Vanguard's $4.6 billion acquisition of Altruist made headlines across the financial industry, but the bigger story is what it says about the future of financial advice.
In this episode of Boldin Your Money, Steve Chen is joined by Ed Williams, Lead Financial Advisor at Boldin, and Michael Byram, Boldin's CTO and former engineering leader at Altruist, to discuss why this acquisition matters and how technology is reshaping the way people plan for retirement and manage their money.
Together, they explore why traditional financial advice can't scale to meet growing demand, how AI is making both advisors and consumers more capable, and why the next generation of financial planning will be more personalized, proactive, and accessible than ever before.
The conversation also covers the evolving role of financial advisors, flat-fee advice versus traditional AUM models, AI agents, automation, and why the future isn't about replacing human advisors — it's about combining human expertise with powerful technology to help more people make better financial decisions.
Whether you're working with an advisor, managing your own finances, or simply curious about where AI is taking personal finance, this episode offers an inside look at where the industry is headed.
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Transcription
Steve Chen
Hey folks, welcome back to Boldin Your Money. Last week Vanguard announced it's acquiring Altrust for 4.6 billion dollars, which is big news in the wealth management space and wealth tech world. But the part that got our attention, it wasn't the deal itself, it was the problem Vanguard says it's trying to solve, which is They believe and we agree that far more people could benefit from financial advice than the industry has the capacity to serve. And so that's a problem we're all trying to solve. So today we've got two people to dive in. So one is Michael Byrum, Boldin CTO. He's helped build the technology at Altraris before he came over here. So he's got a take. And then Ed Williams, who's a lead financial advisor here at Boldin, who's worked at both Vanguard and places like Facet and TIA. And so he has a take on where advice is going in the future. So with that, Michael and Ed, welcome to our show.
Ed
Hi, thanks for having us.
Steve Chen
Yeah, great to see you guys. So let's just start with the news. So Michael, you know, as a altruist alum, would love to take get your take on, you know, what you think motivated this deal and what you think it means for the future of advice.
Michael Byram
Yeah, you know, I I've thought a lot about it since it it was announced. you know, I really think that the way that advice is going is it it's getting closer and closer to the people being served. Traditionally advice has been, hey, you know, you've got two, three, four, five million dollars and now all of a sudden an advisor has time for you and they can talk to you. And Ultra's really tried to make advice more accessible, make advice easier to to come by. And Vanguard's potentially seeing the writing on the wall, I think there's a number of things that have happened with Schwab and Fidelity and different organizations kind of started to draw lines in the sand and shown they don't really care about the advisory side of the business or the consumers at the end of the the tunnel. They just kind of care about the money behind it. And Vanguard saw an opportunity and I know they were previously an investor, an altruist, and so they were they were really close to what they were doing. And I think they capitalized on that.
Steve Chen
Sure. It does feel like Vanguard's a good buyer. I mean, I applaud Vanguard and Jack Bogle for, you know, they for really leading the way in terms of democratizing investing. So they aligned, you know, the the investor as an owner of Vanguard. And through that alignment, they had a big incentive to drive the cost of investing down, right? They drove fees down, and that changed investing for last few generations of investors. We had both the index fund and just much lower fees. It used to be, I think back in the day, like Fidelity Magellan, you you could have a hundred basis points just to own the fund. And now it's like, I think for some of these Vanguard ETFs, it's like 15 basis points or can can be even lower. you know, Ed, as someone who's worked inside of Vanguard and has kind of seen the progression of kind of investing in getting democratized, what's your take on Whether or not we'll see advice get democratized.
Ed
Well, I mean, you have a couple of things going on here. Most importantly is is Vanguard sees the rating on the wall, as you say, is that we can't possibly, as financial professionals, serve everyone, right? Vanguard has a has a group of financial planners they call Vanguard personal advisor services, and they're trying to get a lot of their mutual fund customers signed up for personal advisor services and that they charge, you know, zero point three percent on that. But even with their team of advisors, they can't come close. To serving everyone that needs to serve. So that's why they wanted to go into, you know, getting into working with more individual advisors, meeting more clients where they are when they can serve them. The issue is that even though Vanguard started out as an innovator, like you said, with the index fund and bringing down costs and stuff, now they're one of the established players. And so democratizing advice means to some extent cannibalizing their own business or competing with themselves. So, in general, do I think advice will be democratized? Absolutely, but I don't know the extent to which some of the big established firms like Vanguard are going to lead the charge.
Steve Chen
What do you think you know, how do you think this this change will come to the industry?
