Elements with Reese Harper | E269

Enabling better financial planning conversations with clients.

In today's episode of Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Reese Harper, CEO of Elements. It is a financial planning company focused on delivering deep, meaningful conversations between clients and advisors, but specifically focused on the key things that they need to focus on in order to be effective in their financial planning journey. 

Episode Highlights

  • 1.36: Reese shares how the idea of launching Elements came through? What factors motivated him?

  • 3.57: Reese has built a financial planning software, because it's more about the delivery, than effectiveness. Financial planning is about big tables and numbers.

  • 04.47: When most people think of financial planning, they are thinking about financial modeling, financial projections, financial forecasts of the future. As per Reese Elements is a financial monitoring/financial vital sign. 

  • 06.38: Reese tried to create a more efficient way to answer questions without him having to do any of the data entry or data maintenance. 

  • 07.49: As per Reese they are trying to get deeper in conversations, but not have as many extensive presentations as they are trying to put in front of people. 

  • 13.48: Saving money, spending money, paying taxes and paying debt are the four elements that are the four vital signs that cash flow is made-up of.

  • 16.02: Reese explains how the elements financial planning system scorecard works. 

  • 18.01: The magic moment where the financial advisor and a client are always answering questions and giving them insights and helping them see the world differently through your lens, like that's the magic moment. It's not through the technology that happens, it's through the advisor's connection with the client. 

  • 18.58: Reese discusses the obligation that they have as the software provider in a world where it's all about financial health. 

  • 21.28: As per Reese both benchmarks and heuristics are important and right now, they just have heuristics in the system. 

  • 23.37: Reese supports the idea of advisors using guidelines and benchmarks to motivate clients toward a healthier state when needed. 

  • 26.27: Insights engine is what are we going to surface to the advisor to show them what's going on with their clientele.

  • 28.02: Reese explains how they have created a new language to discuss things with clients because a lot of clients bring some kind of bias into the conversation from previous instruction they received, or TV shows they have watched or podcast they listen to.

  • 30.12: Reese shares the success stories and how well the app is received by clients.

  • 33.37: Reese explains how their entire clientele is not on meetings. He is batching responses and he is doing it asynchronously.

  • 35.52: A DSO that employs like 200 dentists, it's really hard to cost effectively work with rank-and-file dentists, says Reese.

  • 38.01: There is only the segment that will only ever be serviced through pro bono because of absolute lack of capacity for affording it, but for everybody else, there are ways just got to make it happen.

3 Key Points

  1. Reese discusses an easy way to measure holistic financial health. He shares how the elements financial planning system helps clients to collect and organize financial data and then gives a snapshot of all their key financial health metrics–in one view.

  2. Reese talks about the three main ways that they use to interact with clients.

  3. The advisor mobile version is mostly meant for real-time analysis, and when you get on the phone with the client, you will be editing data on the fly with them. The web is there for triage and sort of book-level clientele, explains Reese. 

Tweetable Quotes

  • "If you ever tried to build your own software for your own needs, using your own money from profits from another business that like an advisory business to pay for software, you realize very quickly that it, it's very challenging." - Reese

  • "Using people to focus in on the key performance indicators to their financial lives, this show that basically that is what they should be focusing on so they can answer a contextual question because now you have that dashboard on the screen." - Jason 

  • "You could really overwhelm people quite Quickly if you say we have to collect all the financial vital signs that exist in the world." – Reese

  • "Benchmarking is kind of the V2 of what we see coming. It is when you can create internal when you have a large enough internal sample, you can start creating financial health metrics." -  Reese

  • "Our insights engine identifies what's next, and we suggest copy, we suggest communication tips, we suggest like things to do, and that's in the web, not on the mobile device." - Reese 

  • "Almost everything that matters to you in your life has some representation on your phone screen." - Jason

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech