Introduction and Company Background
Som Mohapatra, Co-Founder of Hadrius, an AI-native compliance platform serving over 500 financial firms, recently closed a $22 million Series A funding round. Drawing from his prior entrepreneurial ventures—including a fintech startup competing with Robinhood and a prediction market platform—Som emphasizes the critical nature of compliance in wealth management and the lack of effective compliance software, which motivated the creation of Hadrius. Over four years, the company has grown to a 70-person team, focusing on AI tools to improve compliance outcomes.
Evolution of AI in Compliance and Emergence of Agents
Som explains the shift in attitudes toward AI in the industry, from resistance to widespread adoption by 2025. He distinguishes between AI for compliance (assisting with false positives and data review) and agentic AI, which autonomously performs compliance tasks and generates reports. This approach transforms compliance roles: analysts become managers, compliance officers lead strategic oversight, and Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) take on board-level responsibilities. Instead of manually reviewing flagged items, agents provide synthesized reports with actionable insights.
Core Compliance Areas Addressed by Hadrius
Hadrius delivers oversight across six interconnected compliance domains within broker-dealers and RIAs:
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Testing Program | Monitoring adherence to Written Supervisory Procedures (WSPs) and Policies and Procedures (PNPs). |
| Communications | Surveillance and archiving of emails, instant messages, websites, etc. |
| People Oversight | Code of ethics, disclosures, certifications, and personal trade monitoring. |
| Account Surveillance | In-depth trade monitoring for compliance risks. |
| Marketing Review | Compliance checks on advertising, investment memos, webinars, podcasts, etc. |
| Branch Management | Day-to-day branch operations and periodic branch exams. |
This comprehensive, interconnected platform replaces siloed compliance systems by integrating data from all verticals, enabling holistic risk analysis and decision-making.
Headless Software and AI-Native Culture
Hadrius embraces a headless software model where compliance work executes behind the scenes and delivers insights directly through familiar communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and email—eliminating the need for daily logins. This infrastructure approach improves ease of use and efficiency. Som highlights the company’s distinctiveness as both AI-native (AI embedded throughout every function) and interconnected, enabling holistic compliance coverage, unlike older legacy systems retrofitted with AI.
Agentic Tools and Use Case Visualization
Agentic AI tools function like a ChatGPT interface connected to Hadrius’s internal compliance data. Instead of manually collecting reports from multiple platforms and preparing compliance summaries, agents autonomously:
- Aggregate flagged communications and trade data
- Analyze risk exposures and compliance status
- Generate concise reports with resource recommendations
- Send these to compliance officers via email or chat applications
This automation allows firms to run multiple agents concurrently, dramatically reducing manual effort and streamlining compliance monitoring.
Off-Channel Communications Risk and Industry Challenges
The SEC and FINRA have intensified enforcement around off-channel communications, costing the industry over $2 billion in fines since 2021. The major risk is advisors using unapproved text platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal) that lack secure archiving and leave firms exposed to data breaches involving MNPI (Material Non-Public Information) or PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Som stresses the importance of secure, compliant communication channels that are easy to use since employees prefer familiar texting methods. Firms often fail by imposing difficult compliance protocols, leading employees to circumvent rules consciously or inadvertently.
Key Compliance Pitfalls and Human Behavior Insight
Som draws a parallel with tax filing software, noting that non-compliance employees want simple “yes/no” workflows rather than complex procedures. Compliance must be easy and intuitive to avoid human error or deliberate avoidance. If firms do not simplify compliance, people will naturally seek shortcuts, increasing organizational risk.
Industry Influencers and Partnerships
Som admires Altruist for its agility and AI-driven approach; Vanguard’s acquisition elevates their market impact significantly. He also cites Michael Kitces as an influential thought leader bridging wealth management and technology. Hadrius plans a co-partnership announcement with a prominent wealth management firm soon, emphasizing their growing embeddedness within the industry.
