Inside the Pod: Episode 11
Frank McAleer, SVP, Wealth Planning, is a pioneering intrapreneur at Raymond James, creating longevity planning resources and support to help advisors engage on all aspects of the modern retirement while helping them stand out in a sea of sameness and truly provide clients with holistic advice and guidance.
With the proverbial 10,000 baby boomers retiring in the U.S every day, longer life expectancies and the complex issues surrounding retirement readiness, transition and ongoing management – accelerated and more complicated by COVID-19 in many cases – there is an emphatic need and no greater opportunity in the advice business than helping clients through issues of retirement and longevity planner.
Frank and his team have developed a thoughtful and carefully researched and curated set of solutions that advisors can introduce to clients encompassing everything from legacy planning to elder care to fraud protection and income planning -- and surrounded the advisors with practice management support to help them effectively address these issues with their clients.
Frank and I are both passionate about the opportunity for the financial advice business to take these issues on and make a meaningful difference in aging clients’ lives (and their children for that matter) and go well beyond the traditional investment management-centered approaches that are fast-becoming commoditized. Press play and join the conversation.
Show Notes
· The Origin Story of Longevity Planning at Raymond James [01:48]
· Aging Clients and The Evolution of Retirement Planning [05:08]
· Becoming the “Center Point” Advisor by Becoming a Comprehensive Longevity Planner [11:09]
· How COVID-19 Has Accelerated the Need and Opportunity for Advising at the Intersection of Health and Wellness [14:29]
· Achieving Pole Position in the Wealth Transfer Game [18:00]
· Raymond James’ Curated Longevity Planning Resources [21:15] (including Broadspire Care Management, Everplans, EverSafe, HPOne, PinnacleCare
· Combatting Fee Compression [39:28]
· Advisor Adoption and Success Stories [45:43]
· Financial Wellness, Financial Literacy and True Peace of Mind [47:23]
Podcast Transcript
Wealth Management v2.0: The AdviceTech Revolution, Episode 11
with Frank McAleer, SVP, Wealth Planning, Raymond James
Gavin Spitzner (President, Wealth Consulting Partners, LLC):
Welcome to "The Wealth Management v2.0: The AdviceTech Revolution" podcast, where we are focused on the business of the business, the business of advice. And, specifically, we study and celebrate firms that are leveraging the combination of technology and humanity to deliver better advice to more people, and better outcomes for more people through that combination.
This is a very special edition of the podcast in that I've been speaking to a lot of entrepreneurs, heads of RIAs…and today I'm with the very definition of an intrapreneur, someone innovating within a large incumbent firm, Frank McAleer, SVP of Wealth Planning at Raymond James.
I've gotten to know Frank, through our joint work on the industry Next Chapter initiative, a kind of skunkworks effort of 30+ industry experts looking at all kinds of issues related to the shifting of focus within the advice business to retirement income, retirement management, longevity planning, under the guidance of Steve Gresham. So Frank and I have really bonded over that and our mutual interest in these issues.
Frank is absolutely pushing the envelope. He's really on the front lines of the intersection of humans, advisors, advice tech, and very specifically a focus on the issues of aging boomers and longevity planning.
So Frank, tell us about yourself. Tell us kind of the origin story, your version of an origin story for Longevity Planning at Raymond James, how you got focused on it, what your passion is there, and then we'll get into it. But welcome, Frank.
Frank McAleer (Senior Vice President, Wealth Planning, Raymond James):
Gavin, thanks. It's great to be here. I really appreciate the intrapreneur terminology, because we really are innovating within a big Fortune 500 company. And that's been interesting and a lot of fun. So my brief background, I've been in the business for 30 years, actually 30-plus, but I just stop at 30, I don't extend it. An advisor on the distribution side and I joined the FA side with firms like Raymond James in the early 2000s. I was with a firm based in Philly for a while for about six years Janney Montgomery Scott. My hometown is Philly. I live in Florida now and been with Raymond James for seven years. I also have a public accounting background before that, which has been really, really beneficial. So the evolution of getting the Longevity Planning actually started when I arrived at Raymond James, seven years ago, we're working with the MIT AgeLab and Dr. Joe Coughlin. And they introduced to us at that point, the three questions that will help you determine the future quality of your life. And you and some listeners may know these, but I'll just repeat them anyway.
We should be asking ourselves or our clients who will change your lightbulbs? How you get an ice cream cone? And where would you live? And it was very just resonated, they continue to resonate today. And they all really relate to can you age in place? Can you handle home maintenance? And the ice cream cone is not about you going to the drive, it's the freedom, the freedom of being able to go from point A to point B, and what happens when you can't do that. And where you live is really about the community that you'll live in avoiding isolation, especially when family members move away. So that was the beginning of it. And what we did back then, is it resonated so much, and it made so much sense. And I know one of the things we want to talk about is why is important. And I'll come back to that.
