Cracking the Personality Code: AI for Better Client Relationships with Matt Schiffman

[00:00:22] Matt Schiffman: Thank you Suzanne, and thanks Advisorpedia for the interest in what we're doing at totumai. So a little bit of quick background. I entered the business in 1981 as a financial advisor and in that time I have been a wholesale or I have been a head of sales and I've been a chief marketing officer on a global asset management company.

So I've seen the financial services ecosystem from a variety of different perspectives based on experience. And that culminated in us developing totumai, which we're going to talk about today. But totumai in essence, is a tool which gets to improving communication between people by understanding their personality and using and leveraging artificial intelligence to, in a variety of different use cases, which we're going to discuss today, which will enable and foster that communication, deepen relationships, and drive better results.

[00:01:21] Suzanne Schmitt: Thank you again, and I think it's really timely. AI seems to be rolling off just about everybody's tongue as we work in market right now. So knowing that we've got a lot of advisors out there who are likely hearing the drumbeat from their home offices about the need to continue to personalize, as well as an increasing emphasis on what AI can do to help advisors really hone in on the highest value aspects of their practice. I wanted to put you through a couple of questions to help our audiences really understand not only the opportunity, but what makes totum, we think, unique in the marketplace. Matt, let's start by talking a little bit about, what's your perspective on why traditional demographic based personas maybe aren't cutting it, aren't sufficient for financial services. And did you guys have an AI kind of aha moment when you were thinking about and ultimately forming totum?

[00:02:13] Matt Schiffman: Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there, but let me see if I can approach it logically. First off, interestingly, four in 10, based on surveys, four in 10, investors are less than very satisfied with their relationship with their financial advisor. Why is that? And, in truth at the bottom, at the bottom line on this is that the dynamics of that interaction, that relationship, that experience is not quite what they want it to be. And to improve communication, historically what the financial services industry has done is create, or use, demographics to describe and frame a client based upon their wealth, their age, their occupation. The challenge with that is that's a very weak signal. A much stronger signal, which describes the personality, the behavior, how best to engage, is really the personality.

And so under unmasking and uncovering what that personality is, is so much critical. If you think about it, Suzanne, just in a very simplistic sense, if we're talking about billionaires, we can have billionaires who are introverts and billionaires who are extroverts. But if we treat everybody as one category demographically as a billionaire, without overlaying personality, it's very likely that what you're going to do is you're going to miss the mark when you're trying to communicate effectively with them.

And so the aha moment. That we had in thinking about totumai is with the advent and development of large language models, if we could find a way to fuse the personality equation with the large language model, could we effectively improve the dynamic of the relationship all across the experience spectrum between an advisor and his or her client.

[00:04:23] Suzanne Schmitt: It makes a lot of sense. Let's stay on that for a moment. You intimate that trust, it really hinges on personality and kind of interpersonal fit more than financial expertise. Could you talk a little bit more about how your personality based communication strategy really helps to reinforce that bond and that trust between client and advisor?

[00:04:45] Matt Schiffman: Yeah. If you think about it, imagine a world where I was searching for a financial advisor, right? And ultimately settled on two potential financial advisors where I was very confident that they had deep expertise. But what's going to take it across the line? What's going to cause me to hire one advisor over the other?

And it's that they get me. They understand me. The financial service industry has not done a great job with this. We've done a wonderful job in building customized and unique portfolio solutions. All the tools that an advisor has is at their hands, right? And many advisors obviously have moved towards a more holistic dynamic in their relationship with their clients.

But what's critical is, where's the trust come from? How do we know that this individual gets me? And interestingly, if you think about the world that we occupy, we're all very accustomed to unique experiences being served up to us, whether we're talking Spotify, we're talking Amazon, we're talking Google.

The financial service industry hasn't done as great a job with that because a lot of that, and this is where you're moving towards, is tied up in the communication, the experience, right? I know that someone gets me when they speak a language that I understand. I know that someone gets me when they're driving an experience with me that resonates with what I'm looking for. And we'll talk more about that as we break that down. But that is what ultimately, and that's what research would show, drives trust. That they understand me, they get me, they are communicating with me, in a way that I understand and appreciate and want.

