Expert Insights

Helping Millennials Match Their Money with Their Values A conversation between Sophia Bera Daigle and the Betterment Advisor Solutions team about building a goals-driven practice for millennial clients. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Advisor: Sophia Bera Daigle, CFP® After working in traditional financial planning firms since 2007, I quit my job at a NY start-up to launch my own firm, Gen Y Planning. I now live in Austin, Texas with my husband, Bryan, and our son, Theo, who was born in the fall of 2020. After spending several months living abroad in 2019, we’re excited to share our love of travel with Theo! Firm: Gen Y Planning Gen Y Planning brings financial planning to millennials. We now work with a variety of clients in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are in the middle of making huge life decisions: navigating a new job, buying a home, merging finances, starting a family, relocating, and pursuing advanced degrees. The Gen Y Planning team believes that the earlier you work with a CFP®, the faster you can build a secure financial foundation for the future. Why did you decide to become a financial advisor? I like to help people use their money to match their values. My clients range from creatives to small business owners to Silicon Valley employees. Whether you plan to retire early, take a sabbatical, or build a career you love, I’m excited to help! What is the least understood aspect of your job? I would have to say the least understood aspect of my job is that financial planning does not just mean managing investments. I offer comprehensive financial planning, which includes all areas of your financial life: paying down debt, protecting assets that have been accumulated, purchasing a home, refinancing a mortgage, reviewing job offers and company benefit packages, reviewing tax returns, and proactively tax planning. My approach is goal-driven with my clients in the driver's seat. I work with clients to co-create their recommendations so that they’re more likely to implement the recommendations. Then my team and I act as their accountability partners to see that they are following through on the recommendations so that they can reach their goals. Why did you choose to partner with Betterment Advisor Solutions? I like that Betterment offers robo-advising, which includes automatic rebalancing, at a low, flat platform fee. In addition, Betterment has a simple, user-friendly interface that makes it easy for clients to navigate. Betterment also has great features like effortless Roth conversions and tax-loss harvesting. Something small that I love is the ability to set up an automatic investment weekly instead of monthly. It’s a great way to dollar cost average into the market while also smoothing out cash flow. How have you set up your firm's tech stack? And how has leveraging automation impacted your practice? We utilize a handful of low cost tech tools (Trello, Dropbox, Zoom, TextExpander, Gmail, etc.). We have found that our philosophy of “simple over sexy” has a greater impact on our clients than fancy software with charts and graphs. We don’t pay for expensive financial planning softwares that produce twenty-page reports our clients will never look at. The benefit for us and our clients just isn’t there. We like using Trello to track our clients’ financial goals and life changes and to take notes. We have a board for each client so we can easily prepare for our client meetings. We have a Google form we send to clients before their check in meeting and they update their net worth in Excel. We send them a one-page meeting recap after their meeting in a PowerPoint that we print to PDF. It’s efficient, simple, and the action items that came from the meeting are clear. Can you walk us through what the onboarding experience might look like for a new client at your firm – from when they land on your website to your team actually opening and transferring their assets – and how Betterment may fit into the onboarding workflow? An interested potential client starts by scheduling a 30-minute introductory meeting. They would fill out an intake form prior to our meeting. During the meeting we learn more about them, dive into the services we provide, and end with a quote for our services given their financial situation. After, if they decide they want to become a client, they sign a contract, pay their upfront client fee, and schedule their first client meeting. Prior to this meeting they are given a list of documents to gather and upload to a Dropbox folder for us to review. What is one critical lesson you have learned from your clients? My values and priorities are not necessarily the same as my clients. I need to keep this in mind when a client is making a decision that might not be the best financial decision, but may be a really important life decision that deeply affects other areas of their life. In that case, I want to help them figure out the best way to financially navigate through that choice so that they can continue to reach their goals. How has a remote or hybrid work environment changed your relationship with clients and prospects? I have always run my business remotely, which has a plethora of benefits for clients, the business, and my employees. Clients can meet in the comfort of their home or office and don’t need to worry about commuting to our meeting. It also allows me to work with people across the country and travel myself. It opens my workforce options up to the whole country as well since I don’t require my employees to be in one location and come into an office. I can’t imagine having in-person client meetings again. Now, when I get to see my clients in person, it’s only social! It’s way more fun that way! What do you think is the biggest opportunity for advisors today? I think the biggest opportunity for advisors is in working with the millionaires of tomorrow—young professionals who are making good money but maybe haven’t accumulated much wealth yet. They still need planning in many areas of their lives: paying down student loans, purchasing their first home, negotiating job offers, navigating company benefits and company stock options, starting a family, and saving for retirement. If you could only give one piece of financial advice, what would it be? Don’t wait to start. Small steps have a dramatic impact on your overall financial situation. You don’t want to be shoulders deep in a complex financial situation before you seek help. Find a planner who will be your financial partner to navigate finances with you so you can reach your goals and achieve your dreams.