But what we said back then is to the planning process, you need to ask these questions or these types of questions because it opens up a whole new role of conversation. And that phase you're actually, I mean, clients are surprised like, "Wow, I never thought you could help me with this." And back then what we said is to advisors, you need to go out in your communities and understand who the geriatric care managers are. Get to know the elder law attorneys. If someone can really not remain in their home, what are the types of facilities in your area that they can go to? And we found out quickly, that was just a bridge too far for advisors and for obvious reasons. So we went back to the drawing board and said, "Maybe we should develop our own resources, develop meeting research, who are the good ones out there? Put them through a vetting process, the Raymond James procurement process." So we're comfortable that are recommending these resources to our advisors who can then recommend them to clients.
So that's how I got started, it was just really thinking about beyond what most advisors have done. And that is help clients accumulate to get point B, and then "Okay, we got you there good luck, you're on your own." It's so much more than that now, which I know we'll discuss. But that was the evolution of it. That's how it started.
Gavin: Terrific. I love that. So we'll get into more of the business side and why this is good business, and the advisor side and advisor adoption, then some of the issues around that you've dealt with. But let's actually start with the client, which can often get lost in these conversations. Let's start with the client and go from there. How from your work and what you've studied let's talk about let's just ground this in how the concept of retirement has evolved and continues to evolve. And this I think, get into a little bit of a discussion about what clients aging clients want to actually talk about the stuff that's keeping them up at night. That they want to talk to a professional about, versus a lot of stuff that we tend to talk about with them today.
Frank: That's a great question. So going back to just a second when I was talking about planning, because what we found is when you started helping clients think about where they may live, or where they would go for critical care the question from clients was, "Where do I go for these resources? I haven't even thought about that. Thank you so much for helping me plan for this." So that's another answer. But as far as the evolution of retirement as I said before, I think for a long time it was, accumulate and go. For the most part, advisors prided themselves and still do and it's still important to be a great money manager and maximize return on assets till you get to point B.
But I think the fact that us baby boomers, I don't know if you are but I am entering... getting...I'm not close to retirement, but I'll put it to you this way I can get an IRA distribution without a 10% penalty. How about that? But I think the fact that the boomers control the assets now, and they have a lot of questions, and the new longevity, the fact that lifespans are so much longer now, these are real issues. And I do believe a lot of it has evolved this concept of just more than asset management, for those reasons.
And also, I think technology and the information age has really advanced the type of information that's out there. In other words, if you know one company or you know one advisor is helping their clients decide where they live in the future, helping them with caregiving all of a sudden it's out there, right and it just helps the industry evolved so much faster. I also think that this whole concept of bundling. And you and I've talked about this before, the whole concept of the membership economy. If you look at Netflix, and if you look at Amazon, right, we all have memberships. And why are we members? Because they give us more and more of what we want. And I think what we're thinking and others in the industry are thinking of why can't we be the same thing?
There are so many things that our clients want. And I think one thing if you can say, for sure, right, no matter what clients need it all, there's one commonality through it all and that's money. It always involves money. And if the concept of financial planning is to help clients manage their money, and not just manage, but spend efficiently and have planned for it, then that's where it all fits together. But I really believe all of those forces have really changed the concept of what retirement planning is and what it can be.
Gavin: Right. And as an industry, there's been a great shift towards financial planning writ large. But as I'm sure you've seen, too, the emphasis has very much been quantity over quality...
Frank: Yes.
Gavin: ...often just using it as a means to an end, jumping too early, product sale, and generally, the process is very mathematical and there has to be some math to it in terms of what your goals are and how to fund them, but very often, it leads to a purely investment centric solution, one set of solutions. And planning, I think, for the most part, hasn't, we haven't asked enough questions about what the money is for and, at the same time, presented possibilities framed questions like the ones that you framed upfront for our clients. Because what we've seen with other elements of financial planning is, once an advisor presents possibilities, whatever those original stated goals were, they often change because they didn't know. They didn't know given what they have today, and what their prospects are going forward, they didn't know what was in the realm of possibility.
So when it comes to retirement planning, it's often been just simply "Do I have enough? How do I not outlive my money in retirement?" Which are obviously important issues. But with investment management, increasingly commoditized. And whatever this stat is 10,000 boomers turning 60 years a day, there's just such an incredible opportunity, and obviously, you see it to become this retirement advisor, and help clients actually think through these broader sets of issues about living in retirement. And including, let's think about the gig economy. When you said before, you're not ready to retire anytime soon but maybe you're thinking at some point, you downshift, and you stay involved with things. But that's where planning could be such a help to think through "All right. How do I manage my cash flow? And can I do that so that can start to have a different kind of work-life balance?" But I threw out a lot there. Give me your thoughts?
Frank: No, you're absolutely right. I think the industry is going more towards financial wellness, which we can talk about that or holistic planning. But there's no...the interesting thing about our business is there's no standard definition, right. And you and I have both read the book called "The Infinite Game," it actually never ends the evolution of our business. But getting back to expanding the role of planning and being that retirement advisor, we sometimes referred to it as the center point advisor.