Closing Thoughts on AI’s Role in Compliance
Som summarizes that the days of humans manually handling repetitive compliance tasks are ending. Agentic AI now allows compliance officers to focus on strategic, higher-value work. He notes that regulators like FINRA have adopted their own internal AI tools, demonstrating AI’s growing acceptance on all levels. However, he cautions firms to adopt AI solutions with quantitative benchmarks to validate their effectiveness and differentiate real value from hype. Prospective buyers should demand evidence-based performance compared to generic language models like GPT or Claude.
Contact Information and Final Remarks
Som invites listeners to learn more at hadrius.com or contact him at som@hadrius.com.
Key Takeaways from the Discussion
- Agentic AI in compliance shifts work from manual review to autonomous execution and reporting, increasing efficiency and reducing risk.
- Hadrius offers a comprehensive, interconnected, and AI-native platform covering all major compliance areas in wealth management firms.
- Off-channel communications remain a high-risk exposure requiring easy-to-use, secure, and recordable communication tools to maintain compliance.
- Compliance processes must be simple and intuitive to ensure adherence by non-expert employees.
- The industry is moving from AI-assisted compliance to agentic compliance, elevating the role of compliance officers to strategic governance.
- Rigorous quantitative benchmarks are essential for assessing the true value of AI compliance tools against baseline language models.
- Real-world compliance infrastructure is increasingly headless—work is done invisibly and delivered via chat and email without users needing to log into complex platforms.
This insightful episode highlights the transformational potential of agentic AI to revolutionize compliance in financial services by making oversight smarter, faster, and more integrated with daily workflows.
RJ Malyk 00:05
Welcome to the BPN Insights Podcast. I’m R.J. Malyk..
Today, Chip sits down with Som Lohapatra, co-founder of Hadrius, the AI native compliance platform now used by more than 500 financial firms
Hadrius just closed a $22 million Series A, and today Som tells us what agentic compliance actually means for the industry and why AI alone was never going to be the whole answer.
And right now, here’s our host, Chip.
Please take it away.
Chip Kispert 00:36
RJ, thanks for that wonderful introduction.
I’m super excited to have Sam on the show today.
Welcome, Sam.
Som Mohapatra 00:43
Chip, really, really excited to be here.
Thanks so much for the invite.
Chip Kispert 00:00:46
You have a ton going on, including you just closed a$22 million Series A.
Som Mohapatra 00:00:54
Yeah, super, super exciting stuff. It’s been, you know, four years plus in the making.
This is my personal third company. This is my second company with my two co-founders, Thomas and Alan.
And the sort of long story short of how we’ve gotten here in the first place is my first company with these two co-founders was a fintech.
00:01:17
Well, actually, let me restart here. My first personal company was a prediction market startup. Three years before the Kalshi and Polymarket, the big ones in the space.
Unfortunately, I was three years too early. So I missed out on building a $30 billion company. That kind of sucked.
My second company was in the fintech world, competed with Robinhood, Wealthfront, so on and so forth, built a digital wealth advisor. We ended up growing that to 25,000-plus high net-worth clients, ended up selling it for seven figures, and really learned a couple things while running that company.
01:59
One is that compliance is not optional. You’ve gotta pay for the consulting, the software, the tooling. And two, at least back then, all the software in the compliance space kind of sucked. And so we had to build our own. And that turned into, you know, the first version of Hadrius, which was sort of AI tools for compliance.
And here we are almost four years later with our Series A, with almost a 70-person team and, you know, just a huge green space in front of us.
Chip Kispert 02:31
Yeah, I’m excited for you.
I’ve had the opportunity to watch you over the last year, 18 months, especially since Ryan joined you. And I’ve seen you in action and, and you guys really are doing some neat things out there that I think the marketplace probably needs to take a look at quite frankly.
And you’ve been growing and you’ve been growing kind of your, your footprint within the wealth space, both at RIAs and broker dealers.
