The FinTech Report Podcast: Episode 26: Interview with Santiago Burridge, Lumiant
Lumiant to focus on ‘values’ for financial advice, not product; expands to USA
To listen to this episode, click here:
https://fintechsummit.com.au/the-fintech-report-podcast/
Santiago “Santi” Burridge founded Lumiant in 2020 to support financial Advisers in delivering on the promise of advice by creating a software-supported advice experience.
According to Santiago, Financial Advice needs to expand beyond investments and into every facet of a client’s financial life. With Advisers understanding what truly drives their clients.
Lumiant is a cloud-based advice and client engagement platform, where clients and their advisors connect around their lives, values and finances.
Lumiant’s goal is to remove key person dependency by creating a memorable, measurable, and repeatable process that anyone can deliver. We’ll take a deep dive into what this means and how it’s delivered.
Please note that this discussion is not financial advice and you should seek professional advice that suits your individual investment needs.
Key points in this interview:
- Santi wants to support the industry in transitioning away from product led to advice led, which is largely driven through a values-based or life-centric advice process
- There was very little technology on the market to support advisors in this transition – there are platforms, CRMs and tools that help put clients in portfolios or products but nothing to cater for the wants and needs of clients throughout their entire lives.
- According to Santi, financial advisors have incredible conversations that essentially get butchered and turned into 80 page SOAs, risk profiles and performance reports which mean very little to clients – it’s like handing them an MRI scan and expecting them to understand what they are looking at with no professional training or experience.
- So Santi wanted to create a platform that would bring advisors’ superpowers to life – their ability to connect deeply with their clients and understand everything there is to know about their lives and their families. Santi wants to turn the qualitative, extraordinary unstructured conversations into structured, quantifiable and measurable dashboard that brings to life what’s important to a client and their family. With this information, Lumiant can better define a financial plan that will help clients to live their best life
- Lumiant is comprised of several modules to help with client discovery, trade-off conversations, keeping clients on track and accountable, and bring to life the intangible value of advice. Modules include:
- Your Life – our short assessment that acts as a lead gen tool that gets clients to inform you what areas of their lives are most important to them – based on the 8 Dimensions of Wellbeing
- Your Values – our deep discovery values-based advice process that gets to the heart of what clients truly care about
- Your Goals – our SMART goal tracker that lets clients inform their advisor on what they want to achieve to live a life aligned to their values
- Your Wealth – connects with investment and open banking providers to provide the overall net worth of a household in one place
- Your Best Life – Lumiant’s multi-goal optimization engine, with Monte Carlo simulations, enables you and your clients to scenario plan and model their best life. Clients can immediately see if they’re on track, underfunded, or overfunded helping them to make better, more informed life decisions.
- Since Lumiant launched in Australia in February 2021 and the US in May 2022, Lumiant have over 150 advisors from almost 50 practices supporting more than 4,000 households in living their best life.
- US based Savant – one of America’s largest RIAs – invested $3M in Lumiant, rather than build its own solution, to deliver advice in a more understandable, tangible, measurable and efficient manner that engages all clients on their financial plans.
- According to Santi, the traditional systems, technology, and experiences used to engage clients around their advice have placed product, performance, compliance, and efficiency first. They do not facilitate an experience with an extreme client focus and often totally ignore or disengage non-financial clients. All they want to know is “will I and my family be ok now and in retirement” and what they need to do to live their best possible life.
- According to Santi, there is a vast amount of research that confirms that not all clients are engage in their financial plan:
- 50% of women said their financial advisor cannot connect with them
- 36% of women said they feel patronised by their financial advisor
- 70% of women leave their financial advisor upon divorce or death of their spouse
There is also research that suggests that by better engaging clients you can increase referrals, retention and revenue. And, we’re seeing this amongst our own customer base, with many of our customers saying our values-based advice process helps them convert clients, increase referrals, better engage the whole family and ultimately increase revenue by being able to better showcase the value they provide their clients – particularly when it comes to the intangibles.