How do you become the center point advisor where clients want to work with you or consolidate assets with you, meaning, you're not the caregiver, you're not the person that remodels their home if they want to age in place, but you can pull it all together for them. And by asking the types of questions that I mentioned earlier, it's not just those questions. I mean, quite honestly, the education of ourselves for those questions has educated our advisors as well, right...about the possibilities. And to your point about effectively managing money it's really not effective until you know what you're planning for, like, have you had a contingency for needing a long-term care facility? Do you have a contingency for if you are given a critical diagnosis will Medicare cover it all? And if not, do you have contingencies for that? And you can have a lot of contingencies and because you've budgeted for those, your plan doesn't look so good, but they might not happen either, right?
But you know, we find that you just have to ask these questions and see what they're really, really concerned about. And from a business perspective, clients are so appreciative because they're not thinking about these things they haven't been trained to. And they're just really, really thankful. Like, "Thank you so much for helping me think about that. Now, where do I go for a resource?" as I mentioned before so. But that's where we're getting to more and more and more. You know, what's interesting Fidelity came out with, I'm sure you're familiar with it, in ‘17, which I still refer to as the new advice value stack. Have you seen that?
Gavin: Yeah.
Frank: It's based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Gavin: Terrific.
Frank: What I love about it is at the very base of it is money, man, right?
Gavin: Right.
Frank: And I love that because it's still very, very important. There's still so many advisors, that's the main reason they got in this business. But the base supports.. there's two successive levels…the next one was goals, right? Like, just planning for basic goals, like, college education, and Medicare. But then beyond that, and I love this term is peace of mind. I've seen that so much more related to financial planning, and how do you define peace of mind? I mean, I know how I define it, and I think many people will. So when I put my head on the pillow at night, I can pretty much fall asleep because I know I've thought about everything that could happen to myself and my family. I know the resource I may have to go to and I can afford financially.
Now, in all honestly, I'm not going to sleep every night, because I haven't accounted for everything. But that's really what it's worth. That's what we're getting to… that's how do you provide client peace of mind? That makes you so much more valuable and irreplaceable with that client.
Gavin: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the advisors who help clients with these issues, they become indispensable. And you're now you're not being judged -- you certainly have to perform from an investment management standpoint -- but that's not the focus of the relationship. It's all these other things you're doing to enrich their lives, giving them that peace of mind. You know, I think about it in terms of -- and maybe COVID has elevated this in some ways, in a good way to help people think about things in a more meaningful and real way than they might have before. You know, very real issues like...
Frank: It has.
Gavin: ...yeah, you get sick, you go to the house where you might not come back. Are you...you know, think about the value an advisor can bring to help somebody realize, if at some point, if you don't get hit by a bus, you're going to know things are going in a negative way. Do you have your financial life organized? Do you have issues lined up? An advisor that can do that you're and talk about the business opportunity now, as aging boomers get to the point where they start to consolidate assets and simplify their life and who they work with, you're now in pole position, right? If you don't screw up the investment side, and you saw these other issues, and you're a partner along the way, because it's not like it's once and done, you are in an incredible position.
Frank: Well, I will tell you, not only your question has COVID accelerated it? Absolutely, has. And I think I've shared this with you, I have a report from Absolute Engagement, Julie Littlechild's Company, and this goes all the way back to the March timeframe. Her question was directly to clients of the advisor. What more information help do you want from your advisor? A lot of times these questions are what are you concerned about in general? But this was from their financial advisor. And far away the combination of health and wellness and issues around caregiving, which we're being surrounded with, you can see an increase. You want, in successive weeks it all increased. So the demand is really there. Our clients have always wanted to talk about these things. And I think as most advisors or boomers how do you...
One of the questions we get is how do you broach the subject? You know, just tell your own story. We're all living in the term empathy, putting yourself in someone else's shoes, I mean, we're in those shoes, we're all in the same shoes here so it's so easy to begin the conversation. And as far as you know, the effect on business, which I think you refer to a little bit a minute ago, it's, I have all kinds of stats, I don't know, if you want to get into that right now, I can.
But when you look at the assets and revenue of those who utilize these resources, and some of the success stories we've seen beyond a doubt, it's catching on, right? If you look at the utilization of our resources, if you want me to go through those briefly, I can. There's a bar chart that goes up every month. Now, it would be disingenuous to say for me that all 8,000 advisors are using these resources. It takes a while, it's a learning curve because you're really shifting how you do business. But it is happening and those who are employing this way of doing business, our version of longevity planning I've definitely seen the results.
Gavin: Yeah, let's get into that in a minute. But as you're talking about that, you really, you can't talk about this issue without also talking about the opportunity to engage specific market segments, whatever you want to call them, engaging women to a much larger extent. I know you've studied this extensively. You know, gets to the making sure advisors do a much better job engaging both members of a couple.
Frank: Yes.
Gavin: It also gets to the issues around millennials, who are dealing with a lot of these issues that we're talking about, for their aging parents.
Frank: Yes.
Gavin: So there's, so many different dimensions to this.
Frank: No, thanks for bringing that up. But I do call it the elephant in the room, this whole topic of the transfer of wealth, right?