Betterment Advisor Solutions Case Study Q&A: How Truepoint lowered the cost of serving more clients Founded in 1990, Truepoint Wealth Counsel is an independent and nationally-recognized RIA based in Cincinnati, managing over $4BN in AUM and voted among the 2020 Top Workplaces by the Cincinnati Enquirer. Since the publication of this article, Brad Felix is no longer a client of Betterment Advisor Solutions. Commas remains a client. Brad Felix was not compensated. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Betterment’s Alex Choi recently sat down with Brad Felix, portfolio manager at Commas (formerly RhineVest), a subsidiary of Truepoint Wealth Counsel, to hear about how the firm has successfully leveraged the Betterment platform to grow the practice. Alex: Tell us a little bit about your practice and the factors that have contributed to your success. Brad: When Commas started in 2015, I realized how technology was changing the wealth management industry. Betterment was one of the disruptors driving that change, and we saw how the Betterment Advisor Solutions (B4A) platform could lower an advisor’s operating costs. We wanted to leverage those cost savings to serve those who don’t necessarily have a million dollars (and that’s a lot of people). We've grown from 0 to 338 households since 2015. Growth was supercharged when Truepoint Wealth Counsel acquired our firm in 2016 and there’s been no looking back. Alex: How does Truepoint think about segmentation and where does Commas fit in? Brad: Today, Truepoint’s True Wealth service offering represents our firm’s bread and butter where we provide tax and estate services. But we still want to serve other clients well and do right by them. So segmentation just makes sense, and the Commas/B4A combination offers a great solution. B4A and Commas started by serving clients with less than $1 million but are now starting to serve clients in the $1 to $3 million tier as well. Alex: What were some of the biggest hurdles you encountered while you were initially growing your business and how did you navigate those? Brad: I think the hardest thing for every new firm is distribution; and with the less than $1 million client segment, it can be a challenge to convince people that they need a financial planner. A lot of people feel like they don't qualify. So the first marketing push was letting people know that they had options beyond an insurance company or a bank, and that fee-only fiduciary advice was available regardless of how much money you have in your investment accounts. We tried to do that in a number of ways: a kind of radical, very transparent website that clearly showed pricing and the fact that we had no minimums. We created an edgy brand to show that we don't take ourselves too seriously and that everyone needs and deserves access to financial advice. We've also done some work around search engine optimization (SEO), focusing on keywords like “financial planner” and local searches in our Cincinnati geographic area. We like to rank well in those local searches and believe that our memorable brand and website helps us attract new clients. I think there's an advantage to being different when compared to lots of financial planners that kind of look the same. I would encourage others to define a unique message and lead with that because it does help you stand out. Although things were slow at first, at some point it just clicked. Delivering on your promises and serving clients well will get that flywheel going where they're telling their friends about the good experience they've had at your firm. Alex: I have always been a big fan of your firm’s website. Can you talk a little more about your process for building that out and why you chose to include what you did? I think a lot of our clients aspire to build similar type sites and would appreciate how you went about it. Brad: I appreciate that. We worked with a really good local designer who pushed us to come up with a very simple message about why we were unique, why we were different. Our biggest goal for building out our site was transparency. We know that consumers are tired of landing on websites and still not being able to understand how much they would pay for something. We’re very clear, very upfront because in our minds this is the first stage of trust. We want people to talk to us, so our “let's talk''' button is all over our website. If the website conveys enough trust to get them to have a conversation, then we can be successful in moving them to the next stage to be a client. We felt that Betterment had an attractive product so any chance we had to note our decision to utilize Betterment’s B4A offering and also to highlight how we're providing value to the client seemed to resonate with people. Alex: So how does Commas position Betterment Advisor Solutions to its clients? Brad: We describe Betterment as our technology partner. Given Betterment’s increasing brand awareness, we talk about Betterment alongside Fidelity and Schwab, and people are comfortable. It’s part of our tech stack just like anything else. In addition, we're in the business of financial planning. It's what we do. In that vein, we've always viewed Betterment as a complementary partner, not a competitor. Alex: How do you price your offering, and how do you communicate your firm's pricing to clients? Brad: Our financial planning fee is $65 a month, but we also believe investment management is an essential part of the whole package. Our investment management fee is 80 basis points, which includes the Betterment fee. Alex: Does Commas leverage some of the client behavior functionality like goals-based planning modules and behavioral guardrails? Brad: Well, to be honest, the advantage of partnering with Betterment is that it also has a retail product and you put in the research to know what's a good feature, what's a good design choice, how do you get a better outcome, better behavior, etc. We honestly try not to interfere with the work you all do there and really just let the platform guide our clients and focus them on what we do best. We really spend most of our time on financial planning and just working through all the goals a client has set up in the Betterment system. Alex: Can you tell me some ways your practice has become more efficient? Brad: Very simply, the Betterment platform significantly lowers our cost of doing business. So account sign up, trading, cash management, those are all ways that we're not spending money