Ed
Well, I think it's gonna come from firms like Boldin and a lot of the new firms that are arising because when you have these big established businesses, right, you have an incentive to kind of keep things the way they are, maybe make some mild changes. But when you come out with flat fees, ongoing, you know, flat fee subscriptions, we found by and large that this is what people want. So What generally happens in this kind of situation is innovative firms like Boldin and and some of our competitors will come out. Clients will move overwhelmingly to the new system. And firms like Vanguard will have no choice but to, you know, if you can't beat them, join them kind of deal. It reminds me of of when Vanguard started the index fund. Ned Johnson, a Fidelity, was one of the it was one of the biggest opponents of the index fund. He launched a big ad campaign saying index investing was un-American. Today, Fidelity are the second largest indexers in the business. And I think we're gonna see some of that, you know, with the with the big players.
Steve Chen
interesting. So Michael, I know that I remember from reading, you know, Jason Wink, you know, as he was building Altrist, he was out there asking about, you know, how should we charge for this? Like should we charge, should we do a fee on cash or arbitrage the cash, right? Net interest income, or should we charge a platform fee to the advisors? Do you have any, I mean, without giving away any secrets, like any insights into how they thought about it and why it was a challenge for them.
Michael Byram
Yeah, I mean initially what we did was when we set it up, we yeah, I was I was there from the beginning before there was even a product. and and what we did was we had a portfolio accounting system and they charged a dollar per account to use that. And there was fee billing and householding and different things involved with that. and then from there it came to we offered trades and once we started to be able to custodian accounts and trade on those accounts, then We started to offer portfolios and there were altruist portfolios and some of those were free. And then there were other portfolios that we gave people access through, through our portfolio marketplace and different things like that. and so the way that they monetized it over time kind of changed and morphed with that. And I think I I'm not entirely certain, but I think towards the latter part before they got bought, if if you were custodiing assets on the platform, I I think they even waived like the platform fee that they were charging. But it was it was really cheap. It was a dollar per per account per month or something like that.
Steve Chen
Yeah. I think it's super tough in general in this space. The whole the entire industry has grown up and gotten indexed on AUM. And there's reasons for it, right? Cause I mean, well, the argument has been,
Ed
If you're kind of just man.
Steve Chen
more money, more co I think around advice, the argument has been more money, more complexity. I think the argument kind of falls apart a little bit around portfolio management. Cause like, you know, when you think about it back to the Fidelity Magellan, there's, you know, four people running this fund. And if it has, you know, a hundred million dollars in it, it's certain, you know, it is what it is. And if you have a hundred billion, it's the same four guys running the thing, right? And so they're just, you know, they're not necessarily doing more service, they're just capturing a lot more margin in in that case. Now the values, complexity, and stuff like that, okay, maybe there's some argument, but it does feel like we're seeing more movement towards flat fee. We're definitely seeing smaller firms offer this and and small RAAs. Ed, do you think that's like d I think it's part of the future, but like what's your take on Flat V versus AUM for the future?
Ed
Well, like you say, I mean, AUM made a lot of sense when it was a lot more work to handle big accounts and things like that. But now, I mean, technology has enabled it to such a degree that a bigger account isn't necessarily more difficult to manage. And clients are well aware of this. They're they're paying the AUM fees and they're seeing that they're paying a percent, sometimes less, but still a staggering amount of their money every year, and they're wondering where all this money's going. the flat fee is definitely what the clients gravitate towards. Again, the only issue is that with a lot of your more established firms, they're they're less inclined to offer it.
Steve Chen
Yeah. Well I don't I don't know if any does Fidelity I mean the big ones are Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard. Does anyone are any of them offering Flat Fee or is it all kind of it's lower basis points. I think it's you know, thirty to fifty basis points, but if if you take advice, I don't know I don't know if I've Flat Fee out there.
Ed
I I don't believe I've seen flat fee with any of those major brokerage firms.
Steve Chen
Yeah. So we'll see. We'll definitely see how this this emerges. So so let's let's shift gear. I'm just curious. I think, you we're all everyone's interested in kind of like how do we deliver advice at scale, how do we democratize it, you know, inter and I think you know with Vanguard buying Ultras, they're like, Okay, this technology's great, right? It's it can help us.
Ed
Yeah.
Steve Chen
They've got six thousand advisors, we can deploy it probably internally. Maybe they'll do something with their own you know, their own consumer version, we'll see. But, you know, Michael, when you first when you started with Ultras, what was their stated mission and what were they what were they trying to get accomplished?
Michael Byram
I mean it it actually was to make financial advice more accessible to everybody. It's made it better and more affordable. and I I really think that that that's the mission that they set out to do. And they set out trying to do it by optimizing the amount of time that advisors had to spend with the client. And the hope behind that was that You know, you could go downstream. You wouldn't have to only service clients that are $500,000 or a million dollars in AUM because the amount of time that it took for you to service them was less. And I think that was kind of like the main mission behind that with Jason is like the all these people out there, they need help. We talk about democratizing.
