The Back-Office Advantage: Innovation That Elevates Advice with Ryan George

[00:00:21] Doug Heikkinen: Let's start out, I've known you a while, but let's start out by talking about your journey and your journey to Docupace. How did you get there and what's some of the past?

[00:00:31] Ryan George: I can start with a couple things. First, I'll start with I was fired. So yeah, David Knoch and myself worked at a broker dealer called 1st Global back in the 2000s or 2010s.

And we sold that broker dealer to a company called Blucora. And after we sold that company, we were surreptitiously just excused from the business as people do. And then David was hired as the CEO of Docupace and brought me along. So that's how I ended up at Docupace specifically. In the business, sheer luck. I got out of college and needed a job, and so I ended up as a rep answering phones. And the long, winding way has brought me to here.

[00:01:18] Doug Heikkinen: I haven't ever started a podcast, and there's been 300 of 'em, with I was fired, so that's great.

[00:01:25] Ryan George: I have to be unique, right?

[00:01:26] Doug Heikkinen: You too.

For those who may not be familiar with Docupace, tell us what it is and how your platform helps financial advisors.

[00:01:35] Ryan George: Sure. Docupace is a back office operations platform. So, we've been in business for 23 years. Made lots of changes over those 23 years. I've been here just about five. And what Docupace does is essentially makes all of the processing, the paperwork, account opening, account maintenance, all that you need to do to service and an advisor needs to service an account, is done through Docupace. We have a surveillance platform that makes sure trading is compliant. We have two other solutions like the compensation management as well as we do an, we have actually have, an advisor transitions program that's been really popular the past couple years as well as there's been so much movement in the business.

But, Docupace handles everything that sort of happens behind the scenes during the advice delivery process.

[00:02:21] Doug Heikkinen: When I saw you earlier this year at the Envestnet conference, you were really excited about the improvements you were making this year. What are some of those?

[00:02:29] Ryan George: Sure. So I think the first and foremost, is a new user experience.

So we have been working diligently on a new user experience to really modernize the platform. Like I said, Docupace has been in business for 23 years. Because of that, you start dragging some legacy tech ball and chain with you and, being able to get free of that is a big piece for us and something that our clients, we've already started rolling that out with new clients and we're currently rolling that out with existing clients.

That's one thing. But I don't want to, while it's a new user experience, I think I would be doing a disservice to our technology teams if I didn't talk about all the backend work, like moving to the cloud, putting in tech key stuff like event driven architecture and GraphQL and other things that actually make the platform much more scalable.

Much more customizable. And what that part of it is, we wanna make sure we can push out capabilities, like administrative capabilities, to the field so that our customers can control more things for their customers without having to come to us to make changes. Like, we don't want them to call us and have, or even have to put in a ticket if they want this word to say XYZ instead of YZX.

And so we're trying to do our best to allow them to do that.

[00:03:38] Doug Heikkinen: You also acquired the workflow platform Hubly back in March. What drove your interest in that acquisition and how has it improved your offering?

[00:03:48] Ryan George: A couple of things. With any transaction, cultural alignment really matters in terms Of, making like a transaction work.

And Louis Retief and the Hubly team were all about workflows. They're all about making business more efficient, flowing through the business more effectively, which is what Docupace does as well. And so we had purchased a company, a platform called PreciseFP, a client data gathering platform, back in 2021.

And Hubly is another piece of that. And what we're looking to do is build what you would consider like a all-in-one operations platform. But done it by where you can buy different pieces as you go. And this is really specific for the RIA market, which is scaling up, and needing more process. So we've had a good experience that, like I said, that one, was closed in March.

We've been working together to update the platform, make some enhancements, and really trying to get, getting the business to work much more effectively.

[00:04:41] Doug Heikkinen: So are you still shopping, or better said, are you still active in the M&A marketplace?

[00:04:47] Ryan George: We absolutely are. So we actually hired J.T. Petrilli, who is our first ever head of M&A.

And he's been at work bringing in different opportunities in the marketplace. We're pretty specific on wanting businesses that are, business that are growing business that have a true potential in the marketplace and that align with our. Back office credo. But, we're definitely always in the market for looking for the right fit, the right culture, and the right business that fits in with Docupace.

[00:05:17] Doug Heikkinen: You can't go anywhere these days without talking about AI. And you talk about AI washing. Can you explain what it is and what you think of it?

[00:05:25] Ryan George: Yeah, so AI washing and you're, starting to see a little bit more of this now. We're at the, we're at the hype, part of the hype cycle where everything that was going to be new under the sun maybe isn't.

And I think what's happening with AI washing is, technologies are just throwing sort of generalized language models into their platform. It's not really unique, but they're overselling what it can do because it's not based on lots of data, unique data. And they're basically just, oh, let's plug in ChatGPT, and now I can write something.

