Hubly with Louis Retief | E216

Easy automation of advisor practices.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Louis Retief, Co-founder and CEO of Hubly. Hubly is an advisor workflow automation tool that helps take information from CRM’s and create actionable and easy to develop and implement workflows for advisors. Hubly is a vertical SAS software that supercharges comprehensive financial advisory firms. The purpose is for your highly regulated professional services like financial advice, tax preparation, trust, good planning, investment management, etc. 


Episode Highlights:

  • 1.41: New consumer financial products disrupt how people interact with their finances. But what we care about at Hubly is how this product innovation in new consumer products disrupts your professional service workers in financial services to serve their clients, says Louis

  • 2.59: In his role at wealth simple, Louis started asking if this massive revolution of new fintech products has been. How will that affect the professionals working in the industry? 

  • 4.11: You can’t eliminate the human. Humans have to become a lot more productive to service their clients. So we figured Hubly’s future that the advisor is not going away and how we can help the advisor serve more clients, and it is when the journey started about three years ago for us, says Louis.

  • 6.03: Jason asks Louis many automation tools come with their workflow. Can you speak about where those native ones were falling or failing to elevate themselves to the level you have? 

  • 9.23: As per Louis, tools providers in the advisory space think about the financial advisor as to the end-user, but advisors don’t use half the tech in their business. 

  • 11.15: We are missing many elements for a highly regulated industry, like financial advice and planning, and it is really simple things that we built into Hubly, and we are just the beginning stages of our road map, says Louis. 

  • 13.38: Jason asks if the CRM integrations are vitally important. What goes beyond like after you cross that bridge? Where do you see this going regarding who you want to plug into?

  • 14.44: Louis says that they have been trying to find where there is room for standardization across the advisory industry.

  • 15.36: There is a massive bottleneck around the scheduling process of getting clients scheduled in for their review or check-in. The preparation component for those meetings and tracking all the follow-ups and the advisors’ promises. 

  • 19.29: Louis says that they see the CRM as the redundant compliant database for the client Ledger. So, they push activities back into the CRM to ensure they have that complaint history that is very important for regulators.

  • 20.05: There is confusion between workflow, automation, and process. Can you elaborate on the difference between those three? asks Jason.

  • 23.23: Louis explains that they are limited in their ability to develop best practices, so they are working towards a future where they can have user-generated content on best practices workflows. 

  • 24.01: Jason asks, if you had one wish or something to change your company or the industry, what would it be? 

  • 24.09: We want to spotlight the back-office workers. There is a lot of focus on the advisor and many tech bills for the advisor. However, they are not the main users of any software in a product or a firm, says Louis

  • 26.19: Our success is measured by how many more end-clients can access our advisors’ services, says Louis

  • 26.44: There are two things that we are working towards. One is to make Hubly self-service so your smaller advisory firms and solo advisors can get started with. The second is starting to work with larger and larger advisory firms than the enterprise space that has already served hundreds, if not thousands of clients. 

3 Key Points

  1. In the financial advisory business, you provide one of the most complex services. Unfortunately, people don’t realize how complicated a service you are delivering to your clients, so we built a robust solution, says Louis.

  2. You built a workflow engine essentially to integrate with different CRMs, pull that data in, and build simple to create, implement, and manage workflows that help advisors run their practices, says Jason.

  3. Louis explains that they have already built a couple of things into Hubly, making the ongoing service component a lot easier in their workflows. A user can create a workflow rule called a recurring rule.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “You can’t eliminate humans from financial services. That is such an essential component of helping people make sound financial decisions.” - Louis Retief

  • “Hubly has many features that allow for personalization on a client level that CRM workflow technology does not qualify for.” - Louis Retief

  • “Advisors want to have the one-ring version of the software, but no software package in the world is world-class at everything.” - Jason

  • “Many advisors make mistakes to jump to the automation component without having the proper process or workflow in place to deliver something.” - Louis Retief

  • “We are very much focused from a cultural standpoint as a company. Focus on processes and workflows for our own business.” - Louis Retief

  • “The things that excite me from a road map standpoint as a company are what we will deliver that will allow us to service more end clients.” - Louis Retief

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech