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Sebastian Good: Oh, you normally cut yourself out. I get it now. Sorry, Laura. Okay. Hey everyone, welcome to our webinar today on the evolution of digital advice. We're going to be talking about how AI-powered planning and portfolio intelligence are becoming differentiators in the self-directed
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Sebastian Good: brokerage space. I'm joined by Xpero's principal designer, Julie. Julie's worked in this industry for 20 years, building experiences for a lot of the brands you've heard of.
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Sebastian Good: I'm the CEO of Xpero. We're going to start just with a little introduction to Xpero itself, and then we're gonna walk you through some of the insights we have in this space.
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Sebastian Good: So, go ahead, Julie. Xperia's a company that, for 25 years, has been building the front ends that power finance. And now that AI is transforming how everyone interacts, we're seeing how AI is transforming those, front ends. Go ahead.
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Sebastian Good: We work in three primary spaces. Across all of them, we are helping investors get the insight to make the decisions they need to make to be responsible stewards of their money.
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Sebastian Good: We work with institutional investment platforms to build portfolio management systems, trading systems, risk management tools, and the such. Love for you to read our case study, where we used AI to transform a portfolio management function over at Vanguard.
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Sebastian Good: We also work with, model makers, fund manufacturers, asset managers in their digital distribution function.
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Sebastian Good: putting tools, resources, calculators, fact sheets, and digital experiences in front of advisors and retail investors to understand their models. And then, of course, what we're here today primarily to talk about, we work with a number of firms to build their digital advice
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Sebastian Good: functions in the self-directed space and advisor-facing space. All right.
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Sebastian Good: How do we do this? Xpero has an ecosystem of partners we work with, Morningstar, ICE Data Services, M2 Newswires among them.
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Sebastian Good: We know that building a great digital experience is only possible on top of great data, and so we work with these and other partners, and of course, in any one of our engagements, typically link into our customers' data as well. Go ahead.
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Sebastian Good: As I mentioned, we work in a variety of spaces. We welcome you to read a little bit about what we do on our website, whether that's helping retirement advisors understand their fund shelf.
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Sebastian Good: Helping self-directed, investors research funds and tools. We help capital markets traders use AI to plan their calls. We help hedge fund companies understand their investments.
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Sebastian Good: across all these spaces, go ahead. We, help
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Sebastian Good: our customers in a couple simple ways. Number one, we do strategy engagements with our customers. We also help deliver, in other words, build the final product.
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Sebastian Good: And we also have a set of accelerators we call Connected Finance that allow us to deliver these experiences we're describing today, very quickly. Go ahead.
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Sebastian Good: This platform, Connected Finance, contains pre-built workflows, pre-built AI agents, great UX that's also compliant with accessibility and multi-language requirements, data integration with those partners.
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Sebastian Good: And for many of our customers, we host it. So, this platform and our design experience and our data partnerships are why we can create the great experiences you're going to see us talking about.
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Sebastian Good: Today.
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Sebastian Good: This is a page to read at your leisure about a number of the modules that are in that finance platform for self-directed investing. Everything from portfolio monitoring to goal tracking, tax-aware portfolio construction.
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Sebastian Good: risk explanations, and so on. But I think the best way to see it, is to just look at some of the examples, that Julie's gonna share with you here now.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, thanks. Hey everyone, Julie Ingalsby. So we're going to talk about, the changing self-directed experience, specifically from a UX UI point of view, and then kind of how that leads into technology.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So we see, 6 experience shifts happening in the market today. You know, this is really informing the next generation of self-directed investing. This first one, Insight Over Data, I think is an interesting one.
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Julie Ingalsbe: you know, when I started 20-plus years ago, we were designing quote pages for the self-directed user, because all of that data was historically in the hands of an advisor, right? And so, we have the job of going through spreadsheets of data and creating quote pages from that. And if you go look at any quote page today, it has an overview page, a chart page, a, you know, fundamentals.
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Julie Ingalsbe: ratings, blah blah blah blah blah. And that was all… a lot of that was because of the, spreadsheets that we started with, and the way the data was organized, right? So we took the way the data was organized, and we basically turned that into a UI.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And so now users have access to more data than they could ever, you know, be able to parse through or understand. And so what they're looking for is to take that raw data and put it into clear explanations that help them really understand what happened… what's happening and why it matters.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Rather than using the historical, you know, paradigms that we've created with organizing data by data type.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Proactive monitoring is another one, just continuing to watch and do that, that work for the user, so that they can come into the experience being educated and feeling trust that the platform or the experiences kind of has their back, and they're able to kind of, you know, gain those insights and become a more educated investor.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Personalization at the core. I mean, we've been talking about personalization for the last, I don't know, 6, 7 years. It's no longer optional, like, experiences have to be personalized. It has to be to the point where this feels like it's mine. It's not just some data display of my data.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Guided decision flows, this is something that we've been really excited, here at Xpero about, but how we can actually connect tools into structured journeys, rather than having tools sit in some random tool menu off to the side of the site experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Actually, creating a way for the user to get access to those tools in line, in the process of some kind of thought or idea or, you know, task that they're trying to complete.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Portfolio understanding, you know, it goes past just, like, giving users their holdings or giving users their, concentration or allocation, but we really want users to understand what they truly own. We were sitting with a client, you know, a few months back, and they were like, we want to be able to tell
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Julie Ingalsbe: you know, a user how many ways they owe Shopify, right? Like, how… like, how are we able to show that x-ray data so that they can truly see what's under the hood?