So, Som, within all of that, you know, you talked about compliance, right?
03:09
You got to have it. But in your three experiences, right? Tell me a little bit about how you’re looking at kind of the going forward for the next 18 months.
Som Mohapatra 03:26
Yeah, that’s a good question. The way I think about it is, you know, when we launched in the first couple of years, you know, AI was this sort of, you know, boogeyman.
And so I remember talking to a lot of even smaller firms and they were like, “You guys are doing AI? I don’t want to touch it.”
Or we have management that doesn’t want to invest in AI.
And then you sort of saw in 2024 this flip, where it was, hey, our management now wants to invest in AI. “Tell us, you know, give us all of your AI.”
03:59
In 2025, now I think that the story is literally everybody is using AI for, I think it’s, you know, a majority of firms, advisors are using AI in all sorts of places.
What we’re seeing in 2026, and probably the next one to two years, is agents are the new thing. And I’m happy to dig into in a how they’re different from sort of your AI regime over the past three, four years.
Chip Kispert 04:29
Well, I think that’s going to be a great discussion. I know that many firms are looking to be able to have a compliance department that has more eyes, which certainly AI is going to bring us.
But one of the things that you and I chatted about as we did the preparation for this call is your new Hadrius AI agent, which you just alluded to. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Som Mohapatra 04:55
Yeah. Maybe I can start off with, yeah, so I think the sort of short answer here between, you know,
what does AI for compliance mean versus agents for compliance? Does it maybe make sense for me to jump into that?
Chip Kispert 05:08
Great. That sounds perfect. And I’m going to probably be asking questions of you all the way through it.
Som Mohapatra 05:13
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So when I think about, you know, AI versus agents, I’ll start where kind of the software industry started with the difference. And that was in the coding world or the programming world, you know, AI for coding a couple of years ago meant writing code assisted by AI.
And then you had these firms like Cursor blow up.
Now it’s a, you know, $60 billion valuation just got by SpaceX. And they were one of the first, you know, agents for coding. So, again, AI for coding means writing code assisted by AI.
05:45
Agents for coding are AI that actually writes your code. We’re seeing a similar shift here in the compliance world where AI for compliance is asking AI to help reduce your false positives.
We hear that a lot, that’s what we started with a couple of years ago.
Agents for compliance actually do the work for you and then they share the reports with you.
Effectively, what we’re seeing that means, is with the move towards agentic compliance or sort of agent-based compliance, you’re seeing your compliance analysts sort of become managers.
06:18
Your compliance managers become sort of directors of a compliance function, your directors become almost officers of the compliance org.
And now we’re seeing the CCO becoming almost like a board level director of the compliance function.
Chip Kispert 06:30
Absolutely interesting, your perspective there.
So help me understand a couple of things because what I just heard there, is a lot of reviewing, not necessarily having to dig into the anomalies that come up within the data.
Som Mohapatra 06:51
Yeah. I mean, I’ll sort of walk you through the three regimes we’ve seen, right?
If we look back five, 10 years ago, the job of the compliance analyst was look at these thousand flagged emails that were flagged by you know uh some sort of keyword list click false positive probably 998 times and the two times that that you need to to do something about it go escalated to your compliance officer.
07:22
And then we started seeing okay that that thousand you know ai really reduced the false positives and so now instead of a thousand it’s it’s a hundred but you know you’re still seeing false positives, you’re still doing the work where it’s now instead of a thousand clicks as a compliance analyst, I’m clicking it a hundred times or I’m clicking the button 50 times.
The sort of main overall shift, the paradigm shift that agents are doing is now you’re getting a report in your email or some sort of dashboard or in your Microsoft Teams instance. We did the work.
07:56
We found these emails that were flagged for, you know, say, you know, some code of ethics reason.
We’ve escalated to the compliance officer. We’ve, you know, we’ve booked a report here in your compliance dashboard. Here’s a report of what work has been done in the past seven days.
So that’s the big paradigm shift.