[00:06:51] Suzanne Schmitt: So Matt, what I'm hearing is personalization without the personality isn't effective. Could you talk a little bit more about how what you're doing at totum is different?

[00:07:01] Matt Schiffman: Yeah. What we have done, Suzanne, is try to crack the puzzle, open up the puzzle, crack the nut as it were, of what is the personality?

How do we access that information? And so what we did was survey 400 individual investors currently working with a financial advisor. We had a PhD psychology research. Individual develop a survey which we put out in the marketplace. We survey these individuals and the data that we collected enabled us to identify five unique, personas with their own communication preferences.

And then built an eight question survey that advisor could use with their client, which would identify that individual, their client, as into one of five different specific categories or personas with their own unique communication preferences. So now the advisor has an EQ hack.

they've got a personality tool that enables them to communicate in a way that the client would better appreciate. Interestingly, the research out there would suggest that clients only understand two thirds of what's being shared with them. And if you think about the issues that are of paramount importance today, the dynamic between the advisor and their client, what they're trying to help the client solve for.

These are very sophisticated, thorny issues, whether we're, and they go way beyond financial planning. We're talking about long-term disability and other life events, elder care. So really, thorny issues, important issues, weighty issues. And if you can't articulate that or communicate that in a way that the client can't fully appreciate, understanding that everyone takes information differently, process information differently, makes decisions differently. If you can't delineate and better communicate what you're trying to do and what the message you're trying to get across, then a lot's going to be lost, and that's going to be suboptimal and subpar.

So we've created a survey which effectively will identify and allow the advisor to understand how best to get that information across. And we'll talk about this more, I'm sure other use cases of how this information can inform and improve the client experience.

[00:09:48] Suzanne Schmitt: So we've been talking so far, Matt, but I think the proof in this case is, worth a lot of pictures, in lieu of words. So why don't I turn it over to you, for you to actually take our listeners and our viewers in this case through what makes totum really unique and frankly different.

[00:10:04] Matt Schiffman: Yeah. So I want to show you a video of what could be, and just to set the table for this, what we're imagining is that this tool sits inside of an advisor's workstation in this case. It's in their outlook. Let's assume for a moment that a wholesaler has visited this advisor. The wholesaler is talking about a new investment called Axiom Space.

Axiom Space is actually building the next suborbital space station, and it would give the advisors clients an opportunity to get the next. foothold on space exploration, space commercialization, and the advisor's very excited about the concept. The advisor has over 200 clients and thinks that, 20 of my clients would likely be very interested in this investment.

Now the advisor can either send out 20 emails to their clients, the same email saying, Hey, I just saw this presentation. I'd like to set up a meeting to discuss it further with you. Which is somewhat suboptimal or could create 20 unique emails tailored to the individual's personality, which has already been captured, which we'll talk about further.

But that information resides in the CRM and so automatically, once I set up what I want to do, it serves up a recommendation as to which or how to flex the information in an email form to the client. So we'll run through this video. I won't, I won't offer any commentary. It's, there isn't any sound, but it's all visual.

And then I'll come back on the back end to, make some comments about it.

 So let me offer a couple of comments here. It's clear that these are two very different messages all tailored around the same theme. So the client on the left, Susan, who in Myers-Briggs speak, if you're familiar with that, is a classic ENFP, which translated means she's very non-linear in the way she thinks.

She's very emotional in the way that she reacts to things. She's very creative in the way she visualizes things. And so the language that's being used in this email in terms of, the reason for the meeting, and the way that the meeting agenda has been set up, the language and the lexicon and the phraseology is very different on the left hand side than the right side.

So Simon, on the right hand side, is the opposite, personality wise, from Susan. He is a classic ISTJ. He's very linear in the way he thinks. He's very data oriented. He's very fact based. So you can see, hopefully you can see very clearly in what's highlighted here that the words that we're using are very different on both sides.

Although the email is the same, the same intent, the same message in terms of I'd like to get together to discuss this idea. Now, this is a very simplistic example, and in the world that we operate today, most advisors are dealing on much more complex issues that we discussed earlier, the financial planning aspects, the holistic planning and the life events that surround that.

But just to prove the point that if you capture the personality upfront, you can flex the communication in a way that is most likely to be received and processed by the individual you're trying to communicate with.