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Julie Ingalsbe: And then contextual education, you know, a lot of the investors today are being influenced by social media and things like that, and so we really want to be able to do the right thing and give these users the information and the education that they're looking for in order to become strong, you know, investors that are going to make the right choices, rather than just follow the trends.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So we always step back and look at, kind of, what's happening in the market and what innovators are doing. It's something that we are constantly doing and thinking about. So, innovators like Stash, Robinhood, and Wealthfront, they're showing us that the market is already moving from that raw
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Julie Ingalsbe: Investment content toward experiences that organize, explain, and guide.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So Stash is really turning that research into learning. There's a lot of areas inside of this experience where they're…
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Julie Ingalsbe: they're kind of teaching you proactively good money habits, and the whole fundamental core of their business model is to help people stash money away, and to be able to have, like, you know, a little bit of change going into that account every month, and then they take that as an opportunity to educate you, and from a financial point of view.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Robinhood is continuing to innovate almost, I feel like weekly, there's, like, new things that are coming around… out around their Digest product, where they're using AI to give, updates and provide contextual context to what's happening in the markets, why, and connecting the dots for the investor. And then Wealthfront, you know, very much known for their AI planning, but just
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Julie Ingalsbe: I think what's really innovative about that is that it's plain English. It's really easy to understand, and you can kind of… you're like, okay, it's not as intimidating to build a portfolio because
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Julie Ingalsbe: I have these 4 things I need to fill out, and then it's gonna help me along the way.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Public and SoFi have experiences that connect investment content to the user's actual content. So they're explaining why something may wait… why something might matter in a place, and providing those next best actions.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So, public, there is… on their quote pages, they have a lot of, like, why this matters, how does this relate to you. They also have agents that have been integrated into their experience recently that's really interesting. So, instead of having the user going to ChatGPT, they're actually integrating that content right into the experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And then SoFi is, you know, they're connecting a user's
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Julie Ingalsbe: financial life together, from lending to credit cards to banking, and I know we've seen the merge of banking and investing for a while now, but I feel like SoFi is kind of doing it in a different way. Just more, like, a lot of their pages are very easy, basic to understand, and they know their audience, and I feel like they're, continuing to kind of grow that, product line.
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Julie Ingalsbe: These are some more… more, like, innovative. In the U.S, we're kind of going a little bit further. So the Delphin is… they have an AI score, that's available on the holdings pages that gives an average AI score based off fundamentals, technicals, sentiment, low risk, portfolio diversity, so it's going beyond just performance, and it's actually giving some rating and risk
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Julie Ingalsbe: scores, which is dynamic based off of an AI algorithm. They also have trade ideas that are being populated, which is interesting. I haven't really dove too far into it, but I think that that's kind of another take, that's like another leap forward in terms of idea generation. And then Intelligent is doing this conversation investing, experiments where, again, they're bringing in an agent as well, right into the experience, and
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Julie Ingalsbe: the user can kind of type what they're looking for, and it starts to build almost, like, thematic research on the fly. With… they also have this, like, should I buy piece.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And it's relevant to who you are as an investor, so it takes into consideration the things that you have in your watchlist or in your portfolio, and then says, like, should I buy this or should I not buy it? So they're really walking a pretty fine line there, but it's kind of interesting to see what is, you know, what's happening in that space.
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Sebastian Good: It's pretty amazing how much innovation there is on this AI front in the U.S. I think, for some obvious reasons, there's a lot of freedom being explored in the regulatory space.
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Sebastian Good: I also think these examples are really interesting, because I think there's kind of a war going on, like a mindshare war, where
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Sebastian Good: investors, because they're normal people. I think the stat is, like, 50% of North Americans use a chatbot at least weekly, and most of those use it daily.
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Sebastian Good: And so, one of the big questions is, like, do the banks and brokerages and every other vendor we use need to come into that chat GPT, that claw, that Anthropic experience as, like, plugins and such? Or are they going to be able to use the models in their own, you know, user experiences like you see here?
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Sebastian Good: Probably the wimpy answer is a little bit of both, but those are really big places that we're exploring right now in terms of user experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, and when you bring that up to clients, their eyes are like, ugh, right? Because taking themselves out of that, you know, safe environment that they've created, and putting them in a chat GPT, like, it's just interesting. I'm curious to see where things are gonna end up,
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Sebastian Good: Yeah, I think, you know, from a regulation perspective, there's a very natural fear, like, well, goodness knows what they've been doing in that session, and they can screenshot it and make us look bad, or, you know, the AI can lead them down a terrible road.
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Sebastian Good: They're there. They're gonna stay there. Is there an authenticated and safe experience you can inject? Or is there an authenticated and safe experience you can take control of? I really think we'll see innovation down both of those paths.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, I agree.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Okay.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, so do you want to kind of bring this back to… from a business point of view?
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Sebastian Good: Yeah, so, as finance enthusiasts and tech enthusiasts, I mean, we get pretty wired and excited talking about building planners and AI agents and stuff, but at the end of the day.
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Sebastian Good: you know, talking to someone with a chatbot is expensive. There's tokens to burn, and deploying these tools and fielding the support, and running them, you know, costs money, so…
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Sebastian Good: why are people doing this? I think it really comes down to,
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Sebastian Good: fee compression and the merging of full-service advice and digital advice and self-service advice. You know.
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Sebastian Good: what services belong in which of those buckets is changing very quickly, and you're seeing people taking advantage of the fact that these tools can be made more self-service through better UX, and more self-service through better AI, right? So, you know, maybe the easiest example is a Robinhood who has a set of AI functions, but also kind of trading discounts and other benefits that they roll up into a gold
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Sebastian Good: So
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Sebastian Good: Commissions are free, they're paying for order flow, you know, different brokerages take approaches like that. Where are you going to make your money? If you can get everybody on a $50 a year plan, all of a sudden, you have dependable revenue, and you need to justify that with tools.
