Understanding Today’s Advisor Technology Landscape with Jason Quinn

[00:00:26] Doug Heikkinen: Yeah. But before we get to that, you have quite an interesting background. Can you cover that a little bit and how you got to Advisor360º and why you chose to be there?

[00:00:36] Jason Quinn: I built most of my career looking at technology, seeing a major shift in that technology, and then joining companies that could take advantage of that shift and be a disruptor or an innovator by bringing it into a specific industry. The first was Vistaprint, which brought a template based approach to small businesses, so they could purchase marketing material at a cost that would be much more affordable to them as a premium  marketing capability.

The second was mobile. I joined DraftKings, which brought a mobile experience to the gaming industry. The founders had the idea--I helped from a finance and operations standpoint.

The next shift that we're seeing in technology is AI. And so, I joined Advisor360º. I met them when they first began the journey of the company, which was building an all-in-one platform and their anchor was the advisor experience, which we can talk about. What they were sitting on that was incredible assets around the workflow, including knowledge of how advisors, home office, and clients and investors work every single day.

They had this massive data moat that's been unified throughout the platform and experience. When you have that asset that you're sitting on, and given  we're going to see technology shifting away from software as we know it, into more of an intelligence, artificial intelligence sort of paradigm, I think Advisor360º, is in the best position in this vertical to take advantage of that technology shift.

And so we are beginning to bring that newer technology to the wealth management industry and are looking forward to help reshape how advisors, investors, and home offices work every single day.

[00:02:30] Doug Heikkinen: Great. So for people that are not familiar with Advisor360º, can you briefly cover what it is and then maybe what's new and how you're serving advisors today?

[00:02:41] Jason Quinn: Advisor360º originated as an all-in-one platform that an advisor would use—so anything from a client portal, investor portal, it has home office capabilities, it has a CRM. It has ports to the trading and modeling capabilities that you would normally see in an advisor workstation.

That's its birth. The company has been on this journey to break out the difference between an AI-native platform and operating system that sits underneath, its module applications, and now launching new AI capabilities. When you launch those new AI capabilities, it sort of shifts the paradigm to where the software can work for you instead of you working in the software.

And so, that's what Advisor 360 does. What its brand promise is, and its focus has always been, is this holistic advisor experience. How do I bring that to market and how do I let advisors thrive and grow their businesses ?

[00:03:45] Doug Heikkinen: How do you feel the new platform is different from its competitors?

[00:03:50] Jason Quinn: What we saw in the market was a very large gap--we call this category the advisor experience. If you look at the Michael Kitces chart, T3, you see 50 to 60 categories of different tools that get cobbled together to help advisors do their job. They usually get cobbled together and sit on some other platform that's not actually built for purpose.

What we have done is built an operating system underneath that's specifically for wealth. We promise the data layer because we know how all the data comes together. We understand the workflow engines of this industry.

You can either choose your advisor experience from our native applications--our new AI products--or you can go buy the best-of-breed point solution and bring that into a unified, embedded experience within our advisor experience that is this new category.

When you look at a competitor, we haven't seen one other than the historic legacy players that may have built an all-in-one where they only allow one operating system for people to use. But those were built 20 or 30 years ago. They haven't been built in the last couple years.

[00:05:21] Doug Heikkinen: AI is on everybody's minds and everybody wants to know the answer to this question, which is how firms use AI to drive advisor efficiency and enhance the advisor client experience. What's your take?

[00:05:33] Jason Quinn: We're starting with the client and we're starting with the advisor. We purchased a company called Parrot. That was a horizontal AI note-taking tool at the time. We're using that as the main platform and building out what we call AI skills to be able to go from AI note-taking to really everything an advisor does on a daily basis. That's more the manual task or the operating part of what AI can actually do for the advisor.

The one thing that AI will not be able to do is manage the relationship between the client and advisor or home office—and so we’re giving them back more time to do that.

The specific use cases that we're going after and are actually in production today with some of our largest clients including what people call meeting prep in the industry. However, most of the meeting prep on the market today is only linked to the CRM.

Because we have an operating system, our meeting prep actually looks at the financial plan, it looks at the CRM, it looks at your financial performance information, it looks at your tax planning, if you actually have an estate plan as an advisor…and so on and so forth. It brings all of that together and starts the advisor's day and does all that work for them and for that meeting prep.

And then theadvisor or the assistant can interact with the AI to adjust what the AI wants to report on or how they've framed out or summarized the key points that they need to talk about with the client. We found that saves a lot of man hours, so the advisor and the assistant can spend more time with their clients.

[00:07:23] Doug Heikkinen: Can you explain the important differences between AI native and AI enabled and how it impacts how it that impacts the user?

[00:07:34] Jason Quinn: I think about it as an analogy of Tesla. If I were to purchase a different car,  not a Tesla, and look at its self-driving capability, it can't drive—it's more in copilot mode. It'll keep you in the lane. If you want to be on the highway, it can slow down, it can speed up, to some degree with traffic. It's a little bit choppy.