Gavin: Right.
Frank: And we've seen longevity planning, I'll just use that term for the remainder of this call, work here in two ways. You have clients that are beyond retirement age getting in their 70s, and 80s and they need a lot of these types of resources for caregiving or for critical care. And what really needs to happen though, is to have a family meeting and a family discussion about it. So what I'm saying is, when you're talking to clients of that age, they inevitably need to get their kids involved. Now, we're talking about kids that are 40, and 50 years old, they're not kids, but their client's kids. So all of a sudden, they're turned on to the type of resources that you provide, right? That then it can also work the other way, we've seen this plenty. You have Gen Xers and younger millennials that are coming up, they are clients. You talk about these resources, "Wow, I really need this for my parents." So it really, really works both ways. And more Gen Xers and Millennials are better aware of what's happening out there, they see this and to the extent that they go to their parent's financial advisor for help with this issue. And the advisor says, "We don't do that." There's a chance you could lose that client. I mean, it's getting to the point where more and more advisors as they offer this as an alternative, if you don't, you could be at risk in the future. But that's a great point I mean, it covers all the generations because the kids want it for their parents or the parents to get the kids involved in the decisions of these types of utilizing these types of resources.
Gavin: Right. Yeah, with wealth transfer most people they don't maybe they have a Will we know. A lot of people don't have a Will, but there are so many more issues that go into those decisions. And if you can help the say the parents think through what do they want to do within their lifetime? What do they want to wait on? I just think the vast majority of people, they just don't have any sense. They want to be guided, they want to know, and we see this in a huge way with the younger generation coming up. But I think it applies to boomers as well, they want to know, for people that kind of look like me, from a profile standpoint with these kinds of assets in this kind of a life situation. What do other people do? What should? What should I be doing next? And that's the beauty with all this is, you can now lay out a game plan that could be multi-year to say, "Look, we can't do all this right now, here's the right order to go through these things."
Frank: Now, that's a great point. Because everyone everybody sees all the resources we have they get worried about how do I do it all at one point in time? You don't do it all at one point in time. That's not the case at all. It's gradual. It's really gradual. But, again, I mean...
Gavin: Why don't we bring this alive for folks, and give people a sense of the kind of ecosystem that you calculated and are providing. Can we pull that up?
Frank: Yeah, I'm going to share my screen. Just give me a second here.
Okay, you see it. So this is our definition of what we call a comprehensive longevity advisor. And someone...so another firm or another advisor may term it differently. But on the X-axis, you see what I've already referred to, client peace of mind on the Y-axis is the value of a relationship, the value you're providing in this age of fee compression and we should talk about that a little bit later too.
And also immunity to automation. So the bottom two levers, right, that's the bottom two bars, let's say investment management financial planning, and this is, a lot of this is based upon Fidelity's new advice value stack. What we're saying is this is table stakes. You have to provide this to be effectively in the game today. When you start getting into wellness planning for housing and health care and caregiving, and then risk management, long-term care, Medicare, prevention against fraud and theft, and ultimately, legacy planning.
And legacy planning is not just having the right documents, it's where is everything and can my loved ones access it when they need to? Here's the Fidelity advice value-stack we talked about before: managing the money, achieving goals, peace of mind, and then ultimate fulfillment, but we’re really focused on peace of mind. So more value, more peace of mind. So the way we've structured that…
Gavin: By the way, I was going to say I love the point, the dimension you had around immunity to automation, because right now, there's some FinTech sitting in a garage somewhere, trying to automate all this, use AI, use software to guide it. And there's certain basic parts of all this that can be. But back to your point about empathy and the role humans -- effective humans that know these issues -- can get into to ask the “why?” questions as they talk about goals and what they're trying to. Why, why, why, why? You go through that chain and you find out and you help the client find things out that they might not even have known or been able to articulate because no one's ever asked them those deeper questions.
Frank: No, you're right. Thank you for bringing that up because a minute ago, I was trying to remember that point. Clients are not going to come to you and ask "Can you help me with caregiving? Can you help me with deciding where to live? Can you help me with...?" They're not going to do that, that's why it's so critical to ask these questions. Asking questions, we'll be getting more questions from the clients. And that's where you really begin to differentiate yourself, just by asking the question and opening up the conversation.
And even if clients do know that they may need it, they're not going to think to ask you, or they may be embarrassed to ask you because they don't want to ask a stupid question and it's not stupid at all. Again, it all comes back to effective planning and money, right, making money last effectively. So thanks for bringing that up. That's a great point, you have to ask questions.
Gavin: And go to your next slide but I want to come back too, you made a comment about the clients, don't want to look stupid. The advisors, we know this more than anything, advisors would by far prefer never to bring something up versus bring something up that could embarrass them, because it's something that they're out over their skis about. So I want to come back to some of your successes around advisor adoption.