And that's great. But I think it's overly emphasizing this like tremendous profound impact that AI is going to have. And so what I think is happening is, it's almost if you think a couple years ago, like if you put blockchain in your name, or Bitcoin in your name, you would see a spike in stock price.

We're kind of at that point now with AI companies. But I think, I think it will level out soon. I actually think some of it's leveling up right now in terms of people trying to really find, dig under a cave. Just 'cause you say you're AI, tell me what it really is, and what it could really do for my business.

[00:06:26] Doug Heikkinen: Oh, I completely agree with you. So what's your approach to AI at Docupace?

[00:06:31] Ryan George: Sure. So we're trying to build what I would call is an agentic AI platform. It's, that's definitely directly tied to back office operations. So think of an advisor onboarding agent. There's lots of stuff that needs to happen for, to bring a new advisor onto a broker dealer like licensing and other records checks.

And so we're trying to build the, an AI agent that can do that. Also, information extraction from documents. That's something that exists in sort of single point solutions out in the business marketplace. But we want to bring that into Docupace, because we are one of the larger storage and manage and document management providers in the business.

And so we have a lot of data to pull there. So that's been our approach. We're looking to release our first real unique novel AI idea within the PreciseFP platform in the fourth quarter of this year that will allow users to use AI to create a data intake form that's customized to them or customized to the client that they're looking to bring on board.

[00:07:29] Doug Heikkinen: I think I can guess the answer to this next question, but I'm going, you tell us where you are. Where do you land on the buy versus build technology debate and why?

[00:07:39] Ryan George: As a CMO for a technology provider, I think I may not have much job security if I went on the build side of it. But, I will say the thing is, we're at a point where there's so much technology in the marketplace, and to be fair, so much technology has been overpromised and underdelivered, that people are pulling back and saying, I want to go do it myself.

And I thought that they had learned that lesson years ago. And it's, to me, it seems like it's now crawling back into the marketplace of people saying, I'm here. I'm here to build. What they don't know, and say somebody who's at a large RIA or a large broker dealer is, what they don't know is it's not a just a building.

Complete the building. It's a ongoing build, an ongoing build in order to keep things running efficiently and delivering new technologies or maintaining the software. And so that's one of the things, I call it the siren song, which is from The Odyssey where they basically get disoriented by the Song of the Siren.

And I think that's where we may be at today.

[00:08:42] Doug Heikkinen: Maturity of the RIA market is challenging more RIAs to scale. What role is Docupace playing in the RIA solve for this challenge?

[00:08:52] Ryan George: Sure. One of the things I think that maybe not directly intuitive to everyone is operations and efficient operations actually can unlock growth.

And why that is, is that everybody gets to focus their attention where they need to focus their attention instead of keeping the lights on. And I think right now with the maturity of the RIA space, where you've had a lot of M&A activity, you've had a lot of aggregators put together. And they, where it used to just be, oh, if I just grow my assets or grow my advisor base, I'm going to see a return on that investment. I think today we're at a point where I need to, the, that part is done and now we need to get, how can we get the most of what we have, versus just trying to throw more onto the top line. And so that's Docupace is, like I mentioned with Hubly and with PreciseFP as well as taking the, what has traditionally been the Docupace platform and make it, at a price point that's more available to the RIA space.

[00:09:43] Doug Heikkinen: Last one for you. Looking ahead at how technology can be leveraged to help advisors better serve their clients, what are you most excited about?

[00:09:52] Ryan George: I'm excited about lots of pieces. What I'm most excited about is, what technology can do to bring advice availability to more people. Meaning, I've been in this industry, you and I have known each other for a long time.

I've, gosh, I'm dating myself, but, over 20 years now I've been in this business in different roles. And the, one of the things that has always troubled me is, why don't more people have access to quality advice? And I think technology is allowing, really unlocking the doors to do that, where advisors can deliver advice and service at scale without having to charge an arm and a leg for it.

And I think that long-term impact, I think, is going to have a huge just on the quality of life in America. I know that's a big picture thing, but that's something that does make me excited.

[00:10:38] Doug Heikkinen: Hey Ryan, thanks so much for being with us today. Am I going to see you at Future Proof?

[00:10:43] Ryan George: Oh, I will be there. I'll have my swim trunks on and my sunglasses.

I'll be ready to go party on the beach.

[00:10:49] Doug Heikkinen: But you're also going to have a booth?

[00:10:51] Ryan George: No. actually, we'll, I'll just be, I'll be hanging around.

[00:10:54] Doug Heikkinen: Okay. So look for Ryan at Future Proof if you're going, everyone

[00:10:58] Ryan George: I'll be there.

[00:10:59] Doug Heikkinen: Okay. To learn more about Docupace, please visit Docupace.com. We are on all social media platforms @Advisorpedia. Please give us a follow. For our producer Tory Miller and everyone at Advisorpedia, thank you so much for listening.