When you're in a Tesla, that is an AI native capability. It's constantly absorbing all the data of when you're driving, how you're driving and your habits. And you can click that button, it will self-drive.

The difference of being AI-enabled versus AI-native is our agents will know how to do the work for you if you want to do it, versus AI-enabled, which gets you to skip a couple steps, but doesn't really complete job for you because it doesn’t  have a native platform to learn how you work and then be able to perform on your behalf.

[00:08:35] Doug Heikkinen: Interesting. Why is integrated unifying data important and how can it make or break the advisor and end client experience?

[00:08:44] Jason Quinn: What most people are being told in the market right now is: you have to move your data. You have to get it all in one place. And that's no longer true in an AI world. What we need to do is just have access to it, make sure it's contextualized, labeled, and the AI can understand what that data is, so then it can make a prediction. If a client asks to move certain amount of money, it will make a prediction on how the financial plan, how the entire portfolio may need to change with that small ask. Knowing and integrating all of that data and contextualizing it, means it could absorb that one simple ask and then tell you how the portfolio and the holistic advice needs to potentially change.

Then the second thing it does—where Advisor360º is a bit different because we have the workflow knowledge—is there's a button that you could, as an advisor, click and say, now I want to execute that money movement. And then I potentially want to update all of the things that relate to my client’s financial plan, portfolio, estate plan, because of that one small movement.

That's the major difference in why the integrated data's so important--it can contextualize what the prediction is and then how to execute it.

[00:10:04] Doug Heikkinen: What does it mean to be a high-performance advisor in an AI first environment?

[00:10:11] Jason Quinn: We're very early innings of what that looks like. The way we think about that internally at this point is: high-performing means you have adopted the right amount of AI capability where you stay in very accurate, very precise advice, and you've taken back time by not doing the same mundane tasks that the AI can do. What you do with that time is, for example, you can invest that back into relationships with your clients, so you can help expand their portfolios, you can help expand their family plans, and essentially grow your business . Or you can spend your time attracting new clients and then be able to grow your practice as a result. You can also potentially train young and upcoming advisors, so they can build a book, and that's only going to help your overall practice grow.

[00:11:09] Doug Heikkinen: What's Advisor360º doing to bring the industry forward?

[00:11:13] Jason Quinn: The way we talk about it is: how do you go from a paradigm of software tools, to a unified experience, to intelligence? That's why the AI-native Wealth OS is so important. It meets firms and advisors where they are, so that if they want to continue to use their favorite financial planning software application, they can continue to do that.

However, there's a new experience with Parrot that we're rolling out.  If I'm talking to a client just in conversation, Parrot is ingesting that. Parrot will be able to, based on that conversation, update the financial plan and give it back to the advisor right away. If the advisor thinks that's the best approach, it can iterate with the AI. Then, instead of sending an email thanking them for the meeting, they can say in the email, “Thank you for the meeting and I've already ingested everything that you've said and I've already adjusted the plan. Here's all the things I think you should do and that could be implemented...”. It's a much different way to operate as an advisor.

[00:12:36] Doug Heikkinen: You're talking to so many advisors, what challenges do you think are facing RIAs as the industry evolves and it's happening so fast?

[00:12:45] Jason Quinn: The ethos of the RIA that we see is independence, freedom, it's really a small business. We see that there's two things that they're struggling with. How do I grow? And how do I make sure that I'm able to provide an incredible experience? And it could be human experience or it could be digital experience or a little bit of both. And our promise is, is that we can give you a great experience.

What we've been able to do is a parallel path. We can land with you, or--in other words--stand up our technology right next to your technology and invite both the advisor and the investor into that new experience while you're still running your current technology, so it's not disruptive to your business.

And that's been their biggest pain: how do I move to the future without actually disrupting or risking my business?

[00:14:19] Doug Heikkinen: Speaking of the future, last one for you. What's next for wealth Tech for advisors, both as we look ahead to 2026 and beyond?

[00:14:29] Jason Quinn: In my opinion, the wealth tech has done an incredible job of creating innovation. So there's 600 different applications.

I think in the future there's going to be a lot of consolidation of those wealth tech applications. What we'd like to do with Wealth OS is enable some of that consolidation by getting on top of a data layer for those applications to either continue to thrive and grow, or aggregate with like applications to create a unified experience, which also should allow that one or the other point solution to thrive and grow.

[00:15:23] Doug Heikkinen: Jason, this has been great. So informative. Thank you for being with us and we wish you an Advisor360º a super year in 2026.

[00:15:33] Jason Quinn: Thank you for speaking with us. Hopefully we'll have a great holiday and we'll catch up right after the new year.

[00:15:38] Doug Heikkinen: Yeah. All right. To learn more about Advisor360º, please visit Advisor360.com.

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