Jack Sharry: Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us for this week's edition of WealthTech on Deck. Today we're going to talk with someone who is a classic giddy up startup, make something out of nothing but a good idea and a lot of hard work entrepreneur. His name is Parker Ence. Say hello to Parker. Parker is the founder and CEO of Jump Advisor AI. Parker and his team bring the AI enhanced client meeting cycle to financial advisors in a big way. We're gonna learn more about all that. They tell me that they help RIA and broker dealer teams cut client meeting admin time by 90% and elevate the client and advisor experience by putting notes, CRM updates, tasks, and compliance logs on AI autopilot. Jump is easy to set up, 100% customizable, secure and compliant, and integrates closely with the advisor tech stack. It's like hiring a meeting assistant, and I'm told it's faster than dictating, and it's all in one spot for the advisor. So Parker is an entrepreneur operator, Stanford MBA with 12 years of CEO co-founder experience with Advisor Tech, Data DAS, AI, SaaS, and InsurTech, so we'll talk about some of that. And then there's a lot of buzz around AI, of course. Parker not only understands the buzz, but he understands what AI is supposed to do and gets it done. So Parker, welcome to WealthTech on Deck. It's great to have you here.
Parker Ence: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Jack. Great to be here.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, so Parker, let's start with you explaining what Jump Advisor AI is all about. What do you do? Who do you do it for? How do those folks, whoever they may be, I know who they are, but how do they benefit? And what are you hearing from your users? Tell us.
Parker Ence: Yeah. Well, it's great to be here. And I think what we're probably best known for at Jump is our AI meeting assistant that's made for advisors. And so the story there is we were working with an RIA firm and this RIA owner said to me, note taking is the bane of my existence. I love working with clients. I love doing investments. He actually happened to be the chief investment officer of the RIA. So he really loves investments. He said, but what I don't like is typing things into my CRM. I don't like having to write up a long compliance note to document what we did. There's all this information that I'm always nervous I'm going to miss something important that I need for later. And even when I'm preparing for the meeting, I've got to go kind of dig through all my old notes and all the data that I have about the client in order to be adequately prepared to show up ready to go. And this was right before ChatGPT kind of hit peak awareness for all of us. And so he said, I've seen some of these AI things, can you AI away some of this administrative work that I have to do so I can spend more time with clients, do more with clients? And so my co-founders and I, we had a lot of experience in fintech and other related things. And at the time we were building an AI assistant that would basically take the conversation data from any meeting and make it really easy to update your CRM. And so we quickly realized that there's a great opportunity here to do a lot more than that. And so Jump today, our most popular product is that AI meeting assistant, which essentially just uses cutting edge generative AI to do meeting prep, to do all the follow-up and documentation after the meeting that you'd want to see. The average advisor is going to save at least an hour per working day just with that. And so that's kind of what we're best known for. We've got almost 12,000 advisors that are using that on a regular basis. And then maybe what's not as well known is there's also all this data that is now available around, you know, in order for Jump to work, there's some conversation between the advisor and the client. There's a lot of rich data in that conversation. And so how do we use that data to help advisors be more successful? So that's part of our insights program. And then wrapped in all of that, of course, compliance. How do we enable advisors to use AI, but do it in a safe way that the chief compliance officer can say yes to. So that's sort of Jump today. And we're a team of about 120 remote teams scattered around, which is crazy for me because this time last year we were seven people. So it's been, it's been kind of wild ride, but a lot of fun. And we've been able to partner with a lot of amazing advisor teams from solo advisors all the way up to the largest broker dealers and RIAs in the country. So it's been really fun to see, hey, there's been so much talk about AI, you know, for decades. And this is something that really is driving real advice.
Jack Sharry: That's terrific. And I think I've seen where you did a deal with Cetera and you did a deal with Osaic. Tell us about that enterprise level stuff. That's pretty impressive.
Parker Ence: Yeah, so we're currently working with LPL. We've been working with them since last fall, which has been a lot of fun. We've been great partners. We just went live with Osaic and Satera in the last few months and also a lot of fun. And I think it's been really great to partner with these enterprise level technology and product teams that are really have developed a lot of passion around how do we get safe and practical AI tools into the hands of our advisors and help them reclaim hours of the day, help them deliver a better client experience. And it's been really fun to see advisors just getting excited about the impact there. And so, yeah, those have all been successful launches. And then on the RIA side, we've also had the opportunity to work with some great large RIAs, national RIAs, and equally just a ton of fun and fun to roll these things out because it's just, it's instant gratification, right? The minute you turn it on, it's like, wow, I just got back a bunch of time. I don't have to do a lot of things that I don't like doing immediately. And so it's kind of, it's fun for that reason.