Ed
They need help. We talked about the
Michael Byram
They they they want this, but they're not being serviced because they just don't have enough. And the people who don't have enough are probably the ones who need it the most, ironically.
Steve Chen
Right. D do you feel like did they move the needle? I mean, I it and Ed, let's get your comment in a second, but like I it it feels like a an individual advisor could support in using legacy tools and tech, maybe a hundred families ish. And was UltraUs trying to get to two hundred plus or did they have goals around that?
Michael Byram
I d I don't know what the goals, the stated goals were around that. I can't I can't really answer that. I do know that we would release things and measure the amount of time that we were trying to save advisors by releasing them. And that was a that was a key metric that we would look at as we went about doing things because more time theoretically should mean more clients that they can support.
Steve Chen
Yeah, more capacity. For sure. and did they specifically say we're not gonna go direct to consumer? I guess they wanted to keep the channels clean.
Michael Byram
Yeah, that was always the case. There was never any interest in supporting anybody that wasn't an RIA out there, at least in the time that I was there. I I know they've done some larger deals since then. I don't know if they're all RIAs or not. I haven't looked into it, but but yeah, when I was there, that was the only people that we we would service.
Steve Chen
Yeah. That's interesting. It'll be interesting if Vanguard deploys this for the consumer side, but but we'll see. I mean, I think on our like my hypothesis has always been like, hey, there there's a capacity problem. We need to serve more people, but we have to start with technology. And then we will
Ed
Yeah.
Steve Chen
add, you know, people, which we're doing. Now we're adding AI, which has emerged since we started in a big way since we started the company. But Ed, you know, what's your take on the trends you've seen in terms of advisor? Pacity over the course of your career.
Ed
Well, there's no question about it. I mean, advisors books have grown substantially. When I first started at Vanguard in the early two thousands, advisors were handling maybe fifty to seventy five households apiece. within ten years, that number had already grown to several hundred. Probably two, three hundred was a pretty common number. And my last firm, I was handling more than five hundred clients at one point. and the fatigue is real. Right. So the technology does enable the way the way it's existed so far, enables the advisor to handle more relationships. but nothing like we're going to see here in the next couple of years. Right. if the technology can start to remove a significant amount of this busy work from advisors and things that aren't necessarily that don't necessarily require the advisor's expertise, then maybe we'll get to a point where an elite group of advisors will be able to handle. large even larger groups of clientele without the fatigue and have the you know the five hundred or the six hundred client get the same attention as the first one.
Steve Chen
You know, Ed, to expand on that, you've looked, you've worked across, you know, firms like Vanguard, Facet, Tia, you know, different pl I'm not gonna ask you to name names, but I'm just curious what
Ed
No, it's okay.
Steve Chen
what your take is on kind of like the spectrum of, you know, you like you said, hey, you started at 50 clients, you got to 500, that's a 10x span. It does feel like the capabil the capacity of these companies to think this way is pretty different. And we just love your take on like how you see that. Like do you think that okay, we're gonna see the top five percent of firms are really gonna be able to deal with, you know, three hundred, four hundred clients per I mean, you've had a certain amount of cognitive load per human being
Ed
Mm-hmm.
Steve Chen
as on the like I don't think at a certain point, even with all the tools in the world, you still wanna have relationships and know people. and then maybe there's a bunch of companies that can only deal with like a hundred to two hundred and then there's still some laggards that that don't it work. But I'm cu I'd be curious to get your take on how you see this. Yep.
Ed
Seem like there would be models, right? Like so there would be like service tiers. So people who tr traditionally didn't have access to financial advice or certainly didn't have access to high quality advice, they might be satisfied with an arrangement where they have an advisor who's, you know, meeting with them maybe every year and is is dealing with, you know, hundreds or maybe even a thousand relationships. people with a little more complexity are probably going to want to see things a little different, right? And they're going to want to see an advisor who has more time to spend on their cases and won't be fatigued. and I think that's how it's really gonna look is and then you know, you know, your top top clients of course are gonna want a very sophisticated service in the same way that they have today. And I I don't think there's any reason why it needs to be a one size fits all approach to finance. I think you'll democratize it in different ways for different groups.
Steve Chen
Yeah, super interesting. Michael, you know, back to you. In terms of having built for advisors and now you're building for consumers, what are some of the big things that that jump out for you?
