Host: You're listening to WealthTech on Deck, a podcast about the future of wealth management technology brought to you by SEI. Here's your host, Jack Sharry.
Jack Sharry: Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this week's edition of WealthTech on Deck. I've been on a listening tour since December when Lifefield was acquired by SEI. As we record this podcast in late May, I've met with at least 80 different executives from across the industry over the past five months. I've learned so much. A trend I've been observing for some time and it has only been reinforced of late, is there is a convergence of capabilities underway across our industry. Whether it's wealth managers and asset managers, warehouses and national firms, RAAs big and small, family offices, private banks, trust companies, insurance and annuity companies, workplace retirement platforms, amount of breadth and more, all are coming together in pursuit of providing a more streamlined advice and guide and experience for the benefit of the investor and the advisor, for the firms themselves. The industry is spending billions of dollars figuring this out, but the essential challenge is the financial services industry has been built brick by brick without a set of drawings. There's no grand plan. It has evolved piecemeal and largely been account and product centric and remains so. Although that is shifting, we'll probably talk a little bit about that. And as things have evolved and become more complex, lots of services have been added to the mix, financial planning, workplace retirement guidance, family office and trust services. Today we're gonna speak with Jamie Hopkins who has spent his career on all sides of providing guidance for advisors and investors and the firms he has represented and led. Jamie is the Chief Wealth Officer of WSFS, which I'm told is WSFS Bank, WSFS, and the CEO of Bryn Mawr Capital Management. Many of our listeners know Jamie from his years at Carson. We held a variety of positions as managing partner of Wealth Solutions, managing director of Carson Coaching, and director of retirements research. Looking forward to getting Jamie's perspective on where he sees the financial services industry today and where he sees it going. Jamie, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.
Jamie Hopkins: Well, thanks for having me on, Jack. It's great to see you. And I appreciate you thinking about me and excited to talk to you today.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, I think we'll have some fun. So let's start by talking through your career journey. You've covered a lot of ground in all sides of our business, which I knew a little bit about, but as I did a little homework, of course, LinkedIn is a blessed thing for that. You've worn lots of hats at many different types of institutions you've served. So RIA, boutique private bank, you've been a retirement plan consultant. You're the founder and president of FinServ, a nonprofit advocacy group for financial professionals. You've been Director of Research for Retirement and Retirement Income, Head of Advisor Coaching, Professor. You've got a slew of initials after your name, MBA, Esq, LLM, CLU, CHFC, MBA, RICP, that's Retirement Income Certified Professional. So my questions, two questions really. When do you sleep? And fill us in on the journey that drives the passion for helping our industry do a better job. Fill us in.
Jamie Hopkins: Thank you. I do get asked that one a lot like do I sleep. I don't sleep as much as I probably should. I stay up late and get up early. So yeah, I actually do yoga every morning at 6 am. So I'm up at like 5:26 and that's part of the routine and I love it. It's good get something out of the way that's positive at the beginning of the day. I think it's always been helpful. But yeah, the journey the journey is interesting, you know, sometimes when I explain it, feels like it makes more sense than maybe those that look, look at it from the outside. But I will take us, I'll try to do this relatively quickly because I can do this in three minutes or for five hours, right over a wine and sit down. But, I actually always take my journey back to a childhood moment. I was eight years old and my dad was construction worker and passed away on a job site. And, that sent, you know, kind of my family into kind of a chaos period or scarcity period because neither one of my parents were college graduates. My mom, my dad were running the company together and then he was gone. And so, you know, it kind of put me as an eight-year-old in this scarcity moment around money. You don't think about those things in that term when you're eight, but, know, when you get to look back on it later, it really set a lot of those feelings I have around money. So, my mom's my hero. She's run that