Conquest Planning with Brad Joudrie and Ken Lotocki | E267

Conquest revisited.

On today's episode of Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Brad Joudrie and Ken Lotocki. Brad is the Chief Revenue Officer of Conquest, and Ken Lotocki, Chief Product. Today they are going to talk about the changes, growth and challenges that have occurred in the past 2.5 years. 

Episode Highlights

  • 1.16: Brad and Ken talk about conquest planning and its origin stories.

  • 02.24: Ken talks about the adoption of new technologies and innovation in Conquest Planning. 

  • 03:30: There's a lot of in every other profession out there in terms of innovation, whether it's medical profession or legal profession or so on, more and more tools are being built to help make it easier for that professional essentially to do their job and financial planning, specifically building that plan.

  • 05.02: Brad and Ken discuss about the challenges they faced and how they implemented processes that helped them to save lot of time and effort.

  • 06.14: Jason mentions how Sam built strategies such a way to help advisors work with their clients and understand exactly what's being recommended to them.

  • 08.10: There is a catalog of strategies on the left little blocks you can select, and you have basically based on the case you are looking at, those strategies have been tested and sorted based on impact.

  • 09.35: It's an easy enough conversation to explain to a client that if you delay you get more money, says Brad.

  • 11.18: Brad explains how Sam has shaved hours off the process using automation. 

  • 13.13: Ken talks about meteoric success which they have seen both in the form of people perspective as well as commercial perspective.

  • 14.42: Ken talks about the technology that they were using to serve a very rapidly growing client base in Canada.

  • 16.21: Conquest Planning has onboarded a number of businesses since and a number of great partners.

  • 19.02: Ken and Brad discuss about the work and the process of hiring people.

  • 21.58: Ken explains how they invest heavily in technology.

  • 25.10: Ken talks about their partners and how they are very happy with the stable of partners they have from a venture perspective.

  • 27.01: Brad and Ken talk about the next feature or next thing that they are going to do in the company.

  • 29.30 We can look at things relatively straightforward, we can do agnostic functionality which is probably where we spend a lot of our time, says Ken.

  • 30.25: There is the UK team on the development side, there is a US teams and then we can also then separate things out, but still look to larger picture for integration. Our business intelligence initiatives, our admin portals, and then our client, says Ken.

  • 33.03: There has only been three companies Jason has known of that have ever sold financial planning software outside of their own jurisdiction effectively.

  • 35.53: People don't understand the financial planning in general because the industry and banks or whatever does a terrible job of basically making this all look very vanilla and very simple.

  • 37.09: Brad says we can get wellness and guidance into the hands of consumers that may need it earlier in their life cycle and potentially kind of advanced to a more advice centric.

  • 38.15: Ken explains that they have recently rolled out a group planning version of the application. They are doing some additional UI work so that this group planning version, self-directed, essentially do-it-yourself planning is built for essentially a client to log in.

  • 40.58: Without implementation, it means nothing without basically being able to square the grey matter in that person's head with the output and making sure that it doesn't square because of behavioral preferences, life events, whatever it is.

  • 45.05: Brad and Ken discuss how they. don't shy away from feedback. That has really been a tenant of and one of the reasons they have been so successful with building an amazing product so efficiently.

  • 45.52: We understand better how advisors and financial professionals are working with their clients today and then have conquest to be agile itself to work within their ecosystem, says Ken.

  • 48.16: Ken shares how they are in a different situation than they were when they first sat down.

  • 53.21: There are a lot of good advisors, a lot of great advisors out there just approach it.

3 Key Points

  1. Brad and Ken talk about the launching of Conquest Planning and how as the company grew it adopted cloud technologies and innovation. 

  2. Brad and Ken talk about the business and how big the team was when they first started in the company.

  3. Brad explains how the company's scaling was almost as a B2B as opposed to an enterprise product.

Tweetable Quotes

  • Around the world people are still dramatically underserved when it comes to financial plans." – Ken

  • "The club speed knows which club to hit knows the distance, the thing and but in the end it's the advisor." – Brad

  • "If you are looking at in terms of the combination of number of start dates for CPP, Olaf security and riffing between age 60 to 71 and it's just the Canadian experience, but the same applies in the US with Social Security and RMD's. The reality is that you are looking at like 28 million possible combinations now." – Jason

  • "You landed the single biggest enterprise contract last year that none of the competition probably heard of yet, so kudos I think that's a testament to just how differentiating you are in the product market." – Jason

  • "We have kept our team reasonably lean, I would say on the distribution side of the House, and that has been fairly intentional." – Brad

  • "We are extremely bullish on our entry into the US we understand it's a very red ocean as far as technology is concerned." – Brad

  • "I love what we do and I love the fact that everyone in our company is passionate like we were." - Ken

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech