About 1,000 financial advisors descended upon The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla., this week for the fourth annual Wealth Management EDGE conference.
The three-day event kicked off on Tuesday with workshop panels focused on investing strategies, allocating to alternative investments, artificial intelligence and a focus on high net worth clients.
WealthManagement.com’s staff is leading panels throughout the conference as well as covering the event. Check back to this space often as it’s updated with highlights from the opening workshops.
AI Lead Generation: The Future of New Business Development
(L-R): Derek Notman, founder and CEO of Couplr, Oleg Tishkevich, CEO of Invent.us, Victoria Toli, COO of FINNY.AI, and Tim Welsh, founder and CEO of Nexus Strategy
“I’m happily married, but I’ve signed up to all the AI dating sites for research,” said Derek Notman, founder and CEO of Couplr, to break the ice at the AI Assembly workshop to much laughter.
Asked about the raw power of AI, Victoria Toli, COO of FINNY.AI illustrated what some of her company’s technology can do.
“AI can scrape billions and billions of pieces of data, datapoints, demographics, professional, money in motion events and then with prioritization …predict a prospect’s probability of converting and provide only those that the advisors want,” she said.
“Pretty much anybody over the age of 18 is in the database,” some 300 million people, she said, when asked about how the AI works in harvesting the data from publicly available databases.
“Perhaps the creepiest Intent Signals, for identifying the ideal prospect persona … people who Googled 401(k) rollovers,” she said, referring to but one example of the online search data ingested by FINNY.
“Is anyone else scared?” asked moderator Tim Weslh, founder and CEO of Nexus Strategy.
—Davis Janowski
‘Start Early, Even if it Is Small Steps’
(L-R): Marwa Zakharia, CEO of MZ Global Consulting, Andrew Sternlight, president and CIO of LinePoint Partners & Co. and Tal Schwartz, founder and CEO of Ai Funds.
In the session titled, “From Data to Alpha: AI’s Role in the Investment Process,” hosted by Marwa Zakharia, CEO of MZ Global Consulting, the panel explored the possibilities and pitfalls of AI usage in a core aspect of the advice business. In doing so, they used other use cases like content generation to illustrate the mindset advisors should adopt when considering their own use of AI.
“Claude by Anthropic is the best for writing, you can upload all of your writing up there and it is best at generating a similar style,” said Tal Schwartz, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Ai Funds. He said he had used all the popular LLMs.
“You can, in turn, say I’m a registered advisor and ask it to keep your content compliant,” he said. “However, at this point it can still hallucinate, it wants to please you, so you still have to run it by your compliance person in case it missed something.”
Farther into the discussion, Zakharia asked both panelists to tell the packed room in Boca Raton about other specific use cases.
One area Schwartz discussed was helping to help identify and, perhaps, remove some of the cognitive biases advisors might unknowingly have in how they build portfolios.
“You say AI is biased, we have taught it to be biased,” he said. “We haven’t had something like COVID in 100 years, yet the AI saw patterns.”
BAILA, Ai Fund’s proprietary AI, believes we are 100% certain that we are in a bullish market for the next one to four weeks, he said.
“There is a radical opportunity for risk here,” said Andrew Sternlight, president and CIO of LinePoint Partners & Co.
In wrapping up the session, he said he thought AI has unbelievable potential as it relates to the investment process.
It could provide stability or promote instability, he said, depending on how it is applied.
Regardless, he said, “Start early, even if it is small steps,” to become familiar with applying the technology in the investment process.
—Davis Janowski
The Evolution of Annuities
(L-R): Jacqueline Reeves of Bryn Mawr Trust, Bonnie Treichel of Endeavour Retirement, and Jeffrey Clark of Jackson
During the Investing Playbook opening session workshops at Wealth Management EDGE, panelists tackled some of the most pressing issues in the retirement income space.
Bonnie Treichel, chief solutions officer at Endeavour Retirement, said there are still impediments to the adoption of in-plan annuities. The biggest being the portability aspect. She pointed to a recent survey conducted with Broadridge that found advisors would not recommend in-plan solutions unless available on four recordkeeping platforms.
Jeffrey Clark, director of advanced planning at Jackson, said the product evolution around in-plan annuities was impressive. He pointed to asset managers including T. Rowe Price, BlackRock and Alliance Bernstein, who are coming out with what they call next-generation target-date funds. These are basically hybrid pension/profit-sharing plans that incorporate annuities.
Treichel also addressed the issue of cryptocurrencies in 401(k)s, pointing to the Department of Labor’s recent action to rescind a 2022 order discouraging the use of crypto in retirement plans. The big takeaway, she said, is that the DOL is not encouraging you to use crypto, nor is it discouraging. Rather, folks should follow a prudent process and the duty of care when choosing whether to use them.
—Diana Britton
The Need for Age-Appropriate Advisors
WealthManagement.com Senior Reporter Alex Ortolani (left) and Craig Robson, founding principal and managing director of Regent Peak Wealth Advisors
Craig Robson, founding principal and managing director of Regent Peak Wealth Advisors, gave tips and told stories about how his RIA has served the modern UHNW family.
Robson, who started his firm in 2019 after 25 years running a UHNW practice at Merrill Lynch, said it’s important to get client’s families together to discuss financial and estate planning. Setting these meetings up, however, are not always easy.
“It can be tough,” he said. “I’ve had clients cry when discussing these areas that they’ve never spoken about with their family before.”
Robson also said that, when considering how to serve that next generation of client, it’s a benefit to have younger team members that they can work with, as he does on his team of 11.
“When you are trying to focus on the kids of your clients and the next generation, I think it’s really helpful if you have some people on your team that are similar to their ages,” Robson said. “A lot of times you find out that the kids of your clients don’t want to work with their mom and dads’ advisor, but they would love to work with someone on the team who is similar in age, demographics and interests.”
—Alex Ortolani
Be Iron Man
Jump AI CEO Parker Ence
Parker Ence, who has been a tech CEO four times, talked about the state of AI and advisor-focused AI, including his own company, Jump, which was founded in mid-2022 and launched into the market in 2024.It won last year’s EDGE Demo competition, had five employees early on and 100 now, and now serves 10,000 advisors.
As the host, Focal co-founder and CEO John Connell said during his brief intro during the EDGE AI Assembly afternoon workshop: “You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to be AI aware.”
Ence, followed up in his presentation on how to think about AI, noting: “If you are not already implementing this [AI] you are already falling behind.” “The way we look at this: there is a lot more fun to be had building that Iron Man suit for advisors,” rather than repeating the development of some of the simpler use cases of the past.
Classification and prediction—based on what it is already familiar with—are what AI is best at right now. Generative AI is much harder.
—Davis Janowski
Tax Planning Takes Time
(L-R): Philip Herzberg, Orian Williams and Drew Superstein
In a session addressing tax strategies for upper high-net-worth families, panelists discussed the advantages of tax loss harvesting. Drew Superstein, partner, Superstein PA, Certified Public Accountants, described one client who used the strategy to offset capital gains from a home sale of about $1.5 million.“
They worked with their financial advisor, and they were able to offset $1.5 million in losses to offset the gain, so they had almost zero taxable income,” said accountant Superstein. “They used the tax savings to put a little more money into that home.”
Such setups, however, take time, with Superstein noting that the strategy took about three years of planning.
—Alex Ortolani