Jack Sharry: That's good for you. Congratulations. That's, having lived the startup life, ours was a lot longer of a slog, but so let's talk about that for a little bit, if you would. So take a step back. And if you'd take us through your startup journey and how you wound up getting through it, all of it over time, I gather there have been earlier startups and talk about what it takes to make one of these things work. Talk about your career journey around startup land.
Parker Ence : Yeah. So I first became aware of the concept of what an entrepreneur was my junior year in high school, my dad actually gave me a book that was kind of a biography of a founder. And it was kind of the first time I realized like, oh, you can just create a business out of thin air. And that sounds like really fun. And so that summer I went and started my own lawn mowing business and was kind of my first real endeavor there. Then later on I started my own guitar studio. So I played guitar a lot in middle school and high school and was a guitar teacher. That was actually kind of what I did through college to help pay for college, which was a ton of fun. And then coming out of college, so my current co-founder here at Jump, his name is Tim Chaves. I joined his company, which was a software development company. So that was really the first time. And we were doing custom, you know, at the time, the cool thing was iPad apps and SEO websites. So those were the two things we did the most. And that was a ton of fun. And then Tim actually went off to business school. And so we sold that company in the smallest exit of all time, but it was good lunch money. And it was fun to go kind of the full cycle starting, running it, and selling it all in a pretty short period of time. And then I ended up kind of stumbling into being the CEO of an insurtech company. And it was around dental insurance. And there's a lot of kind of things about dental insurance that are lame. So we're trying to do kind of a better version of that. And so that was kind of interesting. And we had to build a bunch of software and we built our own claims management and we were working with dentists. And so that was, that was for about five years. And then I went back to get an MBA. went to Stanford business school, which was really fun because you're in Silicon Valley. You're just around this amazing ecosystem of, of, you know, all kinds of founders that are doing amazing things. As part of that, I worked at Google cloud briefly. And the team that I was on was building enterprise AI models. And the use case was, imagine you're a massive company. You've got tens of thousands of job openings and you're trying to figure out how to sift through the resumes to find the best match. And so the team that I was on had created these pre-trained AI models to match resumes to job openings to help people find jobs faster. So that was the first time that I really saw the power of AI and kind of big data. And that was a lot of fun. And Google was a little bit too big for me. So I decided to go small and then I was the CEO of a big data company. So we had billions of rows of data that we collected from all kinds of different places. And we would clean it up and use AI and then package that data up for like hedge fund managers and other folks that were trying to make decisions. So that was all kind of leading up to, before Jump. And I ran that company for about four years and then they got acquired by another company. And then Tim and I, you know, all the way back to when we had our software development agency, we always wanted to work again, together. And so the first idea that we had was horrible. It was basically a secondary market to provide early liquidity for structured notes. So we were going to go to advisors and say, hey, you've got clients that are doing these structured notes and they might want to get out of them early. And so we're going to have this marketplace to provide liquidity. And we like flew out to a conference that was all about structured notes and everything. And everyone was really nice to us and patting us on the head and saying, what a great idea, you know? And then we actually went and tried to kind of like sell this idea to an advisor. And, and he was like, guys, this is dumb. Nobody wants this. No one's going to care about this, which ended up being true. So, we then were kind of back to the drawing board and we said, well, let's solve our own problem. That's kind of conventional wisdom when you're starting a company is like, find a problem and solve it, that's your own problem. And we just, we hated typing notes into Salesforce. And so we're trying to build an AI assistant that would help us do that. And my brother, my brother is a financial advisor, has been his whole career. I've got other family and friends that are advisors. And so that mixed with whole founders experience with fintech, we kind of stumbled into the story I told you earlier with my friend in RIA and, you know, we were able to kind of get in there. And I still remember the first sale that was closed was with a firm that had two advisors and we explained, here's kind of what we can do for you. And he's like, great, sign me up. Like, how do I get it? Kind of that magical moment where we realized, we're really onto something and we can have really positive impact. And it's been a lot of fun since then. So that was maybe a little bit longer than you wanted, Jack, but that was the, that's the full backstory. I've never given that much.
Jack Sharry: I got it. I love it. So, fill us in back to the company as we know it today. Where are you now? It sounds like you've got some good momentum. Those are three big names, Cetera, Osaic, and LPL. At the enterprise level, I imagine there's probably some others you might be talking to. I'm guessing. I don't know. And then, where you now? Where are you headed near term? And where do you see things going over time?