Frank: That's a great point. Because back to the beginning of our conversation today, we talked about when we said to advisors, "Okay, go out there and meet all these experts." They're like, no, the reason that was a bridge too far, is they didn't have confidence in their ability to evaluate these types of resources. So to your point, like not wanting to be embarrassed, so we went back, and I'll go through these quickly in a minute, and researched these resources ourselves and have them go through a sometimes 6 to 12-month procurement process. They don't have to worry about explaining it. They're confident that these are valid and vetted resources that they can talk to their clients about. And of course, we provide all the background all the information. We have a longevity planning line within Raymond James FAs, can call if they have questions about these resources. Can you see? Do I need to bring make this bigger? Can you see well enough?
Gavin: Yeah, it's good.
Frank: Okay. So, let me just walk you through our thinking here. This quadrant is it starts with financial planning, right and asking the questions we talked about, so that's fine. And the outside wheel is the resource, right. So our enterprise planning solution is MoneyGuidePro. We call it GPM, goal, planning, and monitoring. So that's where it begins, you ask the questions about where you will live? And have you thought about a critical diagnosis? And what if you can age in place? And the questions were like, okay, where do I go for that? And that's when we'd started developing these resources. So briefly, in wellness planning, we have Broadspire Care Management and I'm going to do a "Reader's Digest" of all of these but they're all companies you can look up yourselves.
But Broadspire they have an actual human care manager to your point human that will come to your house and if need be, do a home care assessment. "Okay, if you want to stay here, Mr. McAleer, for the next 30 years, here are the adjustments you need to make." It's things like level entrances, easy access to the bathtub, maybe you need that not to have those cabinets so high because of balance issues, when you pull out a big bowl you might fall over things like that. But they also are experts, these care managers in what the facilities are in a certain community. They can help you decipher the difference between a nursing home and a continuing care retirement community they can do all of that.
You know, obviously, we're just this is us being the center point advisor, we're handing the resource off to the client. We can't pass any information on because of HIPAA and whatnot. But it's a proven resource and in all cases, we have enterprise pricing. So that's what Broadspire is all about. Clinical care is all about a critical diagnosis. And I think about nine years ago, my mom never smoked in our life. Nearly at Philadelphia summer going into the hospital, but she was having trouble breathing. And here it is stage three lung cancer. The only silver lining if you want to call it that, as it wasn't prolonged my mom passed away three months later, but this was out of the blue. We didn't know what to do. We were just shelling out money in and out of the hospital, oxygen tanks, you're just shelling out money there's a cover, we don't even know just get it done.
My point is, that's what Pinnacle Care helps you avoid. If I had Pinnacle Care back then I would have called them and said, "Okay, my mom has been diagnosed with cancer, what question should we be asking? What will insurance cover? And who are the best doctors in the area that we should be talking to? And can you give us a second opinion if you already have one?" That's what that's all about. Healthcare Concierge, in fact, that has become an employee benefit at Raymond James. I had two associates use it, they raved about it. It's more than just the help it just mentally, right. And think about that any advisors listening, think about the value of helping your clients get through this and evening out that mental anguish. I'm going to get to risk management.
EverSafe is a tool we partnered with. That's all about theft it's the sets it's a service where the client signs up. We now have an option where FAs pay and I'm a client in all my accounts are with EverSafe, I get a report every week "There was nothing suspicious in your account this week." Or maybe there was. I get free credit reports every quarter. And the nice thing about EverSafe though is you can have a trusted contact partner. In other words, say EverSafe is sending me emails about something going awry in my accounts and they can't reach me. I guess, well, Gavin Spitzner is my trusted contact call we will come and check only make sure am all right. So that's really skyrocketed, utilization. And HealthPlanOne is a company that we partner with for Medicare.
In a nutshell, our clients can go to HealthPlanOne when they're aging at age 65, or even if they want a reevaluation of their current coverage. There's no commission there's no payment to the FA is a total value add. Obviously, HealthPlanOne makes money if they write the policy. For every 10 clients, they talk to they write a policy for four great ratios for them. I like the opposite. For every six, they're not doing anything, which means they're not trying to force the issue. So that's been really, really successful. And another client is a...
Gavin: Yeah, just to pick up on one more thing the elder fraud you talked about some of that. That you can't pick up a newspaper or go online not see 20 stories about just abusive, elder fraud.
Frank: No, it's incredible. I will tell you EverSafe, one of the founders of EverSafe is a woman named Liz Loewy. She was in the District Attorney's Office of Manhattan for a long time. And she started the elder abuse service offering within Manhattan. And I will say EverSafe is helpful with that too because a lot of times elder fraud or theft is a trusted caregiver. You've given them access to your accounts and all of a sudden, your local grocery store, right? So they don't just...they track spending patterns. So I use Publix in the St. Petersburg, Florida area. If I spend $300 a month there, all of a sudden that goes to 600 they're going to let me know. So all of a sudden, okay, well, is somebody else using the card somebody else, what's going on here? So they're really focused on that it's not just basic accounting irregularities. The longer you're with EverSafe the better they get to know you and your spending habits.
