Tuesday Email: Innovation

Read time: ~3.30 minutes

Happy Tuesday! 

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action. 

Regulation is no longer an excuse for lack of innovation

We are a highly regulated industry, no doubt about it. And for decades, that’s been our crutch.

We tell ourselves we can’t innovate because of compliance, so we make incremental changes, convincing ourselves that’s enough. Meanwhile, tech companies are reinventing how we interact, learn, and live.

The future of wealth management isn’t about taking risks with client money—it’s about rethinking how we serve them, what we provide, and how we deliver value.

Because if we don’t innovate, someone else will.

The day we switched CRMs, I felt the tension the moment I walked into the office.

People weren’t just frustrated—they were outright defiant. Screens were dark. Arms were crossed. Conversations were hushed but heated.

We had spent months planning, training, and communicating the change. But when the day came, no one wanted to move. The old CRM was still there—just one click away. And so, they used it. The new system sat untouched, collecting digital dust.

We had a choice: let them ease into it or force the shift. I knew what had to be done.

We shut off access to the old CRM. No more safety net. No more crutch.

I braced myself for the fallout.

Then something strange happened. Within a week, everyone was using the new system, and within a month, no one could imagine going back.

The thing they resisted most had become the thing they couldn’t live without.

That’s when I realized: progress doesn’t happen when people are ready. It happens when there’s no other option.

Wealth management has always been a human business—and it always will be. But being human is not an excuse for failing to evolve.

When our firms resist innovation, it’s rarely about regulation—it’s about status quo bias.

We think that because something has worked for decades, it will continue working for decades more. However, our clients’ expectations are not shaped by other wealth management firms; they are shaped by the Googles, Apples, and Amazons of the world.

Your clients no longer compare you to other advisory firms.

They compare you to their iPhone.

They compare the ease of working with you to the frictionless, intuitive experience they get from buying something on Amazon or managing their money on Venmo.

If it’s harder for them to interact with their wealth manager than to check out at a self-service kiosk, they will feel the difference—even if they can’t articulate why.

That’s the real threat.

Too many firms talk about innovation but don’t build the infrastructure to support it.

Saying you want to innovate is like saying you want to ride a bike for the first time without training wheels.

The desire alone won’t get you there. You need a structured way to build and test new ideas.

That means two things:

• Innovation needs to be a role, not just a concept - If no one is responsible for driving new ideas forward, innovation will always take a backseat to daily operations. Whether you’re a one-person or 100-person firm, someone needs to own this.

• Failure needs to be a line item, not a stigma - Innovation doesn’t have a one-to-one ROI in the short term, just like R&D in technology doesn’t immediately produce profits. If we treat every failed idea as a waste of resources, we will never build something that compounds into an industry-changing innovation.

Right now, failure is seen as dilutive in wealth management. However, in the most innovative industries, failure is seen as accretive.

It’s time to shift how we view innovation investment.

The future is an industry where we think more like Google and less like Goldman. If we’re going to think like Google, not Goldman, we need to start with first principles.

Right now, many firms try to innovate by layering on complexity—adapting existing processes instead of rebuilding from the ground up.

Instead, we should be asking:

• What are the fundamental truths of what we do?

• What does every client need, regardless of complexity?

• How can we remove friction in these core processes?

Most advisors view their business like a dense forest, trying to navigate through every tree. First-principles thinking is about focusing on one tree at a time, redesigning it, and working outward from there.

When we strip a process down to its essence, we can rebuild it in a way that is simpler and better.

This is how Apple designed the iPhone.

It’s how Tesla reinvented the electric car.

And it’s how the best firms will reimagine wealth management.

Google didn’t launch Gmail overnight.

It started as a side project in 2001. By 2004, it was released in beta to a small group of users, where it stayed in beta for five years, constantly evolving based on feedback.

The result? When released to the public in 2009, it wasn’t just another email service but a fundamentally better experience.

The lesson? Innovation isn’t about a eureka moment. It’s about constant, incremental improvement.

Yet in wealth management, we tend to think innovation needs to be a fully built, ready-to-launch, perfect solution before we present it to clients.

But that’s not how real innovation works. The best innovations start small, imperfect, and iterative.

Instead of waiting for a fully formed breakthrough, what if we started testing minor changes, learning from feedback, and evolving along the way?

Apple didn’t reinvent the phone. It reinvented how we interact with it.

That’s what wealth management needs now.

The firms that win won’t be the ones that follow the old playbook.

They’ll be the FutureProofed advisors who rethink the game entirely.

The best is ahead!

-Matt