[00:14:22] Suzanne Schmitt: Yeah, the visual's really helpful. You've touched on, Matt, the notion of personas and archetypes, and you all at totum take a really different approach to how you characterize different personality types and preferences, and you use musical instruments, which is really unique in the space.

Talk a little bit about how you came up with that and why you think that's maybe different and perhaps even more effective than some of the traditional, like Myers-Briggs, for example you just mentioned.

[00:14:49] Matt Schiffman: Yeah we, so we've taken, thank you for asking that. We've taken a very, perhaps non-traditional approach.

So the beauty of coming in when we have and having the technology that we have access to has allowed us to think about things a little bit differently. So for example, the eight question survey, a shortened survey to identify one's personality was assembled using some of the best of the very best. So the traditional personality surveys of Myers-Briggs, Big Five, HEXACO, that are out there.

Our PhD researcher effectively took the very best of those personality surveys and condensed them down to eight questions. And we did that for a reason. The reason we did that was because we knew that an advisor's client is not going to sit through a hundred questions, 50 questions, whatever. That we had to make it short.

But to your question in particular, it also prompted us to think about things non-traditionally in that, we didn't want to use colors because colors have an emotional element to them. for example, if you think about, I was so mad I saw red. So colors have a, a kinetic. Emotional, attachment that may or may not serve us well.

Also, animal stereotypes probably also fall in the same category. So if somebody is very deliberate in the way they're thinking, just to make an extreme example, to label them a sloth, would not be useful. We, thought about it at length, and what we came up was, instruments, don't really have a lot of emotional baggage or attachment to them.

And they're they're unique in their own way. a piano versus a, bass versus a trumpet or a saxophone or drums, very different in what they contribute to sound and the way they can sound. And we thought that was much more useful, much more memorable. And in fact, there's something beautiful about it too, because when you think about it, you know when you can get all five of those instruments in a room, you can have a terrific band.

And we're all, many of us are jazz fans. So it just resonated, it made sense from both the scientific and also a practical point of view.

[00:17:14] Suzanne Schmitt: Yeah, I like it. And it puts the advisor in the position of being a little more of the conductor, so to speak, so

[00:17:20] Matt Schiffman: Exactly.

[00:17:21] Suzanne Schmitt: that conductor's gotta know how to tune into his various sections in the orchestra or the band.

So Matt, you just showed us a really, I think, helpful example where totum can actually help an advisor, shape the language in an email, for example. What other ways can an advisor in his or her practice use the findings of, which particular band, instrument rather, a client fits into?

How does the advisor apply, your findings outside of email?

[00:17:53] Matt Schiffman: so we would define that as use cases, right? What are the use cases for this? How can you leverage this technology to your advantage, and to your client's benefit? And I think it's only limited by the imagination, but I can share some of the more obvious ones.

So obviously we've just gone through an example using emails, but along the dynamic of the client experience. So whether we're talking about the communicating via email, setting up a meeting agenda, driving market commentary, quarterly performance reviews, presentations. If I knew, Suzanne, what your personality was or your type, your persona, then I would probably, take a piece of compliance approved literature that I'm going to be sending you to discuss this topic, but the technology could advise me as to what to focus on on that document, right? What are you going to really care about? What should I dig in on and what should I just either avoid or just not cover, knowing that you may or may not read it, but you'll have the document in hand. So I think the use cases are fairly broad.

Interestingly, in talking with other advisors as they think through their future and what the future of the industry looks like, moving towards bigger teams, these mega teams, for example, I could imagine, and they certainly, agreed that there's an environment where you might better pair, clients on these teams with specific advisors based upon the personality dynamics.

So it, again, as I said, it really only is limited by our imagination, but there are certainly quite a few opportunities, what we call use cases, to apply the technology.

[00:19:52] Suzanne Schmitt: So I want to combine maybe two concepts into one of our last questions in our time together. You and your team did a ton of research, prepared a white paper and released that to market recently.

And in the course of doing that research, you were looking at both academics and you were also talking to advisors who are working with clients right now. What were some of the surprises? That came out of both your academic research and what you heard from advisors who are currently practicing?

