Four Eyes Financial with Lori Weir and Jeff Harvie | E217

Four Eyes revisited.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Lori Weir and Jeff Harvie. They are going to specifically talk about how they have helped advisors and firms deal with implementing new systems to help them better support themselves in this new regime CFR.  Lorie started the company in 2015, and they set out to help investors feel more confident that they were invested in products that met their risk tolerance and financial goals.

Episode Highlights:

  • 3.18: Most recently, we transformed the advisor experience in terms of how they communicate with head office and started bringing the pre-compliance workflow into the advisors’ practice, says Jeff.

  • 4.04: CFR is one of the biggest regulatory changes we have seen probably in the last 20 years, says Jason

  • 5.28: When we looked at the opportunity with our platform or open architecture, the way we use data, we looked at the CFR requirements and said we could help firms scale the requirements so that they can demonstrate that they're meeting the obligations, says Lori.

  • 7.33: We sit on top of the core books and record data, but any data that goes through the system is captured and pushed into different workflows. So, we can make this data fully visible to compliance teams and advisors on a post account opening, says Jeff.

  • 10.11: Jason asks, on the tolerance side, you are basically helping people assess that around 100 points and three category scale. How do you address the definition of capacity, or how does that get tested within what you put in place?

  • 13.21: There are so many permutations around selecting equity, and that really falls into what the role of the advisor is now, says Jeff.

  • 15.57 Jeff has commended a solution to help advisors go through a workflow to assess product selection for mutual funds and ETF’s and that search function can be tailored to the firm's approved shelf or open. 

  • 17.37: We have made room for advisors to be able to put free format in their rationale for why they’re selecting a product and provide the suitability profile of the dealer, and the dealer is acceptance of the rationale, says Jeff.

  • 23.01: One of the things that we have proven out in the last 12 months is that we can prototype and roll-out required modules because we’re sitting on top of the data, and we can move to rollout a module without changing the advisor experience, says Lori.

  • 24.50: There are some structural issues that have been identified with CFR’s that he thinks firms are now going back and saying how do we clean up our data and then how do we have processes to maintain much more structured data going forward, says Jeff.

  • 28.57: We do provide the ability to drift monitoring. We can provide an indication to advisors like are they red, orange, green, or where are they sitting in terms of the spectrum of client portfolio and can they take on or take off risk from the call the road forward, says Jeff.

  • 31.29: The platform we built is immediately able to update information so that you have a full capture of not only product risk ratings that are important but also looking at the portfolio and looking at the person in their totality, not just one element, says Lori.

3 Key Points

  1. Jeff started out doing suitability oversight, and suitability oversight requires an understanding of the client’s risk profile to make comparisons for securities transacted on a client account.

  2. There have been so many standalone processes, and we have been digitizing them and simply replicating in multiple places. So, if you are inputting something once it gets used across the process and can be viewed by anyone, says Lori.

  3. Our platform can help firms organize RTQ and score to 100 via risk scoring within our applications that are proprietary to us so that we can score individual securities and compare those two at a client or an account level from a security selection perspective, says Jeff.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “Our solution set is built around the back, mid and front office to enable a seamless experience for the investor, the advisor, and the head office folks providing oversight.” - Lori 

  • “We sit on top of the core books and record data, but any data that goes through the system is captured and pushed into different workflows. So, we can make this data fully visible to compliance teams and advisors on a post account opening.” - Jeff

  • “We just make it easier to collect, update, and monitor client information, which is vital.” - Lori 

  • “There are two aspects of a product that we have been addressing, and one is helping dealers digitize the whole product approval process for the shelf. We have digitized the world for several dealers where the complexity of products or things need to be approved.” – Jeff

  • “There was no standardization across any of the offices across any of the CRM’s. So, every one of the method we paid as a unique problem solves, they are living the benefits of that consolidation.” – Jason

  • “We really strive to make sure that the client information is as up to date as possible so that you can do a true reconciliation on, where the client is at from a risk appetite.” - Lori

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech