors and. We've learned a lot, so. With that, I want to make this an interactive presentation. So while I'm hitting on certain points, we will be surveying the participants of this webinar and you are welcome to provide your input as we push through. So the state of advisor tech. There's been a lot of advances. There's cloud based solutions, there's web-based API's, data analytics. And more there's an urgency for advisors to keep up with their tech landscape in order to keep their clients expectations met. And there's a couple of realities that I've come to understand that are I think it'd be important for our advisors to to also understand the number one reality is that. Advisory practices have to become more efficient overtime. And I'm going to use a simple example of a spreadsheet for trading. So that that was kind of the old school. I'm going to go manipulate a spreadsheet, create an output and send that off to the custodian. That practice is not very scalable. And over time there's been technology that has helped enable things like model trading through, you know, asset allocation, model trading and that sort of thing. So now today, the expectation is that there's rebalancing of your accounts with a single click or. An automated process that doesn't even require a click. In addition to that, though, there's also other things that you can take. To a different level, so say you want to personalize that that technology experience of investments and instead of just providing a group of models, you want to do some personalized direct indexing that really helps tax efficiency or allows the the client to experience an ESE SG strategy that speaks to them. So those are some of the things that when you're thinking about over time what you put in. Place the way that you display your value. It's got to be able to become scalable and more efficient over time. The second reality is that advisors expect more value over time from their advisor. And this I think two kind of fallacies that didn't play out exactly the way they were predicted would be. One is that there was a prediction that there's going to be a big time fee. Impression for advisors and that that never really happened. The second thing was that the robo advisor was going to replace a financial advisor and we obviously know that did not come true. Michael Kitsis was pretty stern on that. He's like the advisor is still going to play a place, but what has happened as the technology experience has changed for the investor or for your end clients, they expect to have kind of a Netflix. Experience with with their what they're interacting with on from a technology standpoint, they're expecting to have ease of use like an Uber if they're out ordering a car service. So those types of that robo experience that end to end connectedness and that look and feel that those are some of the things that have changed over time is that the investor and the client have increased their what they expect, they expect some personalization. They expect ease of use and so that that second part that the reality is the advisors instead of their their fees shrinking, they're they're being asked to increase the level of service they can provide to their clients and increase that client experience as well. So. So that's why you know, at a high level, I just think technology is so important to make sure you check the boxes for what you're looking for and how you display your value proposition. And this is over a number of years kind of what we have at Orion, what we've said, hey, these are the signs that you need new tech. There's four flags that we're going to be going through. To get you to that best experience that you want to provide to your clients. The first red flag that you need to look at is, does your technology provider take your feedback? It reminded me of my experience with our technology provider when I would get ahold of our our provider and ask them, hey, can you do a customized report for us? We really need to make this little differentiation that provides our value proposition to our clients. The answer was an affirmative. We don't do that. That that was there was no further explanation of it other than that. These reports are what the industry standard are and these are the reports that you're going to use. That didn't sit well with us. We thought we could do better than that. That was a long time ago. But what the point is, is that. There is a a need for flexibility to listen to the advisor and put those ideas into motion. And so your provider does need to do regular surveys and conversations and they're the road map needs to be readily available to you. You have to be able to see down the road and say, OK, they are making changes, they are helping us innovate and they're going to provide us a better experience for our clients. And so that's this is kind of like feedback #1. And at Orion, we we value innovation driven excellence and we work to understand your objectives by listening first. I think that is just the key. Listen 1st and be an advisor driven technology stack. New features are coming out. How often is the platform updated? So you know if you look back in the last 12 months, you say well there's been very little done and or the things that that that have changed have not really been that big of a deal. If you aren't seeing your technology get regularly improved upon, you're at a risk to being left behind. The new enhancements should improve the client experience, they should make you more efficient. Those are the two things that we talked about earlier, but they're just actually you know they're they're tables, table stakes. One thing that I, I think you could ask your provider about is how do they deploy their technology. We use a continuous integration, continuous delivery, CI, CD process that is really the the best way to do it it, it keeps the risk low of changes. The changes are are compartmentalized and they're updated all the time. So you're not having one big data dump of, you know, hey, we're going to have 1/4 release. And it's going to be 8,000,000 different things. You release one thing at a time over you know each day or a week and that is a really important way for you to know, you know when features are coming out if those are, if you're being updated on a on a daily or weekly basis that is a pretty important process. That's what I call kind of an innovation process for advisors to look out for. So this the third. Kind of red flag is it's hard to get ahold of people you know. Do you have to pay for your service? I this reminded me when. Orion, the previous provider we used, they would have a busy signal if I did not call before 8:30 central time. So that was a huge red flag and like they can't even handle the incoming calls that we have, so. This is a problem that's prevalent with technology providers. If there's a commitment to service in your engagements, then you'll you'll you'll feel that and you'll see that with the resources that are available to help you. There has to be multiple ways that you can get a hold of the service team as well. It it can't just be I call this phone number or I send an e-mail here, e-mail, chat. Digital ways to get a hold of like for instance, if you're in a web browser with the provider that you're using, is there a digital way to just call them? Do you already have to actually physically call a phone? 70% of our clients get a hold of us through a digital purpose. They don't dial A phone numbers, they just connect to us. Even if they want to call us and talk to us on the phone, they're still connecting digitally through our website. So those are some really, I mean that's a really easy. Thing to to know you feel that if you're being supported or not. So that was the third red flag. The 4th Red flag is it doesn't integrate with your other tools. This is a constant battle that we're seeing. To run an efficient business, you need to have your tech stack seamlessly connected and that also means by having that seamless connection connectivity through single sign on, it reduces security problems when tools aren't integrated. That creates more risk for you as well. And so those are kind of the, the big four. So I'll go back to that. Number one is they don't listen to you, they don't take your feedback. #2 is there's no new features that are coming out. You look at their 12 month road map and there's not really any meat there like you, you've got to be able to see that they're transforming their business and helping you support your investors. #3 is you can't get a hold of folks in a timely manner. I just can't get help. So that's that's a that's a huge red flag. And four it's not integrated well with other tools. So those are the BIG4 for you and if they're. If these are speaking to you, if you're going, yeah, those are things that really those are on my radar and those are a problem, then you might need some time to think about what your options are within this this industry. There's a lot of really good providers. We think we're one of them, but there's a lot of really good web-based solutions out there. And I you really need to take the time to make that step so that you can advance and support your advisors and get more efficient. I'm sorry, support. Their clients and get more efficient overtime. So the next steps to take if you're looking at this from a you know from a due diligence process that's what our next webinar is going to be about. I'm really excited about this one. We're going to talk about the timeline. How much time is left on your current contract and when do you need to get this put in place. Identify who the best person to start the due diligence processes within your your company. It should be a decision maker not an intern. Sorry interns don't want. Don't need to be offensive to you, but should be somebody that's really a stakeholder within the organization and and can make decisions and then and then I'll tell you what we'll get into this more. But if it's not a key stakeholder then you can have alignment issues like somebody that wants to make a change but then there's not buy in from the rest of the company so that that's that's a big part of it. And then create a list of questions you have for each provider so that you can give them all scorecard. You can say, oh, they answered this one really well. They didn't answer this one well those sorts of things. So you create. A list of questions that are consistently applied across all the opportunities you have. Thank you for joining me today. It was great to talk to you about when you need to admit that you need some new tech. Have a great week. _1732327096058