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Sebastian Good: And perhaps the larger one is their strategies product, more related to what we're talking about today, where if you are gold, so you've already paid 50 bucks, you're going to pay up to $250 more for a set of planners, frankly, like we're going to talk about today. Within a year, they had over a billion dollars, you know, managed under that product, so a little bit of math reveals that providing some of these tools with the right
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Sebastian Good: UI and data integrations can result in some really big recurring revenue that's disappeared once you stop charging for trades.
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Sebastian Good: Sofi, is in a similar place. They charge $10 a month.
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Sebastian Good: They've got millions of members. There's an AI planner that they've built with their own financial planner, so their angle on this is less, sort of, standard traditional portfolio management and more around, coaching and financial planning.
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Sebastian Good: journeys, and, you know, the stats that they publicize are pretty good around a lot of engaged, people taking real actions that, you know, benefit the underlying platform. If you move cash, if you make a trade, those are also revenue opportunities.
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Sebastian Good: And then, you know, the other interesting model, that I think about is Wealthfront. I actually used their product for a while. It's a really nice kind of retirement and planning solution, and it's 100% free.
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Sebastian Good: And anyone that's looked at one of those knows that sort of a tax return-aware yearly planner with smart insights is a really large product surface, right? That's a big thing to just give away.
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Sebastian Good: They're not making money on it. They're using it as an acquisition, engine, where they're bringing more and more people into
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Sebastian Good: a conversation where they've already done a lot of the, maybe, quote-unquote easy stuff, getting information out of the customer, how much do you make, what's your retirement plan?
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Sebastian Good: And then when they say, geez, this is bigger than I thought, I need some advice, there's a paid advisor right there. And I would argue that if I were to sit in front of a paid advisor and fill out a bunch of spreadsheets, I'm not using his or her time very well. This is actually kind of a cool division of labor.
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Sebastian Good: And you see that again, also in the example at the bottom, which is Schwab. They had a premium intelligent Portfolios product that they announced recently.
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Sebastian Good: they're going to shut down in favor of that same division. There's a core, kind of simplified, intelligent portfolios platform that's basically free as part of their brokerage, and they've done some segmentation where they're going to push those more difficult planning questions, you know, back to those full-service advisors. So, I think the right way to think about this is not, you know, what is a self-directed, traditional sort of E-Trade-era investor
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Sebastian Good: willing to pay for, it's what is everyone willing to pay for, and how are some of those functions moving from
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Sebastian Good: Full service into self-directed, or hybrid.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Where do you think our clients are gonna end up? Like, do you think we're gonna see more subscription kind of things popping up in that retail space?
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Sebastian Good: I don't think there's any way around it. And the truth is, a lot of the industry has already been that way, you know.
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Sebastian Good: custodians and brokerages make a surprising amount of money on cash balances. Just getting your cash in produces recurring revenue, right? Encouraging people to rebalance causes, recurring revenue. I don't see,
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Sebastian Good: much revenue for folks outside of the next high-margin product, like options trading or crypto trading. Like, that will always be there, we'll always be chasing the next interesting product.
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Sebastian Good: But for these to be a sustainable business, as this kind of digital economy has been so efficient at forcing, you know, margins and commissions down to zero over time.
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Sebastian Good: I think people are willing to pay for this. And you see that in the AI space, right? Yeah, there's hundreds of millions, or even billions, I think, of people that use the free AI products.
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Sebastian Good: But a lot of people are paying $20 a month. A surprising number of people are paying $200 a month, because these tools provide value.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So I guess if we bring this back to the user, right, from their point of view,
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Julie Ingalsbe: Users are not looking for more information. They're asking to make sense of what they already have.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So we see the journey as, you know, I want to stay informed, I want to make sure I know what's happening, I want to really have, the experience help me understand the relevance. So why does this matter to me? Why should I be looking at it from, you know, that personalization point of view we were talking about earlier? And I want to simplify the complexity, right? And, I mean, we… I don't want to go down this tangent, but we were talking
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Julie Ingalsbe: about the death of the persona a few weeks back, and that complexity could also be in this realm, right? Where, you know, it could… the interface itself could flex depending on what I think I might need, right? If it's a really simple explanation or something that's a little bit more complex.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So making sure that the user really understands the information, so that ultimately they can make a decision, and they can act with confidence, because they know that they're, you know, doing the right thing. And then, ultimately, they're staying in control of their own financial picture.
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Sebastian Good: I think of this sometimes as, like, a game that has to be learned. If anyone's bought, like, a big modern video game, for instance, or they like to play those complex German board games with their friends or whatever, right? Sometimes you approach this experience, and it's overwhelming. There's so many things, right? I don't know how to build my character or win the game.
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Sebastian Good: Well, these… These brokerage portals are like that.
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Sebastian Good: oh my gosh, here's options, here's planning, here's portfolio management, here's what you should do with your cash, wow, mutual funds, college savings, right? And it's very easy to just be overwhelmed, even if you know what a lot of that material is, and it's certainly overwhelming if you have very varying levels of expertise, right? Someone may show up because they're interested in doing some cool options trades because they're a gambler at heart.