Parker Ence: Yeah. So if you think about the product, we've got these three main pillars. The first is the core assistant. So think of this as a co-pilot for advisors. It does a lot of the things that we've already talked about. The second is that insights engine. So how do we, how do we do scorecards for best practices, right? Imagine having a really smart coach that's giving you feedback after your meeting to help you be successful. Really, really helpful for junior advisors that are still kind of coming up. Really helpful for trying to get good habits. Like, hey, we want to, we want to ask for referrals, but are we even doing it? So it's the way to kind of hold the team accountable to that. That's the insights piece. And that includes kind of a data mining engine for enterprises where they can start to learn from what's going on across the firm and make smarter decisions about what kinds of products and services should we be offering, et cetera. And then the last piece, which is the newest piece for us, something that's really trendy in AI is this concept of an AI agent. So an AI agent, you can imagine it's like hiring somebody to do some kind of task or job or set of processes for you on essentially autopilot. And so we're going to launch a library of agents that can do all kinds of things for the advisor. And it's kind of an easy button for all kinds of different tasks. That could be setting up accounts. It could be client intake work. It could be sending out contracts. It's all that administrative stuff that needs to get done, but it's not client facing. And so those are the three areas that we're focused on at the moment.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha. And much longer term, what do you see this AI thing is its infancy right now, what's your worldview on where all this leads?
Parker Ence: Yeah. So I think there's a couple of different vectors there. I do think that it's very clear now that generative AI is going to change everything in the same way that mobile phones and the internet and airplanes and cars, you know, pick your kind of incredibly disruptive technology. It's going to change everything. And so the question then comes to, does that mean that AI powered technology is going to replace advisors and other elements of financial services? Or is it going to be a way to get leverage and augment what's already happening? And Jump is building towards that second. So our goal is really to build that Ironman suit for the advisor so that they can do more with the time that they have. And we've seen examples where advisor teams are able to deliver 20 to 50% more deliverables to their clients because of that effectiveness and efficiency. And so think that's probably the most exciting piece is how do we build that leverage in for the advisor so they can just spend way more time doing what they love, way more time serving clients. They can build their book of business much faster. So I think that's very exciting, but I would say, and we'll often say this when we present at conferences and things. Don't worry so much about getting replaced by AI, worry about getting out competed by other advisors that are adopting AI faster. It's one those, please don't wait moments to get into it. You know, pick, pick things that are compliant and safe, but don't wait. I think it's really important.
Jack Sharry: Cool. So two part question. Anything we haven't covered, you want to make sure our audience might want to understand. And any key takeaways from our discussion today you'd like to leave with our audience.
Parker Ence: Yeah, I would just say, you know, we've got a team of 120 people that are really excited and kind of love working with our customers and everything that is inside the Jump product is there because an advisor requested it. And so we love partnering with RIAs, with broker dealers, with solo advisors, with really any of our customers to co-create the future. And that's been, I think, an important element of our success is to co-create, what should these workflows look like? What should the future look like? It's been really fun to partner in that way. I think, for me, I would just reiterate, don't wait. You know, I think the most popular AI use case so far for advisors has been it's some kind of compliant version of... It's like a general chatbot, it could be OpenAI, could be Copilot, Plexity, Quad, Grok, there's a lot of options now. Whatever the compliance team has approved, that's the most popular. If you go out and look at the WealthTech surveys, Kitces, T3, you're gonna see that as the most adopted. And it's funny because in T3, for example, it wasn't even on the survey in 2024. So it's gone from not being on the survey to, it's over 45% adoption, right? Which is pretty wild. And then after that, what we're seeing is are looking at meeting efficiency next low-hanging fruit because we're not quite ready to go trade and rebalance and move money around automatically with AI. That feels a little bit too soon, a little too scary, but hey, getting some effectiveness and efficiency and AI-driven insights on client interactions. That's a great step too. So I would just say, hey, try it out and whether or not you use Jump, this is a category that's getting around, for everybody. So don't wait.
Jack Sharry: Cool. So before we call it a day for today, thanks, this has been very interesting. My favorite question we always close with is what do you do outside of work that you have a great passion for or are excited about that people might find to be interesting or surprising?
Parker Ence: Yeah, so I still try to play a little bit of guitar. I'm a little rustier than I was back in my kind of guitar teaching days, but it's a great stress reliever to go, you know, wail a little bit. So I like doing that. I've got five kids. So most of my free time goes to doing fun stuff with the kids. We like to go hiking. We live in Utah, so a lot of outdoors stuff, skiing and mountain biking and hiking. And, you know, as of this moment in July 2025 enjoying the summer, right? Just getting outside and it's a great time.
Jack Sharry: Cool, cool, good for you. So Parker, thanks for this discussion. I've learned a lot. You have a great way of spinning a yarn and it sounds like it's mostly true. Just joking there. For our audience, thanks for tuning in. If you've enjoyed our podcast, 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 from many folks around the industry. Parker, thanks a lot. This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed it.
Parker Ence: Thanks for having me, Jack. Great to see you.
Jack Sharry: Good to see you.
