Beacon Flash: Tips on Cybersecurity from a Tech Enthusiast – A Conversation with Geoff Moore, Valmark Financial Group

Welcome to the Beacon Flash, the go-to podcast for enterprise wealth management professionals looking to stay ahead of the curve. Hosted by Chip Kispert, Managing Director of Beacon Strategies, this podcast explores the future of the industry and the most pressing issues facing today’s top leaders. Join us each week as we sit down with industry experts to discuss opportunities and strategies for success.

Chip:

Chip Kispert here from the Beacon Flash, I am so excited to have Jeff Moore, Chief Information Officer for Valmark Financial Group. Jeff, welcome.

Geoff:

Thanks, Chip. I’m super excited to be here.

Chip:

Jeff, you know, you and I’ve gotten to know each other probably. I mean, let’s be honest. We probably known each other at this point 15 years right? I remember the first time that I met you, I went into the Valmark offices, and were talking about compensation. We’re talking commission systems and you were there. So this is really fun for me to get together with you. You’ve been a great participant in our roundtables and I’m ready. I’m really excited to talk one on one about some of the things that are going on in your world. Yeah. So. So here you know, let me get kind of right to it. Right. So, and I’m just gonna give you a little bit of feedback on things we’re working on, right. And then you know, we can spin that back. And so it’s kind of funny because, you know, as busy as we are, we’re working with customers and flying all over the country. We spent the last six weeks doing the things that a wealth firm will do. We implemented Salesforce, we put in Microsoft Office again, we put in HubSpot, we did WordPress, we put in Swoogo which is our roundtable. So I’m sitting here with newfound respect for everything you guys do.

Geoff:

How do you do all this? Some days? I don’t know. Because the part you forgot about is we got to keep everything running still. So you gotta do all the new stuff. And make sure you keep doing all your maintenance stuff to keep the lights on and you usually don’t get a whole lot of credit for the maintenance stuff that’s just expected right there. As expected. That has to be great. You got to give good service all that continue and continue to innovate on top of that, so yeah, I think that’s the challenge like doing both right, making sure you’re still doing well. So for sure.

Chip:

You know, one of the things that also I find interesting is, you know when we look at that our model, right it’s very encompassed right? It’s, it’s ours, right? It’s and only our employees kind of come into it. You’re dealing with advisors out there that are 1099 advisors, right and they’re independent

Geoff:

We want to keep their entrepreneurial spirit alive. And they remind us of that often. Yeah.

Chip:

So, you know, when I looked at that, you know, what are some of the things you’re thinking about you and I’ve talked in the past about how our advisors are doing as we’re looking at cyber, how we’re helping them. This is important, you know, you saw the letter that came out a couple of days ago from FINRA, not necessarily the letter, but now they’re their new version of it. You know, what are some of the things you’re thinking about as you’re looking at cyber?

Geoff:

It’s easy to jump into all the technical controls, right. I spent the last week I had two different security assessments to fill out for just other third parties. And there’s a lot of questions around sort of the nuts and bolts of the technology of how you’re protecting stuff. But a lot of it comes down to it still comes down to the person, right? It comes down to the person and you know, over Christmas I think I posted something that I had like one week where like four different people reached out to me on cyber related issues, whether it was friends and family, or, you know, other people I know that have businesses and you know, everything from ransomware to people getting sort of like socially engineered including my mother in law, you know, just like it just it just never stops. And I think you know, we still have to continue to be vigilant and educate people and train them on all the different ways that they can be compromised. And it’s interesting, I think the younger generations will be easier for them because they play games with each other all the time. You know, I tell my stories to my kids and they’re like, Dad, that’s so obvious. I’m like, No, you guys grew up with it. You guys played games with each other’s phones and tried to trick each other all the time. Whether it’s, you know, people, you know, my generation older, like we’ve had to learn this this is we came from more of a trusting environment and to tell people no and kind of slow down and maybe not trust and a lot of it often I think comes from a sense of wanting to provide great service to customers, and that sort of thing and just a sense of trust, but we just kind of slow down and continue to educate and train people that there there are people out there that want to do bad things to you.

Chip:

Yeah, it’s interesting. You bring up a couple interesting memories for me. Likewise over the break one of my family members had one of those cyber engineered experiences, right. And, you know, the interesting thing in this case was this particular family member was in costume, right? And luckily, their mom was like, Hey, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. And then we, you know, unwound it, and I thought it was really interesting. The other thing is the end of last year, I got an RFP from a compliance officer, who I’ve never met before. I’m like, I don’t think this is right. I don’t think this is right.