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Sebastian Good: But they're probably also interested in saving for their retirement in a responsible way, and so you see one place with all of these different tools, and just throwing them on tabs based on when you implemented them is just not a great solution anymore.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Nope.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So this is how we at Xpero prioritize that intelligence, and I'll let you kind of chime in on this too, Sebastian, but basically, we take market signals and inputs, so Portfolio holdings, watch lists, you know, news, research, all of the raw data, and we do a little bit of deterministic intelligent logic.
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Julie Ingalsbe: said it. And… sorry, that word is always so hard for me.
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Julie Ingalsbe: We do a little bit of that logic where we kind of, like, match it based off of its relevance, based off of the user's intent, based off of, like, where we feel like it falls in terms of, like.
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Julie Ingalsbe: time sensitivity, and all those kinds of things, and we output it to several different places, but one of which is, like, assorted, you know, feed of cards, right, that gives us a relevant amount of content, or even, like, Portfolio Aware News, or we have a product called Lens that helps the user have a lens over the top of their experience that…
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Julie Ingalsbe: helps drive, you know, what matters to them. So, like, all of these different products that we have, this kind of logic flows through.
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Sebastian Good: Yeah, and I think this is an important point, and if we… if we have another, conversation about, sort of how these are implemented under the cover.
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Sebastian Good: we could really get deep into this, but as exciting as AI, which has really come to be focused on, kind of, frontier model LLM, right, generative chat GPT-type technology, as exciting as that is in areas like
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Sebastian Good: Summarizing research, or understanding news, or helping have live conversations with the investor.
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Sebastian Good: You know, we do need to remember that those conversations can be slightly non-deterministic, they can be a little confusing, to implement safely, they're expensive to run compared to some other approaches, and so it's really important to prioritize their use along with
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Sebastian Good: frankly, cheaper and more reliable deterministic intelligence for certain kinds of activities. You don't need to burn LLM tokens to give someone a great
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Sebastian Good: What's your portfolio done since you've been gone?
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Sebastian Good: Kind of view, or help them do, sort of a,
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Sebastian Good: revealed information over time, right, to cater to their complexity level. You'll use an AI for part of that, helping explain in nice English words what happened, but a lot of the statistics, a lot of the priority should really be deterministic in your experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yep.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Okay, last slide before we kind of get into a demo of a… of a mobile app that we have. But this is just… we really believe that AI across the experience is just beyond the little sparkle, summarization, you know,
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Julie Ingalsbe: blob of text, like Sebastian was talking about. So, this brings it back to those six, principles that we talked about at the very beginning, but, you know, AI could be everything from personalization, like, show me what matters, based off of what I own. So, keep me informed into the things I own, and all of the relevant,
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Julie Ingalsbe: kind of branches from those own… from that ownership, right? So that that way I have an idea of what's going on in that ecosystem of my investments.
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Julie Ingalsbe: To explaining, like, tell me this in plain English. This is the more traditional little sparkle market summary visualization or text blob. And then monitor, so what's happened since the last time I was here, like we were talking about, or what needs my attention.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Guided decision flows, so, like, help me understand all the options I have before I make those decisions, so that I feel confident that I'm making the right decision. And then Portfolio understanding, you know, just really helped me…
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Julie Ingalsbe: look at these things and prepare me for the next step. So, help me compare these things, help me build this so I can review it, kind of, experience. And then delegate is another piece of this, which is
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Julie Ingalsbe: insight over data, you know, watch this and tell me what's changed when I come back, or let me know when this thing starts to affect my portfolio. And that should be something that's more of an automated kind of alert, where in the past it was, like, more, manual alert settings that someone would have to go do, but this is…
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Julie Ingalsbe: The system is able to identify when there's been engagement, and to be able to help the user move through that.
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Sebastian Good: Yeah, I think of that whole bottom row as embodying one of the great strengths of LLM-based AI right now, which is it can have a conversation with the user, and it can activate tools. Back to what I was saying about, you know, people wandering into this huge game full of tools and being,
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Sebastian Good: overwhelmed. It's much easier for them to say, can you tell me when that fund is open for investing again?
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Sebastian Good: As opposed to hunting through some sort of alert center, you know, to find the right checkbox to check, right?
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Absolutely. Okay, so we are going to…
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Julie Ingalsbe: We're gonna go ahead and toggle into a little bit of a demo here. This is a mobile application that we've been working on for a self-directed user, that is fairly engaged. You know, they were logged into this experience a week ago, and they're coming back to kind of see what's happening.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Each… this experiment… ex… experience is very much like a TikTok experience, where I flip through this, and it's like an endless amount of just, like, scrolling through. The idea here is that I don't have to navigate anywhere, the content is coming to me. So, this very first one is, you know, welcome back, this is what's happened.
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Julie Ingalsbe: This is that proactive monitoring piece that we were talking about with the six principles.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And I immediately have an insight that's just saying that, you know, my risk level seems to be moving towards aggressive, which I was potentially, like, a moderate before this.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So the idea here is that I can scroll…
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Julie Ingalsbe: And I can go to the next piece of information. And the way we think about this is, it's just bite-sized pieces of content that's being delivered to the user, where in the past, you might get a report that's, like, you know, tons of pages long, or you might have an interface of a portfolio view of, like, all of your data displays that's talking about your portfolio. But we want to actually present that information to you
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Julie Ingalsbe: one little tiny piece at a time, especially in a mobile experience, we feel like it's a lot more relevant. So here we're talking about what is it actually increasing that risk, right? So we're looking at a sector exposure, and we're highlighting that, you know, you're actually pretty heavily weighted in technology, and that's making, you know, it's more sensitive to those market movements, and so you're probably seeing that from a risk point of view.
