The WealthStack Podcast
00:02:01 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
[00:02:01] S2: There's a lot of work. There's... I have to say there's a lot of work. Hours are pretty full on, full days and weekends. But outside of work, I actually got married just at the end of last year. And that is spending time with my wife, and we just relocated to New York. And, yeah, we like to explore the city and see some of the the new parts in New York, which is awesome. [00:02:20] S1: Love it. Yes. I'm originally from there. I will say I do miss the food scene every now and then. It's it's hard to come by good at pizza and bagels out here in Colorado, but we're getting there. So enjoy that, and congratulations, obviously. It's a very exciting time. So you got a lot going on. New marriage. New company. So for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with Nevis yet, give us the high level overview. What... Who are you building for, and what problem are you most obsessed with solving?
00:02:47 · Mark Swan, Shannon Rosic
[00:02:47] S2: Yeah, absolutely. So Nevis is an AI platform for wealth management. And so what we do is we think of AI as really solving the most important problem within wealth management companies, which we believe is the administrative burden for advisors and their teams. Right? And so we believe that where AI can actually help wealth management firms the most is help to streamline processes all the way from what advisors doing on a day to day basis to help them save more time to help scale a business, but actually more importantly, on how to re orchestrate and automate a lot of the middle and back office of wealth management firms. So account opening trade processing, and all the things that actually allow a firm to grow. And the biggest problem that we want to solve is 80% of advisors are spending their day or week on admin, right? And that means less time for their clients, less time for growth, less time for being able to actually give that experience more for what they really wanted to come to the industry for, which is that being close to clients and delivering best in class service. And so by freeing that up, give those advisors that time back, help them scale, help them grow, help them better serve their clients. [00:03:55] S1: And one thing that actually stood out to me is that Nevis is not positioning itself as just another AI add on. You're talking about a truly unified AI platform for wealth management. So when you say that, what do you mean, and how should RIAs think about the difference between a feature and truly a real platform?
00:04:13 · Mark Swan
[00:04:13] S2: Yeah. So I... The way I think about it is you have two types of AI. Right? You have horizontal AI, which essentially is typically point solutions. So think of that as a notetaker or document parser, or even lead generation tool. They solve a point solution, right? They solve a step in the process. My view is what firms really want is a more vertical AI solution. So something that is much more deeply integrated into their workflows and into their firm. So what does it mean to be vertical? Number one, it needs to be industry specific. Understand the nuances of what it means to be running a wealth management business. They need to be fine tuned and tweak to those processes. So being able to parse a tax document is actually quite a specific workflow, which then might get triggered with multiple steps. Again, at enterprise, you can throw in a chat GPT, but actually that's not what the structure should actually be from a security and kind of guardrails perspective. And she's been something much more deeply vertically integrated. The second vertical, the vertical AIPs is on workflow. So really going into, into firms and actually remapping their middle and back office workflows onto more agentic processes that help in orchestrate and automate those. And really, the vertical side could be a combination of point solutions as features, right? So Nevis, we have a notetaker, right? We have a document parsing solution. We have an AI assistant product. We have prep tools, parsing tools. We have proposal generation. We have all of these features, but they're all just features of a larger platform. And the thing that we like to say is that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, right, in the sense that one plus one doesn't equal three, it should equal 10. And I think actually having your CRM plus an AI note taking plus a trading platform plus custody, all in one place is actually much more valuable than having kind of this fragmented point solution that you have to then manage as the manager of the technology as an RIA or wealth management.
00:06:15 · Shannon Rosic
[00:06:15] S1: And look. And I'm sure you're aware of this being in the space now, but the wealth management industry has a tendency to lag behind a little bit. So I have been encouraged to see how much adoption we've seen when it comes to AI. Just... I'm always curious when I... Especially when I talk to CEOs and founders. Obviously, you have a very unique background. You were at Revolut and founded Nevis. So I'm curious, what did those experiences teach you about operational complexity scale, and where do you see us still maybe lagging behind a little bit outside of other industries?
00:06:49 · Mark Swan
[00:06:49] S2: Yeah. It's a great question. So for your listeners that don't know, so I was at a company called Revolut before this. Revolut is less well known in The US, but it's actually now probably the largest digital bank in the world. By the time we left, we scaled the business or helped scale the business up to 45,000,000,000 valuation, and it was serving over 50,000,000 clients globally across like 40 different countries. And Revolut was really a pioneer of digital banking. I've mentioned to you, I just moved to New York, you know, to set up my Chase account was two and a half hours in the branch with someone pressing buttons to open their account. Revolut was you could do it in three minutes on the subway. And so really, it just digitalized a lot of the banking experience, but also offered a whole number of different products as well. So it had everything from you could book hotels to having savings account. And really, that was what I would call like the first wave of digitalization and financial services, where you really driven actually by mobile. So it was the invention of smartphones, digital banking really was being able to then actually have mobile banking, which I think actually accelerated that wave. What we're now entering into in the new wave is actually with AI. And it's not about kind of consumer side necessarily, but actually it's on the B2B side and going into big firms where there's very large you know, kind of operational complexity, which actually can now be automated with AI. Now, what was my experience at Revolut? So in the last, I'd say, eighteen months of my time there, we were as a bank going in department by department, using LLMs to actually streamline a lot of internal process. We were actually one of the first banks to ever be on OpenAI enterprise. And we were using AI to help streamline customer service. There was actually around legal compliance, kind of these like thorny middle and back office processes. Actually, my co founder, Philippe, was the head of AI at Revolut, and was like spearheading many of those processes and workflows. And really what we just saw was that number one AI is here. And we saw that in 2023, very early signs that there was a real shift with what is happening when we moved into actually being able to complete work end to end.
00:08:59 · Mark Swan
But the other thing we saw was that AI is more than just a single call to ChatGPT or Claude, right? If you want to actually install and actually going to implement AI within a large regulated financial services organization, whether that's a bank, or whether that is a wealth management firm. The LLM call is just one small part of a much larger architecture of software, right? You need controls in place, you need guardrails, you need processes, you need checking points, need human in the loop evaluation teams, like all these things. And so our learning was, you know, AI is coming in order to really implement this properly and safely and securely and at scale in large financial services organizations, you need to be much more hands on and make sure the guardrails are there. And so that was really the large part of why we founded Nevis and wanted to find this business to help firms really get the benefits that we managed to implement a couple years ago.