Geoff:

Yeah. So they didn’t pass the smell test.

Chip:

I picked up the phone, right. And I called and I got no, I didn’t send that to you. I’m like, yeah, I think I think you got some. I think you got some Gremlins moving around that system that yours right now. It’s really a hard problem. There’s a lot of money out there. And there’s a lot of naivete. Yeah, yeah. So so when we look at that, that’s certainly one of the things that you know, as we’re focused on the you know, and we talked to compliance officers, that’s that’s top of mind. So tell me a little bit about some of the projects that you’re excited about that you’re looking at 2023.

Geoff:

I’m excited about so many things that can be hard to contain. I kind of like being a pretty energetic person anyway. So I’ll just write down a couple that I’m pretty excited about. So first, in addition to my work at Walmart Financial Group, I was recently asked to join the board of the search ventures, which I think a lot of people in our community know is this agenda, Metro founder of Trita. He’s starting a new venture studio where there’s some new things coming out and I’m really excited to be a part of that. I think he’s got some he’s got just a whole great team of advisors. Actually. Got to meet with yesterday. Just incredible minds, I think you’re gonna see some very interesting things coming out of them, you know, once they start building some product, which is going to be great for our industry, too, on the Valmark personal front, you know, we do a lot of our own custom development to make it easier for advisors to work with us, you know, our kind of niches, people that do a lot of life insurance and Ria and you know, annuity, BD business, all three of those things. So, you know, often that means doing a custom development approach.

So we’ve traditionally kind of worked more on financial accounts, investment cases, those kind of things pre operational, and this year, we’re putting a lot of effort into creating more of a client view instead of an account view, a client view. So back office stuff worked really well with us, but maybe not our front end advisors having a great tool to work with us. So that’s where we’re putting a lot of energy this year and it’s more of a front facing client household family view of their data in their portfolio. So I’m really excited about that. On the recruiting front. I’m pretty excited. We’re doing a lot with video like you and I are doing here today. We’re just kind of building out our own small video studio. We’ve hired our first full time videographer on staff so we’re trying to really press into video and use it in lots of interesting ways. Yeah. applause there. I mean, just interesting, different ways. Like for example, like on some of our job posts, right, like, I’ve done some interviews with our interns. And so when we’re doing a job post now we include the real life sort of testimonial of the intern of what that experience is like, right trying to just, you know, instead of just playing text on the page, it just makes it feel a little bit more real. But specifically, I’m really excited in March. We’re gonna have Michael Kitces join us for our mastermind series, our mastermind series as well. Mark just tries to bring in industry thought leaders, kind of like you do with your roundtable series, Chip. So he’s gonna join us for our March roundtable series, and we’re going to do growth marketing, and I’m really excited about him participating with us at Valmark to do that, so that’s gonna be really exciting.

Chip:

That’s terrific. Those are really four pretty cool initiatives. And yeah, and you know, Michael Kitces is having him come in, you know, his knowledge base along with his team that built a really, really nice ecosystem of really understanding a lot of the FinTech wealth tech that’s out there. So that’ll be fun for your advisors to come in. And yeah, that’s a pretty big deal. Changing gears back to something you mentioned before the advisor client work that you’re looking to do. This is a big deal. Right? So if we look back, you know, even a year, two years so we look at the experience, right that investors have in terms of looking at their accounts, being able to make changes to their accounts, self service, maybe change an address, change, a beneficiary, things like that, request a check. Traditionally, that’s been, hey, you got to fill out a form Hey, you got to call the advisor, right. We got some we got some, some chemistry, some culture, some behaviors that are changing. Yeah. Do you agree with that?

Geoff:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you’re saying that this whole thing about like, going back to Kitces, he’s got this whole talk about advice to advisor or whatever, like, a lot of the more back office functions, right. People are wanting to do on their own and they’re really starting to reserve that time with the advisor for just just that just advice, less transactional type stuff really more like coach helped me Hey, I’ve got this idea or I’ve got this thing I’m thinking about doing how does this fit in my overall plan, which is great because that’s really where they can add the most value, right? Like just doing some of the nuts and bolts stuff. There’s, there’s not as technology can do that.

Chip:

You know, it’s interesting, because I think if you go back five years, you know, there were a fairly large subset of advisors that thought filling out a form was adding value. Right. I think that is passed now I hope anyway, was just an automation is coming to, to come in. I mean, I know my mom, right. She’s, you know, she’s retired right? And she’s balanced, right? She’s she wants, she wants to be able to access her accounts. She wants to be able to see what’s going on. But at the same time, you know, a couple times a year she wants to talk to her advisor and, and really be able to balance that knee to knee with attack. And and I think traditionally and when we looked at the independent side, right or even the insurance side or lesser extent the advisors, Ria side, that advisor portal hasn’t been there that investor access hasn’t necessarily been there in a strict uniform umbrella perspective.