Michael Byram
you know, with advisors, and and I think this is actually one of the one of the important things that I think about within the industry as a whole is like with advisors, they're the experts. They know things. People come to them, say, tell me what to do, tell me if I'm on track, tell me what's going on. With consumers, they need that because they don't have it. So like advisors, they know they know what's right. And consumers they need they need a lot of help being able to understand what's what. So as we build the product out. We have to keep that in mind. We we have to say, like, there's there's an education process to this that goes through there. And there's this kind of like flow towards creating a path and having your plan that an advisor naturally knows how to walk through. Like if you sat down with Ed, Ed's gonna take you through, he's gonna ask you the right questions, he's gonna build these things out, and he's gonna guide you where you need to go. And so what we have to do and what we've been trying to do is build our software to guide people in that same way, to help them get to that path that maybe they're not an expert in right there. But we can. can be for them.
Steve Chen
Great take. All right. I'm gonna shift yours again to talk about the impact of AI on the space and specifically for consumers. And you know, Ed, I would love your take again back to kind of like as you've gone through your career and you've seen consumers show up,
Ed
As you've gone through your computer and you see consideration.
Steve Chen
probably starting with like paper and then maybe some spreadsheets,
Ed
Yep.
Steve Chen
you know, and now they've got things like Boldin plans and then they're talking to AI, like. How do you see how things have changed and how consumers are showing up differently, you know, as technology gets more pervasive for them?
Ed
Well, I think what we're seeing is a is a major expansion to the capabilities of technology, changing what has to even go through an advisor at all. Right. So back when I started, the human advisor was the necessary bottleneck for every single financial decision in question. Right. Now we have clients who are using Boldin quite extensively and they're coming to us with a largely built plan. That puts me in a tremendously better starting point than I used to be, right? So Clients are coming to us not only better informed, which they do seem to be, but also they've done some pretty decent testing to their portfolios. They already have a, you know, largely formulated plan, which means that that first meeting is easily, you know, 10 to 15 times as effective as it used to be. And the second meeting, we're getting into much more planning, much, you know, deeper and more planning topics than we ever would have in the past.
Steve Chen
Got it. And Michael, on the on the back end of this, because you see all the data and the AI conversations and security and everything else. How do you see this evolving you know, from today and going forward in terms of you know what both the consumer and the advisor has access to when they're having these kinds of conversations?
Michael Byram
Yeah, I mean we we wanna make sure that the advisor has all the tools that they need to do the job. We also want make sure that they only have the tools that they need to do the job. And so there are things that people might put into the platform. We wanna make sure that they're that they're They're being represented appropriately. a lot of the things that we're doing with AI now is, you know, we're we're creating summaries and different things like that for the advisors to be able to see. So they're not necessarily jumping into the specifics of the conversations that are going on, but they're kind of getting the gist of of what the needs are of these people and we're we're giving them thematic information that's important there. we are looking to make it to where we we allow for the consumer to go ahead and say, hey, like we want you to be able to see all of these things. But yeah, we're gating access to some. of the new tools can I tease some of the new things that we're doing like like the vault. Am I allowed to tease that here? Are we gonna cut? So
Steve Chen
Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Michael Byram
so yeah no I mean we're allowing for you to upload documents different things like that in into our system and that's coming soon. I think a couple of beta users might have already have access to that but as we do that that's gonna allow for you to be able to pass information back and forth between your advisors in a safe and secure way and to be able to get better information around that on both sides. So yeah, security, and the way in which we go about getting access is something that's very much in the forefront of our mind as we move forward. And 'cause there's just more and more information now that that we're gonna have access to and we gotta protect that information.
Steve Chen
What any any thoughts? I mean, I know everyone's in the prediction business right now, but like on where and this is for Michael again, but like where AI what's what some of the emerging things might see with AI are. like I I saw recently that Sam Altman at, you know, open AI is like predicting we're gonna have AGI, artificial general intelligence in this year, in twenty twenty six, which is kind of eye opening. So anyway, I don't know what your take is on this stuff.
Michael Byram
I mean that depends on what your definition of is is. Yeah, no, I'm not I'm
Steve Chen
Yeah.
Michael Byram
I don't I don't think we're going to be having AGI this year. that would be that would be quite shocking. You know, mo most of the things that I found with AI is that you still need an expert in the loop. You still need somebody who understands what they're doing. And if you do have that, it's a huge unlock. I think anybody who's used AI, if they know what they're doing, they found that this makes them 10X faster at the thing that they're trying to do. But if you're not an expert at it, you know, you're getting and lawyers with cases thrown out because they're citing things that aren't really in there and in different things like that. I it is a very powerful tool. I think it's very good at recognizing patterns. I think it's super useful. But the way that we're trying to use it for our customers is we're trying to be the expert for them. And be that middleman who understands what the AI needs to know and do and check to make sure that it's giving correct and good information to our customers as they're using it. And I think that that'll probably continue to be the case for a really long time. I'm not worried about AGI in the in the short term at least. sorry, Elon, I'm still saving for retirement.