on labor. We’re maybe unique among the firms that are using your platform in that we never intended to use Betterment as a solution only for children of our clients, but we now find that we can serve as many people as possible. Automation and efficiency are key to our profitability, because we provide great service at a higher client to advisor ratio vs. the industry. Alex: Could you just kind of take us through what the experience would be for a new client from when they hit your website to you guys actually opening and transferring their assets and where Betterment may fit into an onboarding workflow? Brad: The Betterment technology helps us to compress our onboarding cycle considerably, sometimes to as little as a day. At the end of an introductory client meeting, we send a welcome email that has a link to the questionnaire that helps us learn more about them, a link to open a Betterment account, and a link for our financial planning fee. The client signs our agreement as part of the automated Betterment signup process. Depending on what they fill out in the questionnaire, there may be additional automated follow-up. For instance, if they have certain held away assets, another email asks for more information. Once all the information is received, the advisor can then get a good look at their entire financial picture so that at the first financial planning meeting the conversation can focus on what's important to the client, rather than all the administrative details. Alex: What additional tools and automation do you employ along with Betterment? Brad: We subscribe to the “low code” or “no code” technology trend. The whole idea is that you don't have to be a developer to create automation between different systems. And that's really the whole premise of what we started experimenting with three or four years ago. We started using Zapier to tie together different pieces of our software. We use Typeform for our initial client questionnaire that we send out and that questionnaire is delivered by Mailchimp, which is a common email service. We also had a CRM at the time, so linking all those together. The basic discovery workflow started when a client booked a meeting through Calendly and then received the questionnaire. Ultimately that information would flow back into our CRM without our advisors doing anything. We were focused on determining how we can spend more time talking with clients and thinking critically while automating everything where human interaction doesn't add value. Alex: So it sounds like you’ve compiled a pretty big tech stack. Do you still find from a unit economics perspective that all those monthly subscriptions are saving you money? Brad: Yes. Our tech stack is not your typical financial industry tech stack. We're bucking the trend on what people say we should use and looking at other industries to find different, innovative tools. We’ve found that pricing for these non-industry tools is dramatically lower. We got rid of our CRM and now use Airtable, which I think everyone should check out. We use a client-to-advisor ratio to help us guide profitability. In a standard firm, this ratio is roughly 100 to 1. Even at 200 to 1, we would have profitable outcomes, but at 300 to 1, we’d feel really confident that creating business in this segment can deliver industry-like margins. It's just a different type of model. It's higher volume, perhaps less complexity, but requires a lot of efficiency to get there. The other metric of course is average account size, but the more efficiency you can create, the lower your average accounts can be. In full transparency, our first business plan assumed an average client balance of $100K. Over time we have far surpassed that. And I think it's only going up from here as we've realized this platform can be used to serve not only clients below a million, but in the $1 to $3 million range. Our average balance is only going up and we're only getting more efficient. Alex: What recommendations do you have for others thinking about how to build out their tech stack? Any resources you’d recommend? Brad: I typically recommend that before people look at available technology solutions, that they start with a whiteboard and draw what they need the technology to do. Then find the tools that fill that need. As far as resources, I’ve scooped up tons of information from #fintwit on Twitter. I think in this new economy that you don’t have to be a developer. For instance, you can build a website yourself much more cheaply than you could 10 years ago. And with subscription-based tech, you can find solutions that allow you to connect everything together yourself. The reality is the operating cost of running a business like ours over the last decade has declined substantially. But not everyone knows or realizes that yet. Alex: What would you tell advisors who might be skeptical of using a platform like a Betterment or someone else's? I think there's always skepticism around whether an algorithm can perform certain activities such as trading, rebalancing, and asset location. However, the contributions of an automated platform with impressive technology and execution can really shine during a situation like COVID, which came upon us so fast, but was met with industry high records of near-daily rebalancing of client accounts on certain high volatility days. Most human trading teams probably couldn't keep up with that pace. The other concern that advisors may have would be working with a lesser-known custodian. In my mind, custodians are more of a commodity at this point. It becomes a non-issue for most people once you educate them on what a custodian does, what they don't do, and what it really means to be somewhere else, while also articulating the advantages that they can give you. Finally, the Betterment UX provides people a clear, visual representation of their whole financial picture in a way that I don't think anyone's ever gotten with other online platforms or traditional custodians. Alex: Any parting comments? Brad: The one message I would like to tell everyone is don't just think about Betterment as a way to serve one segment of your existing high net worth business. Go out and build a business to serve the broader population because the market opportunity there is huge, there's no competition, and millions of people need financial advice. We hope that other advisors can learn from our experience in their consideration to utilize automated platforms and other tools.