Geoff:

Yeah, it’s true. I think I still think we have some work to do there. And even if you look at even the big custodians like Schwab, right, so they’re their retail portal, it was not the same as what the advisors had access to. And some of those you know, if you’re Schwab retail customer, you might get a slightly different experience than someone on the adviser side. Right.

Chip:

You know, we also look at some advisors, maybe they’re purging, maybe with a Fidelity, maybe they’re Schwab. And then they also may have direct, you know, with funds or, and how do you bring that together? And one of the things we’re seeing, really, the leading edge advisors are really starting to say, hey, we and I’ll put the broker dealers as well. We want to own that experience and we don’t want to necessarily leave that to two or three firms to provide a disparate experience. We want to provide one uniform experience, which I think is pretty neat, going forward.

Geoff:

Definitely agree. Not not easy to do.

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Chip:

So Jeff, a question for you. And this is one that I’m kind of fascinated with. When you and I chatted a week or so ago. We talked a little bit about this, but it’s advisors and their staff seem to be asking more and more teams like yours of Valmark and other wealth firms. Right. And tell me a little bit about how you’re looking at, you know, balancing hey, I want to, you know, a wirehouse experience from TAC, right? With kind of how you’re balancing, maybe the budget, right, and weaving those things together.

Geoff:

That’s a good question. So I would describe it as I feel like there’s been a FinTech explosion. Right. So preferencing Kitces. In his map, he used to have this one pager that everything could fit on and then it started getting like you know, more condensed and you needed your magnifying glass and then he’s like, forget it, you can still get the map but I’m actually I created this digitally he he created this digital interface, right to help sort through it. And I think that’s a real challenge, both from just getting your arms around it, because you know, all the providers want us to do an enterprise agreement right with them. But our advisors want choice in what platforms that they can pick. And it’s tough sorting through it and you know, you need to vet all these providers too, so not all of them are on the same level with their cybersecurity maturity. So I’ll give you an example. There was someone that wanted to use a tool that had some PII in it. First question knockout question, do you have multi factor authentication? No, okay, you’re gonna get knocked out then. Right? You’re, you’re gone and but you want to stay on top of it. You want to make sure you understand what the different options are for advisors, and they are looking to us to help them with that. It’s a lot to stay on top of.

Chip:

Gotcha. Yeah, and I absolutely agree with that. And you know, it’s interesting because, in the consulting side we’re constantly wrestling with how do you, you got all these people who want a lot of these shiny metal fishing lures, right? And how do you weave them into that platform both as an aggregator that a firm like Valmark, right, and then as the 1099 advisor, to make sure that they’ve gone through the due diligence, that’s, that’s some big, big challenges.

Geoff:

Yeah. And most of the certs are led by salespeople. They get excited by other salespeople, they see the tool, they’re excited about it and then maybe haven’t gone through as many steps as they need to to make sure that that’s that’s going to be the tool it’s going to work. It’s going to integrate with everything, it’s going to be safe. Right.

Chip:

You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been on the phone this morning with a couple of different solution providers. And it was interesting because, you know, you could see the newer, you know, the firms that maybe were newer and had younger salespeople that were, you know, hey, this is going to solve all your compliance issues, right. And then being on with a fella who had been in the industry 20 – 25 years and said, yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have this great emphasis. We’re gonna have this good infrastructure for you. It’s not going to solve all your problems, but it’s going to be a you know, it’s just interesting to see that.

Geoff:

Two more points I wanted to make. One is compliance. And one is cost. For the first time compliance is, you know, there’s a lot of these tools in bed communication, right. It’s kind of ubiquitous, but as we know, in our industry, all has to be archived, right, it all has to be compliant. And so I don’t know if everyone in that whole vendor community has quite gotten that message and made it easy for us to do that. Some are easier than others. The first is compliance. And the second is there are so many tools out there. I’m not sure. It’s hard. It’s hard. You meet these vendors. And yes, like yes, you have a great solution. But I can’t spend $100 per user per advisor per month for all of these systems. Some of you are worth less, some of you are worth more but everyone’s kind of when they’re modeling out what they’re offering is everyone everyone thinks they can get that like magic, sort of $100 per advisor per month. And it’s like there’s a way to do it. Just can’t do it. So people really get to pick.