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Julie Ingalsbe: If I continue this journey.
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Julie Ingalsbe: we can identify where that risk is coming from. So, now we've gone one level deeper, and it's talking about those underlying holdings, and how much of that volatility is coming from them. And it's from, like, a smaller amount of holdings, right? So I've got NVIDIA, Meta, and Tesla that are all… have a higher volatility rating that could also be attributing to that higher volatility, or risk rating from my portfolio.
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Julie Ingalsbe: At any time, we have, like, AI at the bottom of this experience that is… has what we're calling smart prompts, so I could get some educational content around what is volatility, what does that actually mean? So we're continuing to, like, help the user really understand. But if they know what it is, they can just continue on that journey.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So here we're using some X-ray tools that we have via some Morningstar data, to really understand what the user owns. So this is a stock intersection chart, where we can kind of see by tapping into these visualizations, like, how much of one particular, stock do I actually own, and how do I own it? This particular user only really has two shares, or two funds.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And so, it's interesting to see that overlap, within that experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: This is what we were talking about earlier with this guided,
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Julie Ingalsbe: experiences. So, kind of think about it as, like, an old-school choose-your-own-adventure. Rather than just continuing to feed content to the user, we want to say, okay, what… where do you want to go next? And we can provide a series of topics that helps them
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Julie Ingalsbe: kind of go down the next path. So, anything from, like, what might happen in the downturn, or where am I overexposed, if they want to keep going down that portfolio journey.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Or if they want to talk about, like, what's happening in the markets, or how do I compare to the markets, those are all questions and topics that the system, the AI… the intelligence of this can actually address.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So, we're gonna do what's happening in the markets right now, and we're seeing a little bit of a market analysis of what's happening from a performance point of view. This user's in Canada, a lot of our clients are in Canada, so this is talking about the Canadian markets.
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Julie Ingalsbe: But we're looking at the indices and giving some… a market summary of what's happening, as well as, you know, advancers, decliners, and seeing what's happening underneath the surface.
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Julie Ingalsbe: If I continue to scroll, this is,
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Julie Ingalsbe: this is some deterministic logic that we're adding on top of that summarization. So what's helping the market? So, energy, financials, and oil prices seem to be helping the market right now. What's hurting the market? Technology, market breadth, global concerns. Those are all kind of hurting the market. So it's trying to give the user a simple breakdown of, like, what is this complex thing, and how are we, breaking it down?
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Sebastian Good: And I love this approach, Julie, because it mirrors how everybody, at this point, consumes a lot of their data around, you know, swipe left, swipe right, like, continue watching, right? I mean.
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Sebastian Good: my short-form video feed is just full of endless examples of how to perfectly brown the right meat, right? I guess because I just watch those videos till they're done, right? So, super cool. I get to learn how to cook better. They notice. I think that happens here, too. Like, I'm drilling into some of this, like, okay, what's helping and hurting the market?
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Sebastian Good: As opposed to, you know, looking somewhere else. This really helps understand what people are interested in, right, from that lens perspective, and we can continue to tailor material for them.
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Sebastian Good: And it also just helps with that progressive disclosure. You're not designing
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Sebastian Good: A page that shows everything that only a financial advisor could love. That page should exist.
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Sebastian Good: see it, and a financial advisor should see it, but in general, ain't nobody got time for that, right? They want to drill down in some of the things they're looking at now.
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Julie Ingalsbe: I think this interface is also really great because it also breaks that barrier of the traditional tab structure of a website, right? Something that's always bothered me is that we have a, like a home page or, you know, accounts portfolio page, and then we have a markets page, and the two don't talk to each other, right? Most of the time, because the markets page is owned by some vendor, and the portfolio page is owned by the bank itself, right?
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Julie Ingalsbe: And so, like, getting those two things attached to each other is sometimes hard. But in here, what we're doing is we're not giving you that navigational structure, and I can go straight from a market content to a portfolio content, and I can actually say, okay, we're going to bring it from market data down to, like, what's happening in my portfolio, what's helping my portfolio, what's hurting it. And it… so it starts to kind of bring those…
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Julie Ingalsbe: Connection points back to the user, so that they really understand what's happening in their portfolio.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Another piece is goals, right? So we're seeing a lot of traction in the industry, especially with our clients, around, setting goals and having a breakdown of what's happening with goals. One interaction paradigm I wanted to talk about here is
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Julie Ingalsbe: Here, the user's kind of looking at two goals that they have established, this retirement goal and this lake house goal. If I click in or tap into any of these parts of the application, it actually brings up the AI as the response.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So everything in this app is being responded with an AI, kind of experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So you get the display, and I can tap into it, and now it's gonna say, you know, actually, looks like you might not get close, you know, it needs a little bit of attention, your Lake Gold does. Lake House does. And so it's giving us that data display that's sitting behind the scenes that I was looking at on that prior screen.
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Sebastian Good: I think planning is also a great example of, sort of, progressive disclosure and exposure. If the first entry to your nicer Portfolio tools is, like.
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Sebastian Good: tell me about your plan. That's very intimidating, and you may not have that level of trust yet, but if you insert some of these experiences, you know, as people are understanding their portfolio, as they're understanding the market.
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Sebastian Good: They can start to share little bits of it, and that strengthens the, you know, the value of the information you can share with them.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, absolutely.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So one of the, kind of, another piece of this is contextual education. You know, we've found, talking with our clients, is that over the years, they've spent so much, money invested in creating, educational content and collateral and, you know, different research and things like that that is kind of buried on their, on their site.