2025 stock market outlook: 3 insights from a financial expert Our financial expert weighs in on investing amid market highs, AI optimism, and political uncertainty—and why diversification is key. Investors are starting to feel a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance, otherwise known as that grating feeling when two beliefs you hold don't quite line up. On one hand, the U.S. market is soaring on the back of AI optimism and potential tax cuts. And on the other, companies’ stock prices, relative to their actual earnings, are starting to loosely resemble the run-up to the Dotcom bubble of the late 90s. So which belief will win out in 2025: boom or bust? Let's parse this conflicted outlook by examining three questions in particular: Are U.S. stocks overvalued? Will AI pan out? Do markets care who’s in the White House? Are U.S. stocks overvalued? Around this time last year, we said the booming market at the time might keep going if the Fed lowered interest rates in response to cooling inflation. Interest rates did tick down, and boy, did markets take notice. Through the end of November 2024, stocks in our Betterment Core portfolio returned roughly 17.6% year-to-date. Such a run, however, begs speculation of yet another reversal, a swing of the pendulum toward less frothy valuations and a drawback in portfolio returns. The S&P 500 currently costs about 25 times more than what those companies are expected to bring in over the next 12 months. For comparison, this average “price-to-earnings” ratio over the last 35 years has been 18x. While stocks in the US certainly appear flush in terms of the value assigned to them, perspective matters for the long-term investor. When companies go for more than their “intrinsic” worth, there’s more potential downside than when they don’t. So long as one invests for more than a few years, chances are the market as a whole may “grow” into its valuation. Remember in 2021, when a cohort of stocks were darlings of the pandemic period and shot to the moon? Analysts rightly called foul—those kinds of valuations shouldn’t be sustainable. But within a few years the market was setting fresh all-time highs. An investor who had sold or stayed on the sidelines would've missed out on all that growth. If there’s a lesson to learn here, let it be this: Historically, Investing at all-time highs hasn’t resulted in lower future returns compared to investing on any given trading day. On the contrary, buying when the market has never been higher leads to slightly higher average returns in the long run. You can never be sure exactly when a growth cycle will end. Will AI pan out? Speaking of the stock market reaching previously uncharted heights, another reason for this bullish spell has been optimism surrounding the potential value of artificial intelligence, and the infrastructure that powers these underlying models. Large tech companies that provide cloud services—like Nvidia, which furnishes hardware that powers AI—have rallied strongly over the last 12 months. This clique of stocks, which overlaps with a group of mega-sized firms known as the Magnificent Seven (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia), makes up an increasingly large share of the US and global stock market. So, what does the Mag7’s outperformance, and the hoopla around AI mean for the future? Some say a bubble, some say the early innings of a fully-automated techno-utopic future. Analysts have argued that a good amount of corporate America’s investment in AI capabilities will not ultimately prove fruitful. Yet it remains difficult to use the technology, and to witness the pace with which it has evolved, and not foresee eventual significant boosts to the economy’s productivity and companies’ profitability. There’s that grating feeling again—the potential of revolutionary upside sitting right next to worries that it’s mostly hype. In the face of uncertainty, all one can do to lower their risk is hedge their bets and diversify. Betterment’s Core portfolio, as well as our other portfolio options, invest globally, which means that while they maintain significant exposure to large US stocks including the Mag7, they also hold European, Japanese, and emerging market stocks that trade at less elevated valuations, providing a buffer in the event of a U-turn in the AI juggernaut. Do markets care who’s in the White House? Right now, markets aren’t sure exactly what to make of President-elect Trump’s proposed economic agenda. Promises of corporate tax cuts, while fueling the recent surge in stocks, could in practice increase inflation. Same goes for tariffs and mass deportation. Stricter immigration policies could simultaneously worsen labor shortages in certain industries, constraining economic growth and keeping inflationary pressures elevated. And, rising inflation could in turn pause or reverse the recent trend in interest rate cuts. But until more details emerge, or the policies themselves are actually put into practice, we won’t know their full effect. Despite the policy uncertainty and cognitive dissonance, keep in mind that markets tend to rise over time, regardless of which party holds the presidency. Maintaining a consistent, diversified investment approach is the best way to navigate political and economic cycles. So what now? As always, the risks associated with a down cycle exist alongside the opportunity of a growth cycle, so err on the side of staying invested. And, if you find your clients are sitting on too much cash, now might be the time to act and put it to work in the market. You can also recommend they invest it as a lump sum, which research shows may offer higher potential returns over time. Or, sprinkle it into a portfolio over time. (We make it easy to invest funds from Cash Reserve account, either way.) And however the market performs in 2025, you should remain confident that investing can help your clients reach their financial goals in the long-term.