business. This will probably be her last year. So she's right around 70 and about to wrap up. But she's continued to run that business and gave me an opportunity. And I got to watch her journey as an entrepreneur. But when I got further into my education timeline, I guess is the best way to put that, I kept seeing things like the ads you see on TV, come to your retirement planning here with us. I kind of wondered, well, like where do people like my mom go? Where do non-college educated construction workers go? And really the short answer is you don't run into a lot of financial advisors that specialize in that. I got the privilege and opportunity of actually serving in the appellate division. And while I was there, we worked on one of Bernie Madoff's cases. And that sent me further into this realm and I dove into, right, this personal finance and actually in that case, this abuse of trust, right, this abuse of people's money and, you know, really just out eventually outright threat, theft and fraud and really detrimental to not just the individuals that were financially impacted at the time, although, you know, for the government's sake, we they get a lot of bad rep actually did a phenomenal job at clawing back money and making people hold through that process. you know, I kind of dove into that and it kind of tied with the same thing that you know I was worried about for people like my mom was how do they get advice and if you can't trust somebody then like how's anybody going to go to these people and that's my mom like she doesn't trust financial advice system like it's never been for her you know she doesn't feel welcomed by it she doesn't see ads where they're like hey we we work with construction workers so she's always kind of stayed away from it. And so as I headed into my career, I made most decisions around some semblance of scale from there on out was where can I make retirement more secure for a millions of Americans like my mom. And that was my why. And so, you I taught at American College, built out that RICP designation. And that one really did hit what I hoped it to. was one of the co-creators of that with David Littell. We built it out starting kind of back in 2011, 2012. And I don't have the up-to-date numbers exactly, but I think it's nearing like 28,000 financial advisors have gone through the RICP. So when you think about every one of those has, you know, a hundred clients, 200 clients. I mean, it's literally millions of Americans get better retirement income advice due to that education program. So incredibly proud of that. I had spun up my own estate planning firm that then morphed to a retirement consulting firm during that time. And that was a kind of a scale decision too. I could only impact so many people doing trusts and wills myself off the side of my desk. It's not super scalable, really challenging. And I started working with larger companies instead. Ultimately that led me to Ron Carson, now Omani, over to Carson Group for about six years where I led. Almost every part of that business at some point in time or another outside of the sales team for new partners, investments and some operations features. But when I left, I was leading up Carson Wealth, the RIA, the coaching company, all of our planning, our services, marketing a couple of times and loved it. Got to see the whole process of a great firm that Ron had built, of scale up, bring in a private equity partner, extend the branches and continue to grow and got the opportunity to come lead the wealth teams here at Wispice and Bryn Mawr Trust. Wispice had just purchased Bryn Mawr Trust about a year before they opened up a search, but a president CEO who had led Bryn Mawr Trust kind of exited as part of the deal and then they did a nationwide search to come bring in a new leader. And I've got seven different business lines that I lead up now. Most of them being in the trust world, that's our core background where we've kind of, you know, cut our teeth and grow up. you know, WSFSS is 193 years old now. Um, so it actually predates the city of Wilmington by about a month. That's my fun fact that I've learned since being here and, Bryn Mawr Trust is kind of one of our subsidiary entities. And, uh, it's about 123 years old too. So I've been around a long time. And, I, you know, love the business. I love every aspect of this personal finance business and trust in the state and financial planning. And it goes back to people ask me like, why I do all these things. And it goes back to my mom. It's an easy one. Like I've really spent time honing that why story in my mind. And so, you know, I'm never going to wake up one day and not love my mom. And as long as I keep that front and center, like this industry is for me and I want to keep making it better and brighter for the future.