Steve Chen
Yeah, forget saving for retirement according to Elon. you know, Ed, for you, any big things that have surprised you in the past six months and and thing or things that you anticipate happening that that you you think are surprising around the capabilities of AI and technology in this area?
Ed
Well, I mean, I think just as people use it more, it's getting better and better. And I I realize sometimes that when I'm using AI, I realize I'm digging my own grave to a certain extent. I'm I'm teaching it how to find all my insights. But it it's really good at inferring intent, picks up tone, context, past behavior, makes reasonable decisions. And I just find it it just is really excellent at doing the things that don't require human judgment. Right. So a lot of what you're paying an advisor for, And not just an advisor, a medical professional or legal professional or anything else is pattern recognition. I mean, we've literally looked at, you know, hundreds or thousands of cases, and we know what you're missing. We know what questions you're not asking. AI could do that very reasonably well extremely soon and create a proactive engagement where you're not just having to contact your financial forum firm or your software or anything to ask questions. Rather, it contacts you and says, Based on what we're seeing here and the thousands of similar cases we looked at, these are things you should probably consider. At that point, it probably requires some human involvement as well, but you know, consider that your advisor's already so far along in the process by the time we get to that.
Steve Chen
Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the things that I wonder about so I a couple thoughts. I think voice is gonna be huge as an interface. I've started I had a conversation with OpenAI's, you know, voice interact voice tool this past week that was shockingly good and valuable. Yeah, I was always driving around and I was like, this is really leveled up. And I think that it's gonna capture back to your Quite your your note about tone and emotion. You know, when you talk to a human being, right, you can say kind of look at them or listen to them and you know, tell if they're worried or if they're happy or whatever and they they're anxious. And so a lot of that stuff I think is start gonna start to be in interpreted by AI and this could be pretty interesting. Also, I think agents and teams of agents, this idea that you could have multiple people working on your behalf behind the scenes is gonna become real. So we'll see. Okay, so I wanna kinda talk a little bit more about kind of the evolution of planning in terms of being more of a living document. you know, Ed, do you see people treating this as a like, hey, I've got I think planning used to be like a big piece of paper, a big binder of paper that advisors would use to win business and kind
Ed
Windows.
Steve Chen
of convince folks that they're experts and basically like, here's your plan, but now I'm gonna manage your money and then Most of the discussion was around
Ed
That's right.
Steve Chen
asset management, but love would love your take on how consumers are seeing it.
Ed
Well, I I I I wish they would adopt it more quickly, to be honest with you. There still seems to be an expectation out in the market that they'll receive a document once a year. And I try to explain to people that and we used to do it that way because it it w it was really built around the advisor's schedule. It wasn't built around you or your needs or when you needed to talk to someone. It was all just based on the advisor's business model. And this is when I see you, right? and then they would have an annual meeting or we would have an annual meeting. We'd hand you a packet of paper. And the next year your annual meeting would come up and we'd say, All right, great. Did you enjoy the plan last year? I'd say, yeah. We'd What'd you do? They said, nothing. Every time. Every time. Or they or they maybe did like a tenth of it or something. And the reason why is it just feels out of date already as soon as you get it. if we can just get away from that entirely and have a plan that's constantly evolving, I think it's everyone's going to be better served. People are going to have more real-time, decision useful information, and they're much more likely to act on it.
Steve Chen
Yeah. Michael, do you see that we'll have a lot more automation of things? It it does feel like the opportunity is do a plan, make decisions because of it, and then actually implement it. And then where things fall apart is actually taking action. Where the advisors do well is if they actually manage the money. They can okay, I'm I'm actually managing your money, I'm like keeping it up to date, but they're not necessarily doing other things around it like, Hey, could you do better with your mortgage insurance? You know, savings, whatever. You know, Michael, do you think that we'll start to see that activation of the plan become reality?
Michael Byram
Yeah, I think so. And I I honestly I think There there are ways in which we can do that to make it better for our customers even now. You know, we we've just started to look at things like how they're managing their assets in terms of asset allocation. That's another new feature that I'm teasing that's coming out here soon. Where we're gonna be able to tell you kind of how your portfolio's set up. We talked about risk assessment. These are things that that we're doing to kind of gain a more holistic picture. Where Boldin has been in the past is we've been at a place where you come to us and lay out your stuff and we tell you, yeah, you're gonna be okay. Like your plan's relatively okay. Where I think we're going in the future is a place where you come to us and we help you identify the best way. to go forward and we help you along that path. And I I do think as we continue to move in this space that that that's where we're gonna go and that's where advice is going to go. And that's really the unlock of a lot of these tools. It's it's like we and this is what I meant earlier by we become the expert. We can tell you and guide you along and give you the things that you should be thinking about. And then to your point, help make sure that you're actually doing it and give you either either do it for you or help you along that path of reminding you to do it if if that's the case. More than once a year.