Gavin: Right. It's huge. I mean, you help solve those issues. It's just incredible. And back to the point before about the children. It's a nightmare for children, helping their parents deal with those types of issues. You're going to be...your place within that family is just so solid at that point.
Frank: No doubt. Now, we've seen it.
Gavin: Can I give you a quick Publix story since you mentioned Publix?
Frank: Yeah.
Gavin: My stepmom is down in Florida in Ponte Vedra…goes to the local Publix. Johnny Unitas's brother works at Publix. He's got to be near 100. Anyway, that's not part of the story.
Frank: Oh, my, god. It's a great, great, great, it's a great company really great culture, great, great people, they obviously training them to really work well for customers. But Everplans is to call vault would be an injustice. Everplans and I use Everplans as well. It's an online tool to store anything and everything in your life. Now, the reason we like Everplans is they actually have an outline of six main areas of your life and 29 subtopics below that, that you should be thinking about storing. And I'm not talking about just Wills and trusts and your tax returns, family recipes, hidden documents, stories, pictures, passwords, but the thing is they organize it for you. It's a client tool, right? When you hand it off to the client, it's up to them to go ahead, but it's guided, it's really, really guided.
We have a vault too at Raymond James, which is well used and really effective. This just takes it a step further with actual guidance about what you need to be thinking about. And I would say to anybody that wants to take a look at Everplans or think about it. Sometimes people mistake it to be an end of life tool, which it is. It's very effective. But it's for any point in your life having everything organized, you just feel so much more in control.
You're going back to the end of life, like when my mom died, I told you that story. My dad had died 10 months earlier, he was you know, 84-year-old Irishman that just passed away in his sleep was great funeral one of those Irish funerals turns into an Irish wedding, it was a time of joy, right? When my mom died, I remember like, you cannot access the digital assets unless you have the passwords and the sign-ins. And so it's a really, really great tool to really think about having much more control at the end of life, even though it's not just for that really I think, worse...Go ahead.
Gavin: I was going to say there's nothing I can think of that is more central to peace of mind. If you have that set up right you just hey, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I've got my affairs in order.
Frank: Exactly that exact phrase went through my mind. I think about my own daughter, I have twin daughters who are 27 now. Like, I want them to know, like, here's where everything is, here are the instructions, here my end of life wishes, this is what I want you to say in my eulogy. I mean, you can have it all in there. And it's all organized. And the other thing is one more point you could have Everplans calls it deputies. So you can have a deputy that has access to some of the Everplans, but not all of it. Like my financial advisor, I have a section in there where they can access statements updated statements. So that's another nice thing they do have deputies it's not all or none, you can have different deputies have access to it. And if your life does end there's a function that enables whoever has the ultimate responsibility to go in, PDF, everything, have it all printed out, and make yourself a nice document as well.
Gavin: I like the way you said “if”, if your life ends…
Frank: I don't plan on that. I'm going I'm still going I'm just getting started so.
Gavin: I love it. All right. Anything else?
Frank: I would just say like when we… how do you broach the subject when we present this? I like to use slides like this. Like I say, "Okay, how do you really bring to life a service like Broadspire?" And I said, "Okay," this is a quote made famous by Marcella McAleer, who was my mother and started telling me this when I was 17 years old. So for advisors thinking about how do I broach the subject? How many times have you heard this? Or my brother-in-law was just diagnosed with ALS for Pinnacle or things like that. Or I just discovered my mom's paying $300 a month for auto club membership she doesn't own a car …that's what EverSafe is all about. I could go on forever so I'll stop but I want to give you an idea.
Gavin: Everybody has those stories. And everyone has those feelings so everyone can relate to those. Let's come back to the adviser side. You've been at this for a while now. So you've really seen up close and personal what works, what doesn't work, to help advisors.. it's hard to argue with anything. But it’s one thing to agree conceptually, it's another thing to really say, "All right, I'm going to embrace this and make this part of my practice." So can you talk about adoption, any success stories?
Frank: Absolutely. So it's a great...it's another great point … you nailed it, it makes so much sense conceptually, like everybody should be doing this, it just makes too much sense. It's one of those times where it's the right thing to do, your clients need it and it makes sense for your business, right. But I don't want to be disingenuous, again, it's not...it's a change from what you've been doing for a long time, and to implement it takes some work.
You know, one of the things we may talk about in a few minutes is we keep doing more for our clients without charging more and all this is more work. And it's evolving for us. So let's talk about utilization, utilization of the resources. I have the stats here, let me just look at my stats for a second. We have 8,000 advisors at Raymond James, 6,000, when we started this. 2,000 advisors have at least, use at least one of these longevity planning resources right?
Gavin: Okay.
Frank: And when you look at utilization, EverSafe has increased a thousand percent, that's because we changed pricing…put pricing in the hands of the advisor. Like the advisor pays so much a month, and they can provide as many EverSafe’s as they want to. Broadspire, up 131%, HealthPlanOne, up 77% they've all gone up, but it's not everybody just yet because there is some difficulty, right?