Jack Sharry: So fill us in a little bit on, if you would, on the difference between being at one of the largest RAs and Ron Carson Omani is nothing if not out there in terms of his beliefs on so many fronts and really a huge driver of our industry in so many ways. And a boutique, I'm assuming it's boutique, a boutique, private, family office, private wealth, you know, where you're doing all of it. There's lots of similarities, but I'm sure there's lots of differences. Talk about the differences between the two.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I think a couple of things where it's not as different as you might think anymore. I think that was probably one of my biggest takeaways. A lot of people are like, it's going to be so different. And I got here and I was like, it's pretty much the same in the sense of what you do for clients. That's really the part that you even mentioned at the beginning, wirehouses, insurance companies, banks, trust companies, RIAs, they're all looking more and more similar than they ever have before. I think the strategic convergence in the last eight years, think probably unbeknownst to a lot of us or unknown was like, man, like COVID and I guess time kind of at home sheltered in, people really did move forward their systems a lot more than I think everybody recognized, but it's a lot more similar. I the technology, the offering, everything's very similar. So, on that regard, I don't see a lot of difference day to day anymore. think wire houses look like RIAs, broker dealers look like RIAs, RIAs now look like wire houses. I don't know that there's much differentiation there anymore as there was 15 years ago. Culturally, I'm being in a really fast-paced growing out there firm. I would definitely, Ron is a visionary. think he's won a couple of visionary awards. And he was really always wanting to push the bounds. And we talked about next, next, next. Like what was three lines down the road that we wanted to work on? And that's exciting. It's fun. It's hard to always deliver on all those things. I think we were talking about AI five years before. think they got AI out there this year. But you come to a regional bank trust and wealth division. It's a little different on that regard. I'd say we're definitely more of a fast follower in hopes versus a leader from technology, from some of those things. I think even the clientele, net worth and partners that we work with. So we work with hundreds, if not thousands of RIAs and wealth firms across the country to deliver those trust services. And typically people aren't coming to a trust company saying, how can you get further out on the risk spectrum? It's all about protecting wealth and generational wealth. So they want stuff that works, that's solid. We partnered with SCIs, SWP, we moved all of our trust accounting there since I've been here last fall. And it's a great thing, right? It's a great company, but it brings that security and structure, great systems and technology. And that's what people are really looking for. I do think one of the things that I've also taken out of being in all these different places is ultimately great companies come down to great people. Like we talked about Ron Elamani. I think Roger, who's our CEO here at WSFS brought me in to lead the wealth team. So I've really been, you know, kind of granted a lot of leeway and authority to run these teams, come back to the board and present. But that's what I see, just keep trying to upgrade talent in your teams. And I think that's what all great leaders do. You try to find great people to surround yourself with. You're only as good as they are. And Ron always knew that. Roger knows that. So I think that's what inspires me in this industry is being around people that realize that, that the talent around them is what's so important.
Jack Sharry: So one of the things that as I listen to this and I'm fascinated by the fact that with all the different types of firms that we work with presently, I'm talking about our company, SEI LifeYield, I'm seeing this convergence. Some of the big banks that names, know, where they're trying to figure out how to put their trust services and their wealth management business together. And they're trying to figure it out. And one of the things that strikes me, no small undertaking by the way, they're all trying to figure out how to provide a more comprehensive view, more comprehensive level of advice, all understandable. That's what people have. They have a bunch of stuff. It's spread all over the place, frankly, because it has been built brick by brick, moment by moment. There's no grand plan in place. was just a bunch of stuff over time that you bought a mutual fund here and an ETF there and a direct indexing product in the other place. And pretty soon you got a bunch of stuff and there's no rhyme or reason to it. I'm curious to know if technology and sort of the product types that we all are familiar with increasingly so are available anywhere, that technology is an equalizer, arguably. It comes down to culture and that consultative approach that we all talk about, not always able to deliver, I dare say, but it's all there. Talk a little bit about that, because you've seen it from a variety of sides. How does that happen as a leader? How do you make that happen? So tell me about that.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I mean, products, to your point, like this industry was built around products and you had a lot of places, you know, they had access to products and those are differentiated or they built products and those grew. would say, technology, regulatory, the custodians, even the IMOs, insurance world, you know, there's less and less captive products than really there's ever been before. To me, most people can have access to the technology or products that you need. There's actually very little proprietary technology that I think is a needle mover anymore either. mean, 15 years ago when I used to do consulting with firms, a lot of people had proprietary CRFs and investment management. And that's all gone. Like it kind of went by the wayside. Not entirely, but for the most part. So tech or they wish they could get away from it. Yeah, they're on.