Ed
No, just say like he, you know, historically when we handed them the document, they didn't do anything. This this isn't a failure of the client. This is a failure of of how we were executing things. 'Cause we would we would take this big plan and then we would put all the onus for implementation on the person least equipped to do it. Right. And and you know, the results were very predictable.
Steve Chen
Yeah. And is that in in a certain areas did you start doing more of this? I know at I think at Vanguard it's like it was pretty vanilla, right? They would y talk to you kind of about four funds and didn't really talk about taxes and and things have probably changed, but it was it seemed like it a pretty compartmentalized thing and then I guess it was up to the consumer. But in other part in other places you've worked, did they start doing more things for the consumer?
Ed
Well, you know, the the vanilla comment that we hear all the time from Vanguard is really a feature rather than a bug of the system because Vanguard has to do this all based on an incredible amount of scale. Right. So if there's anything unique, complex, out of the ordinary, that inhibits your ability to scale and scale in a big way. And and that's what they need to do in order for this business to work out well for them. when people want to, you know, have Things done more for them. They want more frequent touch points. They want something a little more personalized. That's when in the past they were relegated to the more bespoke market, dealing with financial advisors. And that's is the market that Vanguard's gonna serve now, with her well, at least with their funds, with the purchase of UltraWist. that's historically cost more. It's been more difficult to scale, but there's no reason why that needs to continue to be true for the next five, 10 years.
Steve Chen
Yeah. I was at a meetup, an AI meetup, and one of the adventure partners got up there and she said, Hey, listen, if your business model relies on the inertia of people not paying attention and like not doing anything, that's probably a flawed assumption. And that would go to things like, Hey, and and unfortunately this is true, but like, you know, for most of our users, they probably have twenty five to forty thousand dollars sitting at a big bank, making no interest. And today with a few clicks, if you look around, you can go get yourself four percent plus interest, you know, fully liquid, FTIC insured, whatever. And you know, if you're sitting there with fifty thousand, you know, it's a couple grand a year, you know, and a hundred and fifty bucks a month, you know, free money. And people just don't do that. And else and likewise there's fees everywhere and all these funds and there's suboptimal everything. It does feel like we're heading this world where that's gonna become surfaced. You're gonna see this and it's gonna be way easier. It's gonna go from like, you know, rocket money, like I'm gonna kill kind of bogus transa bogus subscriptions I don't love, and I'm not really using to everything. You're gonna be able to optimize everything all the time. And AI's agents are good at this. so it'll be interesting to see how that unfolds. But I don't know if you have any any color commentary on what you're starting to see. Like Ed, are you starting to see people do this or get more proactive on this?
Ed
Most certainly. I mean, for that matter, it's it's common for people to take their entire financial plan, feed it into AI, and say, What are all the blind spots? What are all the things I haven't asked? And we we get that very frequently. and it's it's even increased dramatically in the last couple of years. We'll have people asking questions about their portfolios and things like that. And it's clear that that's all enhanced or or a co assisted with AI. And so What what has that done? I mean, sometimes the questions are, you know, still a little crazy that you get from AI and things like that. But for the most part, we have a much more informed consumer these days. And it's only a matter of time before an AI agent, just the way you were talking about, looks at subscriptions, looks at everything that you do and says, Hey, that there's there's cheaper versions of this and lays it out for you and allows you to research them pretty easily.
Steve Chen
you know, Michael, so I know we ro we have an MCP server. Most people don't know what an MCP model context protocol. but basically it's a way for if you have you're rolling around with your own AI agent, like you use, you know, OpenAI or what you know, ChatGPT or using Claude from Anthropic, you know, you're talking to that, you can tell that to go to a place like Boldin and do work for it for you. you know, Michael, are we starting to see I know it's probably pretty limited, but like, you know, that appear is a way of interacting with us.
Michael Byram
It is limited. I mean we do have it. I wish more people would use it. I think it's a it's a great tool for them to be able to go in and gain insights. You can ask it questions, you can run models. I mean we have AI within our platform as well that you can use. We have our own models that support you. You can ask questions too. But this allows for you to directly interact with your plan from your your home hosted one or any any any model you want to bring to the party there for that. So yeah, I mean it's there. We need more people using it.