Simplifying practice operations and designing a better client experience with the right custodian For this advisor spotlight, we chat with Jason Park about building a delightful client experience and using technology to create more meaningful, human connections. Advisor: Jason Park Firm: Margo Park Financial Why did you decide to become a financial advisor? It was more of a natural progression or evolution. I interned at two huge financial firms then became an agent at an insurance company. When that company offered to sponsor securities licenses, I took my exams and became a financial advisor—but the conventional, old-school kind that sells products for commission. The added licenses allowed me to advise on the client’s entire financial picture, but it was admittedly just an extension to insurance sales. Then I learned I could eliminate commissions altogether (and the conflicts of interest they come with) if I were running a fee-only advisory practice. This is the only setup I know of that puts me squarely on the client’s side, by design. If I make an investment recommendation and earn zero dollars in commission, that’s the only way to know for certain that it’s my best, unbiased thinking. Going independent just made sense. When I started my firm, I was so nervous to tell my clients—but every single one came with me. I'm so grateful to my foundation clients for that. I feel very lucky to have evolved into this business model. I believe it’s the most ethical way to be a financial advisor—and my clients feel that, too. Having my own RIA has been extraordinarily rewarding. I never take it for granted. What do you think is the least understood aspect of your job? I think that advisors can sometimes miss out on creating a great client experience. It seems simple to put yourself in the client's shoes and ask, what would I want? and make that happen. But providing a delightful experience to the client is something that I believe is woefully missing in this industry. And I think that clients, sadly, have become accustomed to it. When I meet prospective clients who have worked with an advisor before, they never describe having had an outstanding experience. Nothing stands out. Carefully designing client communication or choosing technology that purposefully offers a great client experience, I believe, can really enhance an advisor's value. Why did you choose to partner with Betterment Advisor Solutions for your practice? Well at first, Betterment scared me. I remember when Betterment came out (only for retail clients) with all its automation and we advisors were afraid of disruption in the industry and wondered, are we going to be put out of business? So when Betterment Advisor Solutions came to market, I was thrilled. I figured I couldn’t beat Betterment’s portfolio automation, so I’d take advantage of it instead. Then additional investment options were added for advisors and custom model portfolios were released. I remember thinking, this is really getting close to unicorn level. Since signing up, I've slowly been using Betterment Advisor Solutions as my core custodian. Aside from one-off, niche situations, I place every client in Betterment. The experience is so simple, fast and easy. The way this platform simplifies onboarding, my day-to-day practice operations and completing any task, Betterment is noticeably different from other custodians. I care deeply about, and am very sensitive to, the client's experience and Betterment really is the best experience I've ever found for clients (and for me as an advisor). Other than using Betterment Advisor Solutions as your go-to custodian, what does the rest of your tech stack look like? I think I’ve tested every tool out there because I’m always looking for anything that might make the client experience better. Even if it means more work on our end, if something makes things easier, simpler or better for the client in a meaningful way, I’ll add or switch to it. Today, my firm’s main client portal is Blueleaf, where you can sync accounts from any custodian. Every week an email is sent to the client that reports on all of their accounts—the client doesn’t need to log into anything, and the emails are simple and clean. I also use Riskalyze because their risk questionnaire is incredibly thought-provoking and practical. I always walk the client through it and I continue to find that, as much as this industry is about quantitative metrics, it's also about feelings and preferences. Aside from this core stack, we’ve built our own household-level asset location calculator and, for very specific client scenarios, we’ll use Pontera to support managing externally-held 401(k)s. Can you walk through what the typical onboarding experience looks like for a new client, and how Betterment Advisor Solutions might fit into that onboarding flow? Onboarding is where Betterment Advisor Solutions excels—it’s truly an order of magnitude better than any existing legacy custodian platform. When chatting with a prospective client, I try to get as familiar as possible, as quickly as possible (I think most people prefer an informal style). After connecting and deciding to work together, onboarding is so simple. I first send the client an invitation from the advisor portal—an email gets sent, from which they can set up their login and verify all the information themselves. The process makes steps that other custodians force you to take look utterly superfluous—Betterment Advisor Solutions is ten times simpler and faster. From there, we sync all of the client's accounts in Blueleaf and use Riskalyze to handle the risk questionnaire. I was reflecting on how onboarding used to be with other platforms and it makes me so tired just thinking about it. As a real-life example, I was guiding a couple through multiple forms at a legacy custodian and it took two full hours—and