[00:20:22] Matt Schiffman: Let me divide that question in two parts. So what I think was surprising from the research, Suzanne was that, when we applied all the data that we had accumulated from researching 400 individual investors currently working with advisors, was the complexity of the communication preferences. I thought maybe if we're lucky we'll get three different types. We found five. And that complexity cuts across the frequency by which they want to be contacted. The depth of the information that's in the content, the tonality, how expressive they want it to be, or unexpressive. Formal tone versus informal tone. All of these dynamics really speak to the complexity of the human dynamic, which heretofore we haven't had an opportunity to really work with because we haven't had that information accessible and in a usable format that's scalable.

I think, secondarily, what came out of conversations with advisors said, yeah, this is really interesting. And in fact, we surveyed advisors on the concept and over 90% said, yeah, this gets to the personalization and now over 90% said, yes, I would integrate this into what I'm doing.

But when you talk to advisors, and this was not surprising, that they said, honestly? Cards on the table, I spend probably 80% of my time with the top 20% of my practice, or top 25% of my practice. Where 80% of the assets are, 80% of the revenue is. But that means there's a long tail of clients that I don't deal with as frequently as I should or as they would like.

And this tool would enable me to, because it's scalable to be able to communicate more frequently in a more personalized way, which should deepen those relationships. And they pointed out that as they think about their practice over an extended period of time. And we've seen this over the years.

We know this is in fact the dynamic of the, of relations between advisors and clients, that this tool would perhaps better enable them to capture the next generation, which is so critical to building and maintaining one's practice. Grabbing the next generation, the generation beyond that.

[00:23:12] Suzanne Schmitt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And the efficiency that a tool like this can provide those advisors to reach into that non I'll say the old Pareto principle, the other 80% of the clients that they don't have the time to work with. Makes a ton of sense. Next to my last question, where do you see personality based typing going in the next three to five years?

And then as a fast follow, Matt, where do you see totumai going? What's on your roadmap?

[00:23:41] Matt Schiffman: So I think, if you stand back and look at what this technology, again, because of AI, it very obviously it's going to move towards an environment where we probably can move away from survey, and the AI will be able to monitor, watch, or read for whatever word you want to insert there, a communication between an advisor and his or her client, and be able to ascertain the client's personality based upon their responding. So if you had a note taker that was actually taking notes, real time of a conversation, say between you and I, Suzanne.

It's very likely that the AI will be able to ascertain your personality, my personality, based upon the way that we're engaging, what questions you're asking and the way I'm answering those questions. I think that if we extend that again, using unlimited imagination, where that could go from there, and I think it's a positive, is I that the AI will likely be able to uncover items that an advisor should be thinking about, or suggestions the advisor should likely be making to the client based upon what the client is saying or inferring. This is a, it would be able to cut through the difference between explicit and implicit.

So what is being implied in the conversation? What's not being said. But if you have the technology to be able to understand it, to be able to break that down and figure out what's the next best step based upon the interaction with that client. And maybe even point out areas where the client is stressed and uncomfortable.

May not be saying it quite the same way or in a less obvious way, but to flag and make you aware of the fact that you need to address something that's not currently being addressed. So I think that's really a useful place for the technology. Beyond? Beyond this? I think because the overall mission for totumai is to improve communication between people,

it doesn't have to be and shouldn't be, and likely won't be, constrained within financial services. I could see it moving into health tech and into education. Anywhere we have two people communicating and where the importance of that messaging is so critical to outcomes. I think this is going to be useful and have a place.

So very excited about that. And I would encourage the listener, if we've struck a chord and prompted your interest to want to know more, is to visit us at totumai, T-O-T-U-M-A-I.net, we'll probably put something up on the screen for you, but at totumai.net, you'll be able to download the research that supports what we've done here, but more importantly, take the survey yourself to test on whether or not it's actually captured your personality.

We'd love to know that. So hopefully that's been helpful.

[00:27:01] Suzanne Schmitt: Thank you very much, Matt. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you sharing not just what you're doing at totum, broader brush strokes, what's happening in the industry specific to the shift towards AI infused personality assessment.

I want to thank our listeners for joining us. Please follow Advisorpedia and you can get this and other Advisorpedia podcasts wherever you get your socials and your pods. Thanks again. Have a great day.

[00:27:25] survey.totumai.net: Please visit survey.totumai.net to learn more and discover insights about your personality traits and characteristics through totumai's comprehensive assessment.