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Julie Ingalsbe: You know, and we were just talking to a client, like, a couple weeks ago, and they're like, yeah, we have all this stuff, and we just… users can't find it, you know? So, if we have an experience like this, then we can actually pull that contextual education in line, and, you know, we were just talking about some portfolio risk and portfolio analysis, so we can actually bring in some common strategies that are associated with that to help the user
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Julie Ingalsbe: Have another, avenue to continue to grow and learn.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Okay, so I think I'm actually gonna go back up to the beginning, because I wanted to go down this path of…
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Julie Ingalsbe: you know, I have this risk alert, right? And I want to really understand where it's coming from. Like, you know, I got a little bit of a display when we were talking originally, about, like, where it is and what's impacting it.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So if I tap into understanding my risk.
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Julie Ingalsbe: It'll actually say, hey, you know, you were… you were selected as moderate when you first started this. Do you want to retake that questionnaire, to see if you truly are still, you know, a moderate kind of investor? If not, I can just continue, and I actually kind of want to see what happens if I, like, rebalance my portfolio.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And so the idea here, this is that…
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Julie Ingalsbe: experience where we're pulling tools into the interface, rather than having the user go to a place where they're going to rebalance their portfolio. We're actually going to bring it right in line with the experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So now, you know, it's asking if I can confirm some details, like which account, what's my, you know, how much am I rebalancing, what is this for, what's the goal, you know, what's my risk profile, all of those kinds of things.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And if I continue, we… there's kind of two options here. I can, optimize that rebalance with the holdings that I already have.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Or I can see the whole… I want to see my holdings and adjust them, right? So then that's more of a robust experience of, like, actually, I want to sell this and buy this.
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Julie Ingalsbe: But if we want to just optimize with what we already have, I can go ahead and do that, and it'll actually show me that rebalanced portfolio, so that I can see, okay, it's actually, you know, looked at, it's upped my Canadian equity, or it's lowered some of that global fixed income.
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Sebastian Good: I think this is an area where there's a lot of innovation right now, right? There was a wave of, sort of, robo-investors and target date funds, and those are good solutions for some people, but there's a lot of investors that want to put their fingers on it themselves, and putting that rebalance conversation or the construction conversation in context of a market movement, in context of a… it's been a quarter since we've talked.
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Sebastian Good: In context of, you know, an educational video they're watching. Gives them an opportunity to take action when they're primed on it.
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Sebastian Good: And, you know, at the end of the day, generating transactions is also healthy for the bank.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Absolutely.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And then, you know, we could go to a review and trade view, but then, you know, really, I just want to be a good investor and make sure that I compare it to my current portfolio, which allows us to kind of do a little bit of a display of, like, current portfolio versus rebalance. What am I actually doing here to get myself back into balance?
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Julie Ingalsbe: And, we have this… we have an insights that sits along our comparison tool that gives us thumbs up, thumbs down, you know, positives and negatives of… of what's happening here, giving that plain English display of, like, how, how the change… what are the… what are the changes actually doing under the hood?
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Julie Ingalsbe: So yeah, that's what we have from a demo point of view. Was there anything else, Sebastian, you wanted to chat about?
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Sebastian Good: No, I think that's really nice, and just for clarity here, you know.
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Sebastian Good: we construct digital experiences for people based on this, you know, connected finance framework we have, and the data vendors that we partner with, and using, you know, our customers' existing data agreements. So, you know, what we build for any particular customer won't
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Sebastian Good: look exactly like this. This is sort of a showcase, but the underlying, you know, modules all play together in these different, combinations to create the experience that you want, so…
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Sebastian Good: That's kind of what we're seeing here. Yeah, let's, let's bring it home, Julie.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So, just sort of breaking this down again, I think it's good. What is the saying? Like, you say things 3 times in a presentation for someone to really understand it or something?
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Julie Ingalsbe: So we're just going to kind of go back through those, pillars that we talked about initially, and it… I think it helps to kind of look at a before and an after, right? So, insight over data, again, turning that raw data into something that actually matters. We know from a business point of view that this increases engagement, and it differentiates the platform, because a lot of experiences today are just a bunch of data, you know, organized by type on a page.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So before, we might have something on the left where it's, you know, just, here's the indices data, there you go, that's what this is doing right now, versus what we were just showing you of, like, okay, this is actually what's happening, and this is what's helping and hurting that market.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Proactive monitoring… So this is continuing to look at that portfolio, surface those insights.
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Julie Ingalsbe: You know, today you might have just a standard, you know, holdings performance risk view, where I have to actually go understand, is beta good if it's high, or is it bad if it's low? Like, I don't know, right? So, I have to actually go do that math or figure that out, versus, you know, something today where we can use a rating system or, intelligence to be able to give the user
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Julie Ingalsbe: Guidance around their risk in their portfolio.
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Sebastian Good: This is a really important area, right, because with our Portfolio Monitor, we're seeing people ask to monitor a lot of things. This is a great example from our ecosystem. This is a Morningstar risk
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Sebastian Good: assessment, and they have a really nice methodology that lets them assign a uniform set of scores. It can be applied to risk tolerance questionnaires, right? And so you can see if someone's portfolio risk is changing, especially if it's compared to their stated tolerance.
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Sebastian Good: That's an interesting alert for someone, and that's what you see in this story. But I can also alert on
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Sebastian Good: Your cash balance has been 10% of your total portfolio for a whole quarter.
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Sebastian Good: do you want to have a conversation about that? And if we know about their portfolio, it could be a rebalancing opportunity, or it could be…
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Sebastian Good: you haven't done anything with your stupid account since you've been here for 3 months. We want to engage in some sort of, you know, activity to, you know, educate you about what we have. So, or, hey, there's been a ratings or research change in your portfolio, right?