this was using DocuSign, which is supposed to be fast and easy! They were so gracious and thanked me for my patience and I kept thinking this would literally take 10 minutes with Betterment. With Betterment, it’s just two steps: send the invitation to open up the account, then send a transfer request. At a legacy custodian, you have to find all of the relevant forms and manually type in all the information. It utterly pales in comparison to Betterment. What is one critical lesson you've learned from your clients? Clients are real people, and they like to talk to real people. Often, clients don't even want to discuss business—they want to connect personally and talk about what’s going on in their lives, which is great! And everyone has their own things which are important or significant to them—no one is the same, everyone is an individual. This interests me to no end. So I’ve found that this personal connection is vital in this business—and in life in general. Has a remote or hybrid work environment changed your client relationships? No, not much. I think people underestimate just how much you can get done virtually. If anything, going digital and keeping up with technology has continued to make communication feel real and familiar for clients, which is my goal. What do you think is the biggest opportunity for advisors today? Creating a better client experience. It is such a beautiful thing to be able to connect with another human being. I often think about companies that have exceptional customer service. There’s this adage about Zappos, for instance, that they’re a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes. I feel the same way about this industry. What comes first is the connection with another human being—and that's the fun part. Creating an exceptional, delightful, important experience for the client is the biggest opportunity for advisors today, and for anyone else interacting with the end-client directly. If you could only give one piece of financial advice, what would it be? Time is on your side. Whatever alpha value an advisor might bring, the biggest driver of returns is time. Even my retired clients are often surprised to realize they still have decades left to grow. Realizing time carries so much weight can be calming. With more time, you will have a better investment experience. Obviously, there's no guarantee, but we do have a century of historic data to reference. Taking a step back and focusing on this long term process can help you put things in perspective. It can give you much-needed clarity, and might ease some anxieties about investing or retirement.

From $0 to $40MM AUM: Jason Hamilton on Improving Client Service with Technology We sat down with Jason Hamilton to learn about his personal journey to becoming a financial advisor and launching his own practice—and how Betterment's technology has helped him build a $40 million firm. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Advisor: Jason Hamilton Jason J. Hamilton, CFP®, CRPC® is a Certified Financial Planner™ and Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor® who helps high-performance professionals and high-net-worth investors create alignment with their abundance so they can live in flow with their wealth and serve their purpose. After coaching clients on their finances for over a decade and over six years as a registered investment advisor, he knows what helps clients go from chaos to serenity with their finances. As a Certified Financial Planner™, he also brings the technical expertise, education, experience, and ethics requirements investors are looking for to help them achieve their goals, lower their taxes, and optimize their income and investment returns. Jason is the founder of Keep It Simple Financial Planning, a fee-only registered investment advisor, managing over $40 million in assets for his clients. He is also the Head of Family Financial Coaching at his family's nonprofit IDEAL, a community development corporation, located in East Los Angeles. Firm: Keep It Simple Financial Planning Keep It Simple Financial Planning (KISFP) was founded in 2016 to help underserved investors receive technical financial advice in a simple and understandable way. Read more about why we believe “Keep It Simple” is the best philosophy. Why did you decide to become a financial advisor? My story originates just before the 2008 financial crisis. Before this, my family owned a small business: An Italian restaurant in a suburb of San Jose. The restaurant's name was Mio Vicino which means "my neighbor." Prior to the financial crisis, my family hired an advisor to help them with their financial and retirement planning. Unfortunately, instead of comprehensive fiduciary financial advice, my family was sold a myriad of insurance products. I believe with better planning, we would have had a much better response and outcome to the economic situation. Before the end of the crisis, we were forced to close the restaurant due to insufficient financial resources. On the bright side of this journey, I saw what my family went through and became determined to not have the same fate for myself. This led me on my journey of financial self-discovery to learn everything I could about financial planning and wealth management. What started as a Google search for "how do people become wealthy?" became an obsession and now a career. Helping clients get into alignment with their wealth has been rewarding in many ways. For years prior to becoming an advisor, I would read online forums, where I found out about advanced financial planning education to become a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. At the time, I had no knowledge of the financial planning industry. Since my company offered education reimbursement, I decided to sign up for a course at UCLA extensions. This was the beginning of my