Chip:

And you know, a couple of things that it’s interesting folks don’t really kind of think about is when you have a new solution provider come in, you have to do a whole due diligence on vendors and do their due diligence. Right? Secondly, you have to integrate that into your systems. That’s a big deal.

Geoff:

Even if it’s something as simple as just doing a single sign on integration. I usually tell somebody it’s either it’s either going to take me 15 minutes, or it’s going to take me two months. I don’t know it depends on the vendor, and how well they play nice with, you know, kind of industry standards.

Chip:

So, you know as we’re wrapping up here, you know, we’d like to keep these about 20 minutes. So we’ve had some great conversations. I have a couple questions I still have for you, but one of them is that I asked most of my guests this. What keeps you up at night?

Geoff:

I think we already talked about it. It’s just cyber is just I just there’s so many horror stories and it just feels like it’s always there’s just some weak link in the chain somewhere. It’s probably a human being someplace. You just feel like you’re bolting your doors, you’ve done the double locks, but there’s just so easy to make a mistake. And just making sure everyone in the organization is trained, especially newer people, your organization. So if you’ve if you’ve been around a while and you’ve got some maybe horror stories that you’ve shared with someone new to your organization, whether that’s in the home office, or whether that’s, you know, new advisors joining your firm, you know, you don’t know what their their level of knowledge coming in on topic is, I feel I think we do a pretty good job of training our people that have been with us for a while, but you know that that keeps me up. It’s probably newer people, whether home office or new advisors coming in, making sure that you know, we get them up to speed as quickly as some of the other people that we’ve been working with for years.

Chip:

That’s the one thing that’s interesting, because when I ask that question, we get a lot of different answers, right? What I’m really encouraged, is the way you answered that because within our industry, this is a major issue. And, you know, you look at the SEC and FINRA, they’re focused on it.

Geoff:

Yeah, here’s what I tell other people outside of our industry, like we’re like the perfect target. Think about independent financial advisors, right? Kind of think about maybe one or two advisors one or two admins in an office, you know, write their financial advisors, first tech technologists, you know, second, third or fourth, but yet they’re dealing with, you know, at least in our space, we tend to think of the independent channel as being the best advisors out there, right. So they’re probably going to deal with, you know, really wealthy clients, large amounts of money, man, they’re there. They’re a target for sure.

Chip:

You know, and I look at our industry and as I was having a chat with an old friend yesterday, who had been in the industry for a long time, he said, You know what, jazzes me about this industry. He goes retirement, think about, we’re helping people realize their dreams in the future. Right. And the interesting thing is, if you look at the majority of advisors, that’s why they’re in the business. And that’s why we’re in the business to support that. And these folks aren’t necessarily focused on you know, the bits and bytes and all that and, you know, unfortunately we’re having to educate them. I think that firms are doing a really good job and working hard to do that. But as you said, you know, it’s only you know, one trapdoor away from something happening. So, I applaud you for having that be front and center because it’s probably the most important thing we’re looking at. All right. Now, on the flip side of that, what’s the one biggest thing you’re excited about?

Geoff:

It’s kind of what I talked about earlier. I saw a new platform we’re gonna roll out. I think it’s gonna be awesome. We’re not quite there yet. But ya know, I think I think it’s gonna make it. I think it’s gonna be a really great experience. I don’t talk about it quite as much too, but we were. We do a lot of life insurance, as well and we’re going to be kind of on the cutting edge of some, some new innovation in terms of being able to do what’s called Delivery Manager getting data directly fed into our systems, from some of the insurance carriers and as well as push some of our insurance applications out via an API process as opposed to using some of the kind of older processes that have been in place previously, something that’s maybe not as relevant for your audience, but I’m also pretty excited about that, too. So it’s, it’s really for me, what it is, is it’s since we work in kind of a couple different verticals, for our advisors, having sort of one interface to make it easy, whether you’re doing broker dealer business, whether you’re doing ra whether you’re doing life insurance, it looks it feels very similar. So that’s kind of like our niche. Our sweet spot is anybody that kind of does all three of those things together. We’re a good fit all the way down through your tech stack.

Chip:

Right. Well, you know, it’s interesting, Jeff, you mentioned that because one of the things we’re really seeing is kind of a three legged stool coming together more and more. And with that, I’ll put retirement wealth on one side. I’ll put risk insurance on the other and then down the bottom. I’ll put banking cash flow, right so we’re seeing folks out there seeming to want you know, one person to go to to be and you talked about it 20 minutes ago, to be their financial coach. Yeah, yep. Right. And that’s pretty cool. That’s really pretty cool. Jeff, I want to thank you for taking the time this afternoon and