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Sebastian Good: Traditionally, a lot of this, like I said before, is hunting for a watch list and an alert system, many of which were really built with, like, active traders in mind, you know, give me a 10% alert, you know, price change.
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Sebastian Good: Whereas, really, we see it as an ongoing conversation. It's an opportunity to have a continuing relationship with the customer, frankly, self-directed or advised, where that monitor can be configured to alert on all kinds of different metrics.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And at the end of the day, it just strengthens that trust, right? Because then the user feels, or the investor feels like they're being taken care of, you know? They have… it has their back, and they're able to, kind of invest with competence.
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Sebastian Good: Yeah, I got a lot going on. I'm not opening my brokerage page every day to see if they have an idea for me, right? I want them to reach out in a responsible way, and monitoring their portfolio is a key part of that.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yep.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Okay, so personalization at the core. You know, this is just really looking at, kind of tailoring that story to me, right? So, like, no two experiences are the same when I'm inside of this application. You know, you might not see the same screens that I screen… see based off of that personalization. But before, we really have that, you know, here's your stock sectors, there you go, there's the allocation that they're in.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Versus, like, we're actually going to tie that data to something that matters that's correlated to you. So, like, we're telling that risk story, that's part of the journey that you're going down, so now we're going to be able to, you know, show that same data, but just in a different way so that the user can understand it.
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Sebastian Good: And this is going to drive investment ideas, is ultimately what happens here, because if I'm telling you, this is doing well, this is doing badly, this is what's happening in the market, if the interface allows me to link that very directly to news and research and trading ideas, I'm probably going to go do something about it.
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Sebastian Good: I think there's a behavioral finance conversation about how to make that a healthy experience, because we want the investors to, you know, do well, not gamble.
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Sebastian Good: They need to be exposed to these ideas, and in context, educational videos, you know, research reports, sector outlooks, these are much more engaging when they're presented because something is happening to me.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Absolutely.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So number 4 was that guided decision flows. I love the before on this one, because it's the… it's the classic, tool landing page. Let's see if we can carve everything we have impossible in one particular screen, and call it these names that no one understands. Like, I… I just… I truly don't think that the, you know, some of the younger, newer investors understand what a screener is.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Right? That is something that we've been using for decades, and I just don't feel like it's relevant. So anyways, so the before is really just this, like, okay, these are all the tools by function, here you go, go figure out what you need to do, versus, you know, here, we're actually going to help you, we're gonna give you some suggestions of, like, where you could go on this journey, and you're still in control, you're still making those decisions, you're still driving it.
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Julie Ingalsbe: But it's helping you, have those, like, guided conversations and guided experiences.
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Sebastian Good: We've had, people ask, well, this is interesting, I see how…
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Sebastian Good: in-context conversation could help me, you know, move to a tool, right, that's relevant to my portfolio? And today we're mostly talking about portfolio conversations.
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Sebastian Good: We had someone ask, well, could it bring them to a tool that would help them find one of our branches? Yeah. Right? And I think, you know, we as a business focus on the financial side of this. We don't publish a general purpose, you know, service bot.
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Sebastian Good: it's really key, I think, to understand that a lot of these chat experiences are going to connect with each other, and we think about how our agent can say, that's an interesting question, I can't help you with it, but I understand some other tools or some other agents I can hand you off to.
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Sebastian Good: That's, that's very much happening.
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Julie Ingalsbe: And I think it will help surface tools that are maybe really valuable but hidden, right? That could be on that accounts page that I would have never thought were there. And it helps, kind of, with that discoverability.
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Sebastian Good: Well, and, and…
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Sebastian Good: as you get into this, this is sort of a conversation design and commercial conversation, you can be guided to additional information. Hybrid advice would be a great example of this.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yep.
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Sebastian Good: I'm running and gunning on a self-directed site, and eventually I start asking some questions about my plan that I don't want to answer, because this is a simple planning module for a self-directed advisor. You're starting to ask about tax consequences and trusts and stuff.
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Sebastian Good: I'm gonna bring you into, sort of, my acquisition flow for… Full-service advice, for instance.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yep.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Okay, so Portfolio understanding, you know, really, the before is just a list of holdings, so these are the holdings that I have, or the, the,
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Julie Ingalsbe: the underlyings for a particular fund, you know, in a table of data, versus something that's a little bit more engaging. And also, I think that this one ties into, some of the…
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Julie Ingalsbe: personalization that we were talking about before, and telling a story, right? And it's, like, giving you a story of what is my portfolio doing, and doing it in a visual way that's kind of easier to understand.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So that the user understands how many ways they own Apple. And instead of having to clap, you know, expand multiple things, I can see it in one display.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Lastly, contextual education. Like we talked about earlier, you know, really, there's just… a lot of our clients have spent a lot of money making educational content that's actually really valuable, but it's just really hard to find. It's inside of an educational hub, you know, that's sort of buried on the last tab of the experience.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Where this actually pulls it in line so that the user can get that contextual education, in a really easy way in context of what they're looking at.
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Sebastian Good: We've done some things that you didn't show this morning, like one of these next swipes for Tell Me More.
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Sebastian Good: could be a great video that's produced by your education group or by one of your influencer partners, right, explaining a key concept in context. Or during, like, an investment research session where I'm using a screener, whether I tell the user that that's what it is or not. We have a really nice AI screener experience that combines being able to look at research and traditional screening
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Sebastian Good: If I'm just sitting asking questions about semiconductors, I don't only have to set a semiconductor filter in the screener. I can also suggest, do you want to read Morningstar's latest semiconductor, you know, outlook article from this quarter? That's in-context education.