journey to become a CFP®. I enjoyed the courses. They filled in the gaps from my prior reading and gave me structure to the process of proper financial planning. It was actually fun! In my search to change careers, I found a group called XY Planning Network that was providing the tools and education to help advisors launch their firms, and the rest is history. I hired coaches and consultants to help me start up and learn the business and the compliance aspects of running a registered investment advisor and, in 2016, I launched Keep It Simple Financial Planning. Over time, I have obtained the Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor® and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designations. More recently, with the popularity of investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, I completed my Certificate in Blockchain and Digital Assets and became a member of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals. Today, we help clients with flat-fee financial planning advice in nearly 40 states and manage over $40 million in assets under management for our clients. Coming from a lower-middle-class family, we knew how to work but I was never taught HOW to build wealth outside of one day buying a home. Investing was not part of the culture of my family. We all knew how to work hard and sacrifice. But, one thing that I teach now that I didn’t get growing up is how to turn my labor into capital that will work for me. Books also had a significant impact on my journey. Dave Ramsey, Warren Buffet, Suze Orman, and Jack Bogle are a few of the authors from whom I absorbed great insight and knowledge. But the most impactful for me were two books by Thomas J. Stanley: The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. The Millionaire Next Door showed me the path for how to become a first generation millionaire (and that over 80% of millionaires are first generation!). And The Millionaire Mind showed me what it takes to achieve multimillionaire status. Reading these books changed my perspective significantly about what it takes to be successful financially. What is the least understood aspect of your job? The least understood aspect of my job is that many times there is more psychology than technical financial planning in what we do. We are dealing with humans and not machines. Within a number of hours I can tell a client exactly how to optimize their financial situation. The challenge is, what may be optimal financially may not be optimal emotionally. As advisors, the better we are at understanding humans, the more likely our advice is likely to be implemented. What does your firm's current tech stack look like? I am a self-admitted technology addict. While we don't use all of our tools with all clients, there are some great applications for advisors to use when appropriate. We use: Asset Map, RightCapital, Income Conductor, Income Laboratory, Holistiplan, Cash Flow Mapping, Kwanti, AdvicePay, and, of course, Betterment Advisor Solutions. Why did you choose Betterment Advisor Solutions? And how has our technology impacted your business? I have tried multiple custodians since starting my firm but the efficiency, beautiful client portal and app, and the support team I get with Betterment Advisor Solutions is second to none. Because of the digital onboarding and easy digital account transfer process I have been able to scale much faster and serve a more financially diverse client base than I could with a traditional custodian. What is one critical lesson you have learned from your clients? One critical lesson I have learned from my clients is that if you help people get into alignment with their wealth, other parts of their lives will flourish as well. Finances are such an important aspect of living in the United States and, if you can get into flow with your financial wealth interactions, you will experience harmony in other areas of your life typically. How has a remote or hybrid work environment changed how your team works? Our firm has been primarily virtual since our founding over 6 years ago and, since the pandemic, it has tripled in size as many more investors have become comfortable with virtual meetings. In our case, the remote work environment has improved our ability to grow and serve clients. We were ready as more and more clients become comfortable with using virtual communication tools to stay connected to friends and family. Now, it has become the overwhelmingly preferred meeting method and has allowed us to help clients solve the specific challenges they face from nearly anywhere in the nation. What do you think is the biggest opportunity for advisors today? To put themselves out there on social media to discuss and share their expertise. I see so many advisors wasting time and money on paid lead gen services, which if you knew how they worked, are typically a huge waste of money. Maybe not waste but for sure not fully optimized. People in general are desperate for a great advisor that aligns with their personality type. I think if advisors would just put out one educational video per week in their niche, or even general good financial advice, they would never have to struggle for business. If you won the lottery, what would you do with the money? Pay off mom's house and travel a lot. If you could only give one piece of financial advice, what would it be? That if your financial situation is not ideal, DO NOT blame or put any responsibility on anyone outside yourself. If you do not take 100% ownership of your situation you will never be successful. Literally anything you need to know about finances, you can find online in a blog or on YouTube. The challenge is people are typically their own worst enemy when it comes to finances. For this reason, hiring a trusted fiduciary advisor may be the best decision individuals make for themselves.