Chip Kispert 08:15
So, you know, and I know the compliance marketplace fairly well. And I’m just trying to simplify this for our audience a little bit. So when you reference AI going back, you know, three to five to seven years, you’re really talking about machine learning in that aspect.
Som Mohapatra 08:35
Exactly. Exactly. Machine learning. I think a lot of firms called it like natural language processing.
And then the sort of more recent innovations, you know, the large language models allow you to essentially operate, you know, software machinery with language. And so that’s what we’ve seen a lot more.
Chip Kispert 08:54
So got that. So in terms of what Hadrius and its agents can do, right, what elements of a broker dealer do you provide oversight for?
Som Mohapatra 09:09
Yeah, great question.
So at Hadrius, we think about compliance across six sort of core compliance areas.
The first and broadest is what I’ll call the what we’re calling the the testing program, right? So every firm, whether it’s a broker dealer, an RIA has a compliance regime, right? They’ve got their WSPs, they’ve got their PNPs that pretty much walk through what the heck are you doing to stay compliant.
So that’s our core sort of piece that touches every other part of our system.
Our second is communications, archiving, surveillance and monitoring, you know, obviously from email to instant messages to websites, so on and so forth.
09:48
The third piece is what we’re calling people oversight. So this is your your code of ethics. This is your disclosures, your certifications, your personal trade monitoring.
The fourth I’ll talk about account surveillance. It’s sort of deeper trade monitoring.
Fifth is marketing review, advertising review, whatever’s going out to the public. So any rules, regulations based around that, whether it’s an investment memo, a podcast, a webinar, so on and so forth.
10:19
And then sixth and final, one of our sort of most recent modules is branch management. Anything from your sort of day to day, who’s at what branch to the sort of annual or every three years branch exam process.
Chip Kispert 10:33
So to me, that’s fascinating. And I just love to ask questions because I’m curious in general. But, you know, as you’re looking at this, that sounds like a pretty complete overview platform for a wealth firm.
Som Mohapatra 10:50
Yeah, exactly. You know, when we started off, the goal with Hadrius was to build, you know, a comprehensive SEC FINRA, you know, compliance platform. And really, I think that’s still the vision we want to be.
Again, this is maybe corny to say, but we want to be the one stop shop for all things SEC and FINRA compliance. Right. I’d say the biggest change to that vision over the past couple of years has been where we’re seeing just software go in general is from a platform to infrastructure.
11:23
And what I mean by that is you think of a platform and you think of, okay, here’s a thing I’ve gotta
go into, login with my SSO, plug in my username and password and click buttons in on a daily basis.
You’ve got your CRMs in our space where that’s the regime. You’ve got your compliance platforms and you’ve got a whole host of stuff that you got to click into.
The really big paradigm shift, again, we’re seeing in the infrastructure world is software starting to become headless.
11:50
What that means is the work gets done and gets, you know, it gets sent to you on your Teams instance, your Slack, your email, and it’s getting done somewhere that you don’t have to log in.
And so, yes, we’re still, over our four years, we’ve always been comprehensive, all things SCC Finder compliance.
The biggest change is now the work isn’t being done on your sort of desktop that you log into.
It’s being done somewhere and getting sent to you.
Chip Kispert 12:15
Love that. I have a whole other set of questions for that, but we’ll keep going.
So as you look out in the marketplace, what is differentiating? How are you differentiating yourselves?
Because I know there are a few others that are out there.
Som Mohapatra 12:31
Yeah. I’d say the two biggest things tend to be we’re AI native and we’re interconnected. Interconnected means if I want a report of, you know, as a compliance officer, you know, compliance between my different verticals, they don’t sort of live in a vacuum, right?
I want to know my highest risk sort of branches, my highest risk employees, so on and so forth.
And that’s not going to live just in comms. It’s just not just going to live in your trade monitoring.
13:02
You want one solution that can pull from all these sources and just tell you what you want to know.