Like right now, for example, all of our resources are separate resources. So we're actually working on how do you bundle that and make it one longevity planning package as opposed to these individual resources. And that's the biggest.. I don't want to paint a picture like it's so easy, just go ahead and do it, it takes work. And that is the biggest I request some advisors to make it easier and less compartmentalized, which is that goes back to the infinite game, we're always evolving. So even though we've had great success, and we're pleased with it, we have so much more work to do. But I think it's really about bundling it and making it one …here it is, it's all right here in one package, of course, all those different resources, does that makes sense?
Gavin: Total sense. And to your point about fees. You know, yes, on the asset management side, we've seen and will continue to see fee compression. What advisors that are adding more -- and we've seen this in some of the research -- it's not a slam dunk, but if presented the right way, and delivered with the right pricing model, it's certainly an opportunity to provide more services for incremental fees.
Frank: Is it additive to revenue? Well as you know, my analogy always is if like, one of my relatives says, “tell me about your business," and you start to explain it. It's not like we have 8,000 advisors selling the same thing, go load up the truck and go sell. It is different across the industry and pricing is different so. But our view is, and we're doing a lot of work and interviewing a lot of groups to get feedback.
But there are some advisors that are saying, if you package this and bundle this differently, as something no other firm offers that we've never offered, nd as a result, there's a membership or subscription fee of, say, $2,000 a year to have access to these resources, and a review. That's what we're reviewing.
Then you have the whole question of, does the percentage of assets under management makes sense for everything that we're talking about? I know you and I have talked about in the past, let's just use 1% as a proxy, I'm going to charge you 1%, the manager assets to give you a free plan. Now, the paradigms totally shifted upside down. You're not charging 1% for managing assets. Now, that's still happening. I was on a call with a study group yesterday of advisors and one of the FA said, "I don't believe in fee compression. It's not happening." And I would say to a large degree, he's probably right because the clients aren't revolting yet, but it's out there and it will happen. So we're exploring ways to bundle and maybe you do continue to charge a percentage of assets under management for asset management. But for planning or longevity planning or financial wellness whatever you want to call it, there's a subscription fee for that to be a member have access to the services.
And I come back to the point I think our industry is one of the few where we continue to do more in response to fee compression, but we don't charge more. And everybody I knew...anybody, any service I use, where I asked for more they charge more so. So I really think we need to think about that, it's a big, don't get me wrong, I know that you know but that's a big ask and a big transition. But we continue to do more and more for our clients, we need to think about it. So we're exploring all options. And some advisors say, "Hey, have clients of a certain size, it’s value, and it’s client retention, I'm just going to provide for myself," that's fine, too. I think it depends on your practice, the client you have, the size of clients. I don't think it's going to be one way or the other, there's all different ways, we're just trying to provide options.
Gavin: Yeah, options, it’s not going to be one or the other, AUM pricing, it's not going away. Though, we certainly are seeing more and more advisors charging you could call it subscription fee, you can just call it a planning fee or even a retainer to say, "You know, based on the complexity of your life, and the services that we provide, we're going to charge you $10,000 a year." And depending on the level, you could get to a place where you just say asset management is just part of that.
Or there's an AUM basis point fee for that, depending on exactly what you're doing. But I think we're going to see more and more of that. I think, packaged the right way, delivered the right way, the value's there.
Frank: Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt it's...and you think about everybody you, me, who you're paying a membership fee to, obviously, Amazon Prime, Netflix. I mean, why did you become a member? Because they keep improving their offering, right? You know that if there's a certain type of show, whether it's a documentary, sports documentary, history, you'll be able to see it on Netflix. So I'm happy to pay that membership fee.
And what we're saying is on the advice side, you need to start thinking about that. What's going to make someone be a member of my club, and have the privilege of working with me or our firm? I think it's more and more like that because that's what clients are used to. Okay, I'll pay a membership fee. But the key is, and we've done some research, and we've talked that people that have done this that have membership businesses, you have to make sure you define the value, what is the value of it? Now, we all know the emotional value references early in the call. But there's also there's a quantitative value in there. And we just put together a white paper about that it's going to be a going concern, it's always going to be improved. Like, "Okay, first of all, access these resources on your own or through imaging, there's quantitative value there a correct diagnosis versus a wrong diagnosis. "
And another point I'll make is like the resources we talked about like I've had some advisors said to me, "Frank, these topics are so dour, you're talking about caregiving, and having to leave your home." And our point is, they're inevitable, but it's not dour at all. It's about being more informed, being in control of your decisions, and spending your money more effectively. It's the opposite of dour.
Gavin: I totally agree. It's empowering. It's giving people control, helping them think about things that they're probably already thinking about, but it's just scary. So you're putting them in control. And there's others that they haven't even thought about yet. And you're helping them anticipate and get ahead of it so it doesn't catch them off guard later. To me, it's at the highest level, like take your hierarchy… it's giving people permission, and giving them the tools to make the most out of their lives whatever that means.