Steve Chen
It's pretty interesting. I mean, like, you know, we try to offer different ways for to engage with clients. You know, I guess from my perspective, what I want to be is, hey, if you had a human advisor, you know, you could you would meet with them in person. I mean, it's amazing just by the way how much has changed since COVID, right? So before COVID, Zoom wasn't really a thing. And this was only like whatever, five, six years ago, right? And like we were using Zoom, but nobody was using Zoom. No advisors were using Zoom. You would go to your advisor. Meet in their offices in a conference room, that's how it was done. And then COVID happens and it's like, okay, people aren't going places, so Zoom, phone, text, email, whatever. So I I think the the world's gonna be this multi-channel world. And it's interesting that we're gonna have people using their own AI agents and like bring your own AI plus MCP, you know, and that's where or telling your AI to go figure out, build me a book. Build me a financial plan, I can go to Boldin, find it, build it and come back to you, bring your data. It's it's you know, it's pretty fascinating how quickly it's how quickly it's evolving.
Michael Byram
Yeah, the the broader AI strategy that I I think about, I honestly don't know that these huge companies are gonna be the ones that make it out. I think it will be the local models. I I really actually feel, you know, we one of the things that's impressed me the most recently is how good the new coin model is, right? It's just something that you could run locally and it works and does amazing things. And and I think that that will be the the way that that goes. And so us having an MCP is just kind of fronting that knowing that that's gonna be the way that a lot of a lot of people are gonna wanna interact.
Steve Chen
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So, you know, on this note of what's the right balance between tech, AI, and humans,
Ed
AI and H
Steve Chen
you know, Michael, yeah, like where do you think humans fit in in the future?
Michael Byram
I mean, so I I talked earlier about this, about how we are intentionally becoming the expert and being the expert for our clients as we utilize tools. so I I do think that there is going to continue to be a usefulness there to that. In terms of what people like and how they like to interact, I think that's probably more akin to to what they're gonna be. Some people they want to talk to somebody. They wanna be able to pick up the phone and talk to somebody. When the market has a horrible day, they might want to be able to just be like, hey, am I okay? Right. and they're not going to trust the computer with that. Some people are. Some people are gonna be like, hey, computer, am I all right? And the AI agent's gonna say, Well, you know, in the last ten years you've seen fifteen drops exactly like this and you've gone up this much since then. So, you know, it it really is gonna depend on the person as to what they want, but but but f front loading that, I believe, is is still that that personal expert that's needed. in order to get everything set up and to build trust, because these large language models are there specifically to be generic and general. And they use probability. And they're not experts. They're trained by experts on many things. and so I I still feel like that that needs that maybe maybe we'll get past that. I I think that that's probably the goal eventually for most of these companies, but I I I just feel like it's gonna be there for a long time.
Steve Chen
Yeah, I I totally believe humans are going to be there because we have relationships with other human beings. And, you know, I don't find myself I do find myself talking to AI more, but I also but it's definitely the much, you know, it's a much smaller percentage of my time. although
Michael Byram
gonna be
Steve Chen
I do see that like the example you gave about reminding someone when a mark when the market tanks that this is a feature, not a bug, everybody has to remind of that lesson every time the market tanks. And what AI can do potentially better than a human is it it can un well, it can know you pretty well. It also can know all of the best examples to give to you in particular about how to settle you down, like talk you up talk you off the ledge, right? Which is a huge
Michael Byram
Assuage your fears. Yeah.
Steve Chen
value of the advisor. So I think it could be pretty powerful and it c and it can do it for anybody. That's the difference. It's like I think that's the big thing that I see. It's just like Advice has been the domain of people that already have money until now. And now it's potentially starting to change in a huge way. yeah.
Michael Byram
Yeah. I actually think, you know, a good analogy to it might be like a farmer's market. Like I can go to the grocery store and they've got tons of food and I can get the things that I want there. But occasionally somebody wants to go and they want to get something fresh. They're like and I think it'll be like that, you know, where it's like
Steve Chen
Yep. And you can go talk to the person that grew the food and like have a great
Michael Byram
Yeah.
Steve Chen
conversation with them. Yeah, it's interesting. Ed, what do you think like what do you think this looks like over the next I was gonna say five years, but it feels like it could be even faster. So call it,
Ed
Think so.
Steve Chen
you know, three years from now, two to three years from now. What do you think's different about the experience?
Ed
Well, the first thing is the you know, historically, and I mean up until like yesterday, historically if you had a financial question or problem or you wanted to, you know, get your act together, you would start with finding someone and scheduling a meeting. Right? Well, the starting point's not a meeting anymore. The starting point is a model now. You're gonna be able to do a lot of the stuff to get up to speed right away. even today in my practice, doing You know, some pretty sophisticated financial planning. I would say probably 70 to 80% of what I'm doing can still be automated. Right. So a lot of that stuff's going to be automated as well. So then you'll you'll call on an elite, a cadre, you know, one of a cadre of elite advisors who have dealt with all these complex cases many times who can help you make sure that your model is correct, optimize it, things like that. We're going to be better at doing it because we're only going to handle the most difficult situations all the time. More importantly then, too, it's not up to the advisor to necessarily be proactive with you. The system can come to you. Hey, your Medicare election window is opening. we need to get ready for RMDs. We had some degree of automation of that in the past, but but nothing like we can set up instantly when meeting people now. So all that said is I think we're going to be in a position where advice is going to be more democratized. It is going to still include advisors, but it's not going to require the same degree of fatigue. And let's face it, degradation of quality that's happened in the past when we try to handle these large volumes.