So that interconnected, comprehensive piece is where we’re starting to see a lot of market pull from buyers, from partners, so on and so forth.
And the AI native piece, I think, I see a lot of firms saying, hey, we do AI now, right? They’ve been around for 20 years, the last year and a half, boom, we do AI now. We do AI for comms, AI for trades, you’ve heard it all. AI native goes multiple levels deeper.
13:36
Of course, our engineers are using AI for a ton of their research, for their coding, so on and so forth.
But we’re also seeing that across the team.
Our salespeople are using AI agents to understand how their customers are operating. They’re using agents to build prototypes to show like a first version of something we’re building out, et cetera, et cetera.
So really the differentiators, again, interconnected and AI native, meaning our employees are reaching for AI first.
Chip Kispert 14:11
Yep. I think that’s great. I mean, I know in our company, we’re doing the same thing. Certainly not to the scale, we’re much more simple, but not to the scale you’re doing.
So how do you see, so tell me a little bit about kind of your agentic tools, right? How- let’s try to visualize those a bit so that our audience can, you know, kind of be able to have that image in their, in their minds.
Som Mohapatra 14:45
Yeah. What’s a…maybe a place I’ll start is the Hadrius Agent, right? Yeah, so probably the starting point is what you used to have to do, even in the Hadrius platform or some other platform out there. Where I’m seeing the biggest use case of agents, at least right now, is reading info.
15:19
It’s doing the reporting. If I wanted to make a report, what would I have had to do even just a year, a year and a half ago? I need to go into six different platforms. I need to download the CSVs. I need to read them, pull them into my head, and then write a Word doc report that says, okay, well, this is the state of compliance. This is what we’re doing. And so that report’s important for the team.
It’s important for your board. It’s important cross-functionally. It’s important to your CFO to tell the CFO, hey, we need to invest more in compliance headcount or in better software, so on and so forth.
15:52
So when I’m talking about agentic tools, sort of the visualization, what you should be thinking about and what sort of folks here should be thinking about is, you know, it’s like ChatGPT, but it’s like ChatGPT connected to all the code on the back end of Hadrius.
16:04
So if I asked, you know, it’s like it’s sort of a chatbot infrastructure where I ask,” tell me about the state of our compliance infrastructure over the past say quarter,” it’s going to pull the email data and the flags and the stuff that you know our tool has done to the email data, the stuff that’s been reviewed across trades, across say, you know, people management. And then it gives you a page or two page report that says “Invest more in these three areas, keep the investment in these two areas,” and maybe you can sort of take resources and time and focus away from this area, not because you don’t need to do compliance, but because you’re doing everything that you need to there, but there’s risk areas here.
Chip Kispert 16:51
Sure. Sure. Well, and you can do them simultaneously with other agents at the same time.
Som Mohapatra 16:58
Exactly. It’s agentception. Sort of scares me a little bit because that gets expensive.
Chip Kispert 17:05
Gets expensive. It’s amazing how many different agents I can be running just for roundtables and for our BPN platform.
So let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s get to the regulatory side. And one of the things that we’ve been observing is that kind of the SEC and FINRA have been running enforcement sweeps on off-channel
communications since all the way back in probably 2021.
17:37
And when we added up the numbers, it’s cost the industry more than $2 billion across 100 firms, right?
That’s a lot of dough.
So what’s driving that number? And where does that firm’s exposure start? And then how do you see them being better prepared going forward?
Som Mohapatra 18:01
Yeah, great question.
I think it all starts, you know, when I’m thinking about off channel, when I’m thinking about just rules, regulations in the first place, I’m thinking about why they exist, right. And again, it all starts from the goal, the shared goal of protecting investors.
So why do these off channel rules exist? It’s because there is real harm to retail or other investors when, you know, advisors are using non-regulated channels to share information with them, right?