Jack Sharry: Yep. Or they wish they could. Yes.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, it's funny. I met with a company recently. They're on, they're right in the middle of an eight year process to move away from a proprietary technology to an outside vendor. Eight years. That sounds awful. Glad it's not me, but it's, but it's, it's real, but that's all changed. So products everywhere. So to me, I do think one of the things that you brought up though, it's the hard decisions about what is the service offering that you're going to deliver.
Jamie Hopkins: And that is a really hard thing because I see firms that want to be everything to everybody. And realistically, you usually cannot be that. So that holds you back from some of the growth and scale that you might be looking for. In other cases, right, it's cobbled together. seven different things. You acquired a bunch of things and there's probably hard decisions in there that there's some, you know, it's not tech debt, like true debt and acquisition debt that you probably don't really want to operate in that forum anymore, but it's a really hard decision. And to rock the boat and take a step back as a leadership team, financially by starting one.
Jack Sharry: And by the way, Jamie, and spend a lot of money doing it.
Jamie Hopkins: A lot of money, yeah. And that's scary. And I think a lot of times people choose not to make those decisions. You just keep it moving forward and you try to unwind it slowly over time. It takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of board support and financial support to be able to make those tough calls sometimes. But you're seeing some of that being forced on companies out there. We don't have to name names, but you're seeing some of that shuttering of services here. And they're going to need to if they want to pull all this together. I also think we have a complex regulatory system, which anybody listening to this knows. When you look at a lot of the large firms, we ended up with FINRA, broker dealer offerings. We ended up with RIA offerings, maybe an OCC offering for the bank wealth businesses, perhaps a state or national trust charter. And when you get all of those and insurance, right, again, a whole nother world, if you get all of those in kind of one company, what you see is it's super hard to coordinate. And I've been with a hybrid firm where the products that one advisor had access to via BD was different than the RIA only one. And that becomes really complicated. So I do think firms long-term need to get everybody on the same page. And that is, again, hard decisions. But I really don't think these segmented businesses are the best way for most firms to run. And so, you know, I've seen that some of the largest firms, they're pulling things down. I've seen some of the strategy decks. How do we get people from left to right onto one system long term? But it is not easy. I do believe that AI and tech is going to continue to level this from bringing services that used to not be available across the board to everybody. So I think, you know, tax planning, I think investments and insurance have been the first three kind of dominoes to tip over that really today there's not a financial advisor that really if they really want access to any one of those three things can't get it regardless of what system they sit in. think trust services, estate planning, alternatives, those are kind of three of the next big ones that are right at that tipping point over the next couple of years. The capital and you know I think SEI has an alt platform now and you're seeing those grow. They're expanding. But if you look at the total percentage of advisory clients using them, it's still very low. And so that's going to grow, it's going to expand. think trust services and digital estate planning, technology companies, you've seen a growth in them, Trust and Will, Encore, Wealth.com, which I'm an investor and on the advisory board. I'm a big believer that those are, you know, in the next year or two, we're going to see this prolific scale in the offering of that out to the market too.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, actually, I hadn't thought about that, just the few firms we work with presently that this, just the technology around trust services and estate planning has just really accelerated the move. And it's all in the wake of the fact that I think this past year and the year before, the two of the biggest years ever for people turning 65. So if you're going to turn 65, they call Peak 65 is the, I think the moniker that was someone gave it somewhere. Is you… these people, and I put myself in this category, you've got a bunch of stuff, it's all over the place, you haven't really done sufficient financial planning, really, I it seems so rare these days that, I should say these days, it's so rare that people do an actual financial plan and mean it, is what I meant to say. And then I know next up for us, we've done that recently, and then next up for us is the estate plan. And interesting, the people we chose to work with couldn't help but want to talk about the investments. And to be honest with you, I'm not that interested as long as it's diversified, as long as it's low cost, all the stuff that I know better because I've been around a while. But it's interesting that they want to talk about the investments. That's sort of the habit. it seems to me we're in a transition. I'd love for you to comment on all that.