Betterment Advisor Solutions Case Study Q&A: How Ritholtz reaches a new client segment Matt Lohrius oversees the Liftoff platform at Ritholtz Wealth Management, which began leveraging Betterment’s platform more recently. Ritholtz is located in New York City and manages more than $2.7 billion in assets. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Dan: Tell us about how the sort of robo-advisor aspect of things works within Ritholtz Liftoff. How do you guys organize it and think about it? Matt: As you probably know, our core business was focused on high net worth households, people that were staring down retirement or leading up to it. And we put out a lot of content—whether it's blogs or The Compound (our YouTube channel)—so a lot of people are following us and telling us they’d like to become clients. But many of them didn’t fit our traditional high net worth, pre-retirement customer profile. But clearly there was a demand, and we wanted to help these people. So that's why we created Liftoff, which we’ve continued to improve over the years. But it really blossomed once we started working with automated platforms like Betterment. There’s no minimum, so it’s great for people in their twenties or thirties who are maybe just starting to invest. Dan: Tell us a little bit more about Liftoff’s ideal client profile. Matt: There are a couple of different types. One would be someone who's on the younger side and who is in the accumulation stage base. They may not yet be married or have a family, but they’re starting to make money and they want to save in a smart way. This type of investor also wants access to an advisor for questions that do arise: around what they should be doing differently when they do get married or start having kids. I also love talking to people who have just graduated college, because they’re such enthusiastic followers of ours. We’re happy to accommodate them. Dan: This is obviously a big potential for growth. How do you think about growing Liftoff? Matt: I think we want to grow it as big as we possibly can and take it as far as we can. And that's kind of my mindset: I get on the phone with everyone who wants to chat. Hopefully we do get to the point where we need to bring more of me to oversee twice or three times as many Liftoff clients as we have right now. Dan: What have been the biggest hurdles to growth so far? Matt: One hurdle is that there's always going to be people out there that would rather just do it themselves and that's fine. We totally understand that. But there are still plenty of other people out there who don't even know where to start. And so we're looking to reach that group of people. Dan: Do you find that there is a catalyst that brings the self-directed types to you? Matt: Yeah, it could be a year like this one that we're in right now where people who have been investing on their own for a while reach out because of all the uncertainty. They are looking to get a little more advice. Dan: Talk a bit about the culture within Ritholtz to new technologies. Matt: We're all about it. Outside of the Liftoff channel, Ritholtz is looking at technology to onboard clients more quickly and smoothly. We know it’s possible—with Betterment and Liftoff, you can open an account like that. So we want to be able to expand that kind of capability throughout our entire firm. And that really just involves us looking at all the technology we currently have to streamline the client experience. Dan: Can you talk a little bit about the difference that an automated platform like Betterment makes in your day? Matt: For Liftoff, it’s just huge from a technology standpoint: opening accounts, transferring money from other custodians, depositing money, linking a bank account. Everything is so easy and intuitive for the client. And that saves us a lot of time: we’re not having to help a client with the logistics of opening an account and can spend our time with them focusing on advice. That's where platforms like Betterment really excel, with the operational efficiencies. I think a lot of advisors hear “robo-advisor” and sometimes get a little turned off, but who doesn't want operational efficiency? And that’s on both sides of the equation to clients and advisors. Dan: What if you go back, what initially sparked the interest in convincing you to start using a robo-advisor as a partner? Matt: It’s kind of just set it and forget it. It's easy. You have a durable, long-term portfolio. You're going to invest in it just to keep saving. That's the work that you need to do, is constantly save. And outside of that, you don't need to do a whole lot. It's helpful for a lot of people. And when we do have a client ask “Can I do my own thing?"—because there’s often that temptation—we tell them “No, you can't.” That's the whole purpose and benefit of this. You can go somewhere else and do that. But if you want a concrete long-term plan, this is where you're going to get it, and it's very likely to work. Dan: What would you tell advisors who are skeptical about using a robo-advisor? How would you help them to understand how well it's worked for you and your clients? Matt: People who are skeptical need to realize that this is a hybrid platform. Yes, the portfolios and operations are automated, but you have access to an entire firm. Because if you have access to me, you have access to all the resources that I have access to. And that can be powerful. Dan: Last question. Does using an automated platform like Betterment mean that you, as a CFP®, as an advisor, get to spend more time on bigger issue questions like planning? Matt: Yes, one hundred percent. That is the whole reason Liftoff switched to Betterment. With the custodians we had been using previously, there were a lot more operational emergencies that needed our time and attention. But with a platform like Betterment, all of that is taken care of so that we at Liftoff can focus solely on providing quality advice. That's all we want to do here. Automation (through Betterment’s platform) is allowing us to do that now, which is why I'm confident that Liftoff will continue to grow. Ritholtz Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Adviser. Advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where Ritholtz Wealth Management and its representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure. This website is solely for informational purposes. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital. No advice may be rendered by Ritholtz Wealth Management unless a client service agreement is in place.