18:32
There’s MNPI concerns. There’s PII concerns. You know, you don’t want to be texting your social security number to, you know, in a spot where others could look at it, right? Where there’s not the sort of proper cybersecurity controls, so on and so forth.
And where we’re seeing this a bunch, especially the past three years, it’s texting. It’s all texting.
IMessage, WhatsApp, Signal. I mean, in our industry, there was a huge, huge security concern with folks using Signal.
19:07
And so that’s why it’s so, so important from the top down, from the C-level down, that the employees at a firm are coordinated to use safe channels that are secure, that are being recorded so on and so forth.
The last thing a compliance officer wants to see is ”Oh one of my advisors in in Oklahoma just texted NNPI” and boom now we’ve got a lawsuit ten million dollars.
Chip Kispert 19:37
Yea, yeah it’s interesting because I’m gonna say up until recently, you know, firms would kind of hide behind the, “Well no texting is allowed.” And everybody knew what was going on. Come on, let’s be serious, right? Right?
So let me drop this down to a smaller degree. 150-Person RIA/BD. What does exposure to this actually look like day to day, right? What are you seeing with that? Because I know you’re working with…
with those types of firms and a little bigger.
Som Mohapatra 20:19
I mean, 150 is exactly the sort of scale where, you know, not everybody knows the management team, right? And not everybody is sort of feeling like, OK, a risk to the business is, you know, is a risk to everybody. And it’s exactly at that scale where you’re going to get people that are, that are going to use the sort of non-proper channels.
So your question was at a 150-person firm, what risk exposures happen from, say, off channel comms?
And I think that sort of core piece is at that size, people are not going to be using the corporate text messages.
00:20:53
You know, if it’s hard to use, they’re not going to use the things that have been built to stay compliant if it’s hard to use. I think that’s sort of the core of what we’re trying to solve and what a lot of other companies in this industry are trying to solve.
You want it to be easy to stay compliant because nobody wants to be non-compliant, but people want to text the people that they’ve known for 20 years in the method that they’ve done for 20 years.
Chip Kispert 21:21
Yeah, people want to get a hold of me, man. They’re going to text you.
Som Mohapatra 21:23
They’re not going to, you know, whatever.
Chip Kispert 21:27
If you go into email, you never know when you’re going to get a call back, right?
Som Mohapatra 21:31
Exactly.
Chip Kispert 21:33
So that’s fascinating.
And where do you see firms really get tripped up? Is it the archiving? Is it the supervision?
Where do you see them getting tripped up? Curious.
Som Mohapatra 21:48
Yeah, there’s a bunch of ways, a bunch of places we could take this. You know, sort of I’ll give you a sort of high-level answer and then maybe we sort of niche down from there.
Where I see firms getting tripped up the most is when it’s not really, really obvious what they need to do to stay compliant. And the way I always think about compliance is I always think about my experience with TurboTax or just tax-filling software. I feel like I’m a smart guy.
22:19
I run a business. I’m always on. I’m drinking a lot of coffee, just thinking about things all the time.
That’s it.
During tax season, my IQ drops probably like 50 points because all I want to do is click yes, no, just get me out of here. I don’t want to deal with this.
My core philosophy is for non-compliance people, for the 99% or 95% of people at a company, they’re not in the compliance org. That’s how they think about their compliance obligations, right?
22:51
Pre-clearance of their trades, disclosing outside business activities, using the correct communication channels. If you’re not making it stupid easy to stay compliant, well, guess what? People are not going to stay compliant. It’s human nature.
Chip Kispert 23:07
That is correct. I love that answer. Absolutely fabulous.
All right. Time to shift our navigation point a little bit here. I always love to ask this question.
It’s one that we have on every show. But who are two or three people or firms that are doing work right now that you really admire and why?
Som Mohapatra 00:23:30
Yeah. Chip, you know where I’m going with this. It’s August 26th.
Chip Kispert 23:34
Well, today’s ironic, I guess, right?
Som Mohapatra 23:37
Yeah.