Frank: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. You asked about success. Let me just read a couple to you. Today, I'm going to count out Raymond James we were encouraged to contact HealthPlanOne to discuss our Medicare coverage and see if we had the right plan for my wife and I. We spoke with Ty he walked us through and they were able to save 50% of the premium we were paying. Good experience. Thank you, Raymond James, for providing the service. So this is not a quantitative value, but this darn valuable, right to get that kind of feedback, right? And this is the kind of thing that your clients you are going to tell others about.
Gavin: I was just going to say the referral effect of this. You know how many people are going to sit around going the proverbial cocktail party, “Oh, my advisor, beat the benchmark barring three times. But they helped me or they helped my parents with these types of issues." That's something that everyone's going to want to hear about.
Frank: Exactly. And that saw you took the words out of my mouth like, you know what I want to just tell you like, my client, I moved to fixed income it's not. But when you talk about something that made the family happy. Here's another one, my sister just called gave me a recap of the meeting today. This is with Broadspire. "She and my dad were very pleased with the case manager, you select it for us, we're so excited to read her report and thankful to have her as a resource for our family." And that's being attributed to that advisor, Raymond James. So that is really, you talk about goodwill not quantitative value. This is a different kind of value but it's really valuable. That's the kind of success we're seeing success stories.
Gavin: Yeah. And it's all -- you touched already on about the concept of financial wellness, which is, face it, overused… lot of different firms take it to mean different things. But that's really what we're talking about. It's for, aging boomers, let's call them primarily, it’s the definition of financial wellness to them. And it is the intersection of health and issues around health and longevity planning and peace of mind. And figuring out what those …almost like having a scorecard to say, "This is what a financially well, first, and go through these phases looks like. Let's see, once you've checked off where the gaps are and have a plan to remediate. "
Frank: That's a great point because I think you and I talked earlier about the article that's out there on Riabiz, it's about a wall street analyst that asked one of our competitors, coopetition actually, what is the definition of financial wellness? And there is no pat definition. I think you nailed it. It's in the eye of the customer. But I think generally… someone asked me, "Frank, just tell me in 30 seconds, what financial wellness is?" I go back to it’s peace of mind. And thinking about money management, what's being managed towards your basic goals, and your peace of mind goals. That's what financial wellness is all about. And we're just going to have to continue to evolve to get there… the work we're doing with the Next Chapter initiative, that's what it's all about. Making a better definition of what that is, at least something that we can all agree on in general.
Gavin: Right. And it's peace of mind, I guess I would call it objective or rational peace of mind where it's actually grounded in what you should be doing versus just… somebody might have peace of mind, but they could be missing massive things that they should have taken care of.
Frank: That's a great point, right? So there's so many a lot of advisors just like, "Why are we doing this? And my clients already love me." And they do. But there's a lot of married couples that love each other, to one point they, are not married anymore. So it happens, right? So that's a great point. Like if you have a client that trusts you, and you've done a great job managing money for them, and you as an advisor, you're saying, "I've done great for my clients," and you have. The issue will arise if someone talks to your client about "Hey, have you thought about longevity? Have you thought about aging in place? We have those types of resources is your advisor talking to you about that?" That's where you have to be mindful of you let your clients love you and you've done a great job. I think over time it just continues to evolve.
Gavin: Okay. You want to be the one having those conversations.
Frank: Yes, you're not going to be, give up that client won't yes, exactly.
Gavin: Right. And that also, that goes to back to the next chapter one that the areas we've been talking about around financial literacy, right. If you can't define financial wellness without defining financial literacy. What are all the issues that you need to be aware of, and have a plan for? And again, we've hit this a few different ways, but it's that knowledge, and then it's the anticipating and being prepared, so you're not caught off guard. And just I think about my own life, you want to have a sense of if this happened, or this happened, you don't know for sure. You just want to be in a range where you have options. Maybe that's another way to think about financial wellness, having options. So that you're not being reactive and being forced down a certain path based on your circumstances or the things you didn't account for in your plan. But you have those options. So if you decide whatever it is, I want to keep working but in a different way. All right, I plan for that so I can do that, or I want to help my kids get off to a good start. And do something for them when they're beginning their career versus waiting to get an inheritance, that type of thing.
Frank: And then they react being reactive scrape point as well. My mom got sick, we were reactive, we were not prepared. We didn't know what the options were. And then here I am four or five years later discovering all this. But reacting someone said it caused you to spend money mindlessly. And it does. I would say, if you're prepared like we've talked about today, you're spending your money much more mindfully, right. That's really what you're doing. You have those options, and you're equipped for it. And that's where, again, differentiation value for an advisor is huge.
Gavin: Well, I think that's a great place to end it although I could talk to you all day about this.
Frank: I can too so I do get passionate about it. I love talking about it. I really believe in it. I think we in the industry are headed in the right direction.
Gavin: With your leadership and the initiatives that you shared you're not just heading in the right direction, you're leading the way, showing the way. So Frank, thank you so much for sharing your insights and thoughts.
Frank: Thank you.
Gavin: I really appreciate it.
Frank: I enjoyed it. Thank you for the time… I really enjoyed it and I hope to do it again in the near future. Thank you.
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