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Julie Ingalsbe: So kind of, like, pulling it all together, you know, we're constantly asked by our clients, okay, how do you actually meet our business goals?
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Julie Ingalsbe: And so, that's something that is always top of mind when we're building product, is we don't want to just go build product for product's sake. We want to actually make sure that it's going to be, A, beneficial to the user, and B,
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Julie Ingalsbe: you know, help grow the business at the end of the day. So we have business goals on the left, and kind of pulling it back to, like, why it matters to the user. And then, you know, these are Xpero solutions that we believe serve both of those, you know, things.
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Sebastian Good: Totally.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Great.
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Sebastian Good: So, just to wrap it up, to bring it back to how we help with this.
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Sebastian Good: Our role in helping our customers put these digital experiences together is in design, understanding what key aspects of the existing experience need to be preserved, what opportunities there are to build new.
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Sebastian Good: We build, you know, we're good neighbors. We build inside the context of many different providers, but we do deliver that sort of blended solution, and for the stuff you saw today, that is grounded by underlying modules that may look different for each deployment, different design system, different colors, right, different configuration choices, accessibility choices.
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Sebastian Good: But ultimately, the hard bits, around data access or a planning engine, that sort of thing are settled, and they're surfaced in your data experience. So, I think the last one we have here, Julie, is a… go ahead to the next one, yeah.
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Sebastian Good: the product families that we showed, kind of, pictures of today, Portfolio intelligence around running portfolio analytics, a lot of that's driven by our friends, over at Morningstore with their high-quality data.
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Sebastian Good: Tools for constructing against goals or model portfolio, you know, asset classes, a self-directed,
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Sebastian Good: caliber rebalancing engine that can recommend the trades and the tax-aware accounts they should be in. A product we call Connected Intelligence, which ingests news and research from people like MT Newswires, Morningstar, or your own capital markets team, or third-party vendors you have.
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Sebastian Good: relationships with, and uses AI to parse those into a common context so that we can start attaching interesting research information or news articles to your portfolio in a responsible way.
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Sebastian Good: Guided Conversations, an engine that lets us design conversations that bring our tools and your tools into one place. And finally, the stuff that we kind of started with, Lens, a tool that helps us record user preferences.
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Sebastian Good: and generate, sort of, next views, for them. So, yeah, thanks everyone for listening today. Today was very design-focused. We'll probably do,
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Sebastian Good: another one where we get into some of the fun technology under the covers in those products. But let us know how we can help you build your next digital experience, whether it's for self-directed or hybrid advisors.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah.
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Laura Smith: Yeah, thank you guys, for hosting today. I, we did have one question come through, so I wanted to…
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Sebastian Good: Oh, fun.
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Laura Smith: that answered right before we go. And just as a reminder to all the attendees, we did record today's session, so I'll be sending out an email this week with a copy of the recording, so you will have that. But there was one question. Do you find brokers are using this AI experience, specifically guided decision flow, as an add-on way?
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Laura Smith: Sorry, as an add-on, Or are they.
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Sebastian Good: Okay, yeah.
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Laura Smith: The existing tool landing page.
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Sebastian Good: I should let Julie answer that from a design perspective, but from a conversations we've had perspective, I think the answer is it's going to be a little of both.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Because…
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Sebastian Good: there's a cheese-moving problem for experienced investors, right? As cool as a guided or even sort of TikTok-style revelatory kind of experience is, if I already have a set of tools I like, it's not clear that it should replace those. What do you think, Julie?
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, I kind of have the same answer, because I just… I don't know, I feel like we're still…
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Julie Ingalsbe: I mean, in the financial industry, I think we're still sort of uncovering that, and I also feel like there's so many other tools that we're competing with that the client owns themselves, right? So then, like, trying to integrate those things together is gonna be a little bit of a pickle.
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Julie Ingalsbe: Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both, I really do, yeah.
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Sebastian Good: I mean, from my own usage, there are whole workflows I now execute completely within chat.
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Sebastian Good: through a tool, but I've got great integrations. So, I could imagine, and I haven't seen anyone willing to go do this yet directly, I guess Interactive Brokers up in Canada is doing this. I can trade from my Claude session.
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Sebastian Good: Right? I can imagine an experience where I'm in Claude itself, and when I say, yep, let's do that trade, you know, something shows up on my phone to confirm that it's really me, and it's, you know, it's a bank app and everything, I could see that being very exciting for people. The brokerage could offer that itself.
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Sebastian Good: I think they're going to also offer the existing tools, because a lot of them exist for a reason. As cool as the chat-based experience is, it's also pretty annoying to be like, oh, don't make the chart like that, right? Or, wait, I didn't understand that summary, because it was a little different than the last time. So, even the chat experiences that we designed, and you saw that in the demo, right? Like.
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Sebastian Good: Often the answer is a tool.
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Sebastian Good: Right? Are there any cheap semiconductors left? Here's a summary of the Morningstar research, and I've adjusted the screener you're looking at according to some of those criteria. What do you think? I think that's the future.
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Julie Ingalsbe: I think so too.
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Sebastian Good: Awesome. Well, thanks for that question.
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Sebastian Good: We'll see you next time.
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Laura Smith: Have a great rest of your week!
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Julie Ingalsbe: Thanks, everyone!
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Sebastian Good: Thanks, bye-bye.
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Julie Ingalsbe: See ya.