It’s August 26th, three hours ago we got some pretty crazy news that I don’t think people might have seen coming.
Altruist just announced that you know Jason Wenk, Founder CEO at Altruist just announced they’re getting acquired by Vanguard. You know the Altruist team, first off, they’re a customer of ours, so we’re really, really excited about their next level of growth.
24:06
They’re maintaining their own brand, they’re standalone operating as a business, according to their announcement.
One of the things I really respect about Jason, Mozzie, the Altruist team is they’ve got their finger on the pulse.
When I think about AI native, again, I think about firms where employees are reaching for AI agents first.
They’re unblocking themselves before hoisting off the work on another team, and they’re just moving faster.
24:36
And when I think of Altruist as a custodian, I think of those guys move so freaking fast. It’s nuts.
So those guys are sort of the folks I think about a lot, especially when it comes to how do our advisors,
our broker dealers sort of thinking about and dealing with AI in the market.
Chip Kispert 24:56
Well certainly you know Vanguard Biome is a game changer, absolute game changer you know, and it’s funny because at our AI Lab Roundtable last week we were talking about kind of how
clearing custody was evolving, and then this comes out today is quite pretty big news, right?
Are there any other folks within the space that you dial in on and really focus on?
Som Mohapatra 25:28
Yeah. Within the sort of, I think one of the cool things I’m seeing here in the compliance world is I feel like five, six years ago, most of the people in the industry were just SEC examiners, right? Like people just you know in the legal world who probably only interacted with them at trade shows at, you know, conference industry events. I’m seeing a lot more firms sort of getting out in the market, right?
00:26:01
You know posting on LinkedIn posting on even Twitter a bunch. Michael Kitces is one that I always like to sort of point out. He, you know, first as an educational resource and then as just someone that has a finger on the pulse on just the tech industry.
In fact, we were talking about our first sort of employee on our team, Ryan. Well, the way he found out about us was he was reading Kitces weekly and we reached out to their team to, you know,
this is way back when it was just me and my two co-founders that started Adria’s.
00:26:33
We reached out to them and said, “Hey, we saw you guys have a tech market map. Can you put us on there?” And they were like, ”Yeah, sure.” And then our first couple employees saw that. We’re like, “This is pretty awesome. Let me reach out”. And they’re still here on the team.
And the last person that I follow that I think about I’m not gonna to share the name all I’ll say is, you
know them Chip, the people watching this know his name. These guys are some of the biggest wealth managers in the industry, you see them on CNBC or you see the CEO on CNBC almost weekly.
00:27:10
If you’re in the wealth space, you know this person’s name and you know this company’s name.
And we’ll be announcing a co-partnership with them in the next few weeks out in Huntington Beach in California.
Chip Kispert 27:22
Ah, out of Future Profile. I’m assuming you’re heading there. I’ll see you there.
Som Mohapatra 27:26
I will be there. I will be there. I’m not going to miss the beach.
Chip Kispert 27:30
That’s right. All right, Sam, as we wrap up the show here, we always like to give our guest 90 seconds, no script, to talk about one thing within the wealth management world that you think people need to hear about.
Som Mohapatra 27:46
I think I’d be really stupid if I didn’t say something about AI. So I’m going to say two things about AI.
One is high level sort of visionary. The second is sort of tactical. So the sort of main thing is,
I think the days of being a human being as a first line of defense in the boring pieces of compliance,
like the road work clicking a button a thousand times, are literally over.
When we started Hadrius, our goal was we want those days to be over so that compliance officers can focus on the interesting things, and I think we’re there.
28:20
You know, you’re seeing this at the regulatory level. FINRA, a couple years ago at this point, launched their own private internal LLM, and It took. People are using it all over the place.
I think Chip, you were giving me that data point of it’s like two thirds of advisors are actually using AI daily now. That’s pretty crazy.
And so the sort of the other side of that is if everybody’s, if every vendor is talking,
AI, how the heck do you know what’s actually useful, right?