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I think the behavior modification, most advisors, and this is not a dig, I think sometimes people use this as a dig, but most advisors are still asset gatherers and investment professionals at their core. And that is not a negative. when I think sometimes I hear people say that and that's supposed to be a dig, I'm like, that's not a dig. It's how we mostly get paid in this industry. It's the majority of people's wealth. And in all honesty, most clients aren't as sophisticated as you. And actually what they need help with is even just feeling comfortable that somebody else is managing their money. So a disproportional amount of time gets spent there. But we do need to get better at estate planning, At using trusts, at having all the legal documents in place. I mean, when you talk to clients and people, you know, you probably know this from family, like how messy everybody's end of life planning is. It's pretty bad. Like, I mean, it's we rated it on scale of one to 10. It's got to be like a one and a half out of 10 overall, right? Like it is not great. We're constantly right assets are missing. People don't know where things are. The will hasn't been updated in 15 to 20 years. And like it's over and over and over again. And then I see all these digital assets out there and they're growing in value. We did a survey here this last fall that average American now says they have $191,000 in digital value from emails and online accounts. And that's tremendous. And there's basically zero planning occurring there. Like advisors don't really talk about it. Even attorneys are five, six years behind where they need to be on this topic. And we will get there, but we're going to get there after millions of people pass away with really messy estates and improper transfer of assets and lost assets. It's not gonna be done because we're, technology's getting this and we're gonna get there because we have so many failures around this one, we're gonna get forced into it.
Jack Sharry: So tell me about, I don't want to call it a side hustle that diminishes it, but I do know that you have a penchant, I share this penchant with you, of loving to teach the industry what you know. And so you've done a fair amount of, well, you've been a professor at, I think it was Creighton and then at the American College and maybe one other. You may still be, can't recall, but I was looking through your resume. And you also set up the FinServ so talk about your commitment back to the industry. Clearly you've done a lot of that stuff, continue to a lot of that stuff. Fill us in on why you do it and how you find it satisfying.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, Jack, I love this industry and every day I wake up thinking about it. I dream about it. I don't know if that's healthy or not, but I do. And, and to me, the give back part of it, I learned just as much. So it's, it's always sharpening myself. And yeah, I started FinServ foundation. Um, for those who don't know it's a 501c3 organization. It's entirely volunteer organization. We have about 280 industry volunteers all across the country, different firms that give back time. And we work with about 200, what we call fellows. So they're college students that are looking to enter this industry every year. And we give them a two year fellowship program. That fellowship includes 24 months, right? Two years of group-based like practice management coaching. So how to be more successful in this industry while you're coming in. Part of that came about because I was running a coaching company at the time at Carson and I wasn't seeing this kind of entry level coaching and training occurring out there. And so I said, hey, we could do this. And so I built out that program. The second part was mentorship. So we have amazing mentors. We just finished up just a couple of weeks ago, wrapping up this spring cohorts mentorship matching. About 100 students in the fellowship we matched with industry mentors all over. And that's six months. We structure it so the mentor and mentees work together for that time. And that's phenomenal. A lot of us, you, me, Jack, sometimes we say, well, we got lucky. Like, we found a great mentor. But I don't want everybody just to get lucky. Like, I want to provide these opportunities. And then the third thing that really moves the needle was access. If you look at the literature around access, access is more like access to your family and natural network. I can't change that. Like you're born who you are. But what we decided to do was bring these student fellows out to industry conferences. So we cover the cost of getting them out to about seven different industry conferences a year. So we get their flight, their hotel, the registration, bring about 15 to 25 out every year. So we'll be down at Wealth Management Edge next, at FSI, at Invest in Women. Usually we do fearless Schwab Impact sometimes too. And this is to get these young people into this industry so they see people like them, that they want to be part of it and open that up. And the whole goal of this is to make our industry more successful by keeping these young people in it. If you look at the Cerulli data, right, about 80 % of people drop out, right, by the five-year mark. You look at that McKinsey report, although I don't think the numbers is bad, right, but they're, you know, they're talking about, you know, what, 250,000 advisor shortage or what, 125,000 advisor shortage by 2035. I don't think it's that big in all fairness. I really don't, but we do have an advisor shortage eventually in this industry. And, you know, we've got more CFPs over what, over 80 than under 30, like all those things need to change, but we need to keep people in this business. We're going to change that.