Steve Chen
Got it. That makes sense. all right. Well, this is this is super interesting to dive into this stuff with you guys. And it's also interesting kind of seeing, you know, how the industry is evolving with like Vanguard buying Ultras. It does feel like, you know, these big companies are are taking this very seriously and seeing like, hey, there's an opportunity to for for me as a big company to better serve my tens of millions of customers in a deeper way. and it feels like the the models are gonna have to evolve and probably will evolve pretty dramatically, in the coming years. So it'll be it'll be pretty interesting to see if the big in some ways, like I think it can be b good to be a smaller company right now. I mean, distribution is a challenge, but also cost structures are a challenge. And a lot of these big companies are rolling around with like, whatever, tens of thousands of employees, tons of real estate, it's pretty high overhead. They gotta pay for all that stuff. And therefore their costs they've gotten used to like this kind of everyone is indexed on this way of making money, this AUM way which is, you know, gonna be here for a while, but as consumers get more aware, it it could create pretty material changes for for folks. So I don't know if you guys have any color commentary on that, but happy to dive in if you want to.
Michael Byram
Yeah I mean
Ed
I don't even know why anybody still has their real estate, to be honest with you. I mean, Vanguard's campus alone, out, you know, near my house in in suburban Philadelphia, I I don't know what it's worth, but it's it's gotta be in the in the tens of millions, if not the hundreds of millions. And just to sit there and pay all those taxes on it and just the water bill alone is it's just gotta be staggering, right? So, it it's it still boggles my mind that that anybody's tried to do this exclusively with with a brick and mortar operation at this point.
Steve Chen
God forg forbid they put a data center on the campus or something like that.
Ed
Mm-hmm.
Steve Chen
all right, well guys, it's it's been great to dive in on this stuff. you know, it's good to get your perspective, appreciate it. any last comments you wanna have for our community as we kind of continue down the path of building for folks?
Ed
I think you're in the right place. I mean, we're leading with technology. We're leading with technology that you can use and make informed decisions, right? and when you're ready to make a really big important decision, you can sign up with Boldin Advisors and we'll make this stuff even more decision useful for you. So, we're thrilled that you're here and we're looking forward to helping you innovate and take advantage of innovation to move forward with confidence.
Steve Chen
Awesome. Thanks Ed. Michael, anything else on your side?
Michael Byram
I I really appreciate all the support that the community gives to everyone as they try to do better with their money. You know, it I am here at Boldin because of the mission that what we were trying to do, where we were trying to democratize financial advice. I I told you this, Steve, when when I was first looking at joining us here is my mom She didn't even start saving for retirement until she was 50. She was as completely financially illiterate as possible. And there is no way a financial advisor was ever going to touch her or help her get to where she needed to be in order to retire. And she couldn't retire until into her 70s. And she worked five or six days a week of 12-hour days as a nurse for a very long time in order to get to that place. And so being a part of this, being a part of this mission is something that I love. And we are absolutely going to empower people to be. be able to do better with their money and to understand what it is that they're doing and why they're doing it. So technology is gonna help us do that.
Steve Chen
Yeah. No. You and I, Michael and I know Ed, like we all have our stories about why we're here and what we're doing and yeah, I agreed. It's like a huge problem, right? It's like everybody worries about money, people aren't sure what to do. I mean, there are better opportunities now, but people aren't sure who to trust. And I think, you know, we you know, firms like ourselves and other firms that are kind of coming at it with a very transparent, fully aligned model and community driven approach. are gonna be part of what brings positive change. On the community side, yeah, shout out to our community, everyone who is in Reddit or in Meta or listens to this podcast, we deeply appreciate it. we're trying to think of a name. I was watching Hard Knocks, Seattle Seahawks, they call their community the Twelves, you know, the twelfth man on the field. So if you have good ideas about that, let us know. but yeah well so with that for folks that are listening, thanks for your time. all reviews, liking, sharing, commenting are welcome. All questions are welcome. All feedback on the product is deeply appreciated. We are definitely building this with the folks on the call, I mean, you know, that are listening and community and also Michael and Ed, you can, you know, thanks for joining and also for the folks listening, you know, you can see some the folks that kind of are inside this business and you know, building it, you know, for for you guys. All right. Thanks everybody.
Michael Byram
Thanks, Steve.
Ed
Night. Thanks for that.