28:53
How do you make it so that it’s AI is not just going in an ear, going out the other.
And I had a eureka moment a couple of weeks ago. I was on a prospective customer call with a highly technical, multi-strategy hedge fund. And one of the first things they asked was, “Yes, we know you guys do AI just like everybody else. What are your benchmarks?”
And so I think the next couple of years, you’re going to see a lot more, you know, even non-technical wealth management, you know, like firms out there that are evaluating AI usage.
29:25
I think I, first off, I recommend that they start being much more quantitative in their evaluation.
And I think that that’s just where the industry is gonna go.
So when I talk about benchmarks, I’m pretty much saying, if there’s a test for what your AI is doing, so in our world, it’s reviewing emails, it’s reviewing trades. You want your vendor or just your partner to say, “Against this public test, our models, our software, you know, is at 98 98% accuracy compared to GPT, OpenAI, or Cloud alone, which is only 70%.”
30:03
I think that’s going to be really, really important because the first question that I’m asking when I get pitched AI tools and the first question our customers are asking is, ”Why can’t I just do this with Cloud directly?”
As a vendor, as a sort of software provider, you need to have an answer.
Chip Kispert 30:19
Very good set of thoughts.
Som, thank you for being on the show. If anybody wants to learn more about Hadrius or connect with you, where should they go?
Som Mohapatra 30:29
Yeah. Give me an email, som@hadrius.com. That’s S-O-M at Hadrius.com. Or just go on to our website, Hadrius.com.
Chip Kispert 30:38
Thank you, Som. Really appreciate you being on the show.
Som Mohapatra 30:40
Always a pleasure, Chip.
Chip Kispert 30:42
Hey, RJ, that was a super interesting conversation with Som. I think we were able to pull out some pearls on where agentic AI is taking areas like compliance.
And, you know, hopefully we can highlight those for firms that are potentially looking at how to solve some of those compliance issues.
RJ Malyk 31:07
That and save time and money. That’s what stood out to me. So many things that he just said. I just wrote down phrases like when he said “AI is tactical and visionary.”
Another one was “Software is headless.” You know, work is getting sent to you, but there’s no–no I’m trying to think of you know, paperwork or no just taking up space in a computer. It’s just gone. And it was just really interesting to listen to him. He- there’s just so much there.
Chip Kispert 31:41
Yeah and it you know it’s super interesting because I’ve had the privilege of watching the compliance space particularly shift over the last 20 years and really going from such a manual oversight to, you know, the start of a little bit of machine learning/rules-based, all the way to agentic execution at this point.
And it’s pretty dramatic. Really dramatic.
32:13
Another piece that I took from him, you know, this was fascinating- not fascinating, but it validates the off-channel communications still remains a major exposure for a lot of firms just because people want to communicate how they want to communicate, and getting arms around a lot of different devices really can be a challenge.
And then finally, I love this, what he said. He said, “Firms need to make compliance easy and evaluate AI quantitatively.” I thought quantitatively, excuse me. I thought that was fascinating.
RJ Malyk 32:54
Yes. Yeah, that stood out to me, too. You know, well, anytime the word easy is used, I’m my ears perk up. You know, anytime you hear someone say something that insinuates the work will be easier or easier to do, less time, easier to comprehend. All that just rings true to me.
Chip Kispert 33:14
Well, RJ, I think it’s time to wrap up our show here.
I want to quote my favorite Ted Lasso and his seasons back on, which I’m excited. “But be curious, not judgmental.”
This is Chip Kispert wishing you well until our next edition of the BPN Insights Podcast.
RJ Malyk 33:35
Excellent. Thanks, Chip. And thank you for checking out the BPN Insights Podcast, which is brought to you by Beacon Strategies, LLC. For more information, visit BeaconStrategiesLLC.com.
Until our next BPN Insights Podcast, for Chip Kispert and everyone at Beacon Strategies, I’m R.J.
Malyk.