Jack Sharry: So I really enjoyed this conversation. Unfortunately, since we try to keep these to a half an hour, we're to have to bring it to a close. So I got a couple of questions as we look to say farewell for now. Because we've covered the waterfront here. I'm not even sure how to summarize it because it's been all over the place. Any key takeaways along the lines of where do you see the industry going? Any advice for your colleagues around the industry? It's sort of as a send off. Anything you'd like to share with our audience?
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I'll give people three things. I'll try to summarize it there. think the first one is in a world where wealth management services look more similar everywhere, I think it's your people for the next decade that are going to distinguish you from anywhere else. So invest in your people, take care of them, hire great people, find great people, keep them. I think the second one is think about those ancillary services that your firm needs to either shut or down, get rid of because they're a huge time drain that you're doing internally proprietary tech systems and investment products. Can you partner out there? And what are the things you need to add, estate planning services, trust services, alternatives, and get moving on those sooner rather than later. There's gonna be no benefit to waiting longer to hop on any of those, right? You're just pushing something you need to do further down. And I think the third one is find ways to give back if you care about this industry. Like it doesn't have to be FinServ, right. Join a board, go to your local university that has CFP program, like they need help too. But find a way to give back. I do run into a lot of people in this industry. And what I see is they give back to other things, right? They give back to the art museums and other great initiatives out there. But I'm like, look, there's a lot of space to give back in our industry. We have challenges. If this industry helped you be successful, like find ways to donate money, donate time, get your firm involved. That's the only way to keep this thing moving. And that has to be a group effort. No one person, no one organization is going to be able to solve that.
Jack Sharry: Great, great. I've enjoyed this very much, Jamie. I've followed you for years. This is our first extended conversation, I think, but great to have you aboard and great to be talking about all this good and important stuff. So one last question, always my favorite for our podcast. What do you do outside of work that people might find interesting or surprising that you're particularly passionate about, excited about? Fill us in.
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, I'm going to give kind of a lab response to this one today, but my kids are the whole world right now. And I texted a friend that I just turned 40 recently and my friend said, what's the feedback? said, I just want to be present around the kids. Like that's number one. But I'll throw two other fun. I was a runner. I ran for 3004 consecutive days in a row and I also play bass guitar. So I'm okay at that. Yeah.
Jack Sharry: So let's back up to that three, what was that? What'd you say, you…?
Jamie Hopkins: Yeah, that's a whole other show. I ran for 3004 consecutive days outside. So it's, you know, yeah, a lot of running. But yeah, I did, 15 marathons, Boston, some Iron Mans, a bunch of stuff and yeah. It’s a whole whole side of things, but that goes back to that, you know, when do you sleep? I, you know, I've got a drive and that was part of it. The funny thing that the reason I did that was to have some way to showcase, you know, everybody says, I'll come in and interview and outwork you. And I was like, I'm going to show it in some other way that's measurable, that was the big driver of that. Yeah.
Jack Sharry: Love it. Love it. Jamie, this has been great. I really have enjoyed our conversation. Turning to our audience, if you've enjoyed our conversation, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we're doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We're available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content for many folks around the industry. Jamie, thanks again. It's been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed it.
Jamie Hopkins: Thank you.
Host: Thanks for listening to this episode of WealthTech on Deck, our ongoing conversation about improving financial outcomes for all. This podcast is brought to you by SEI and produced by Turncast. Subscribe to future episodes in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can connect with our host, Jack Sharry, on LinkedIn. For more information about our perspective on the future of financial advice, visit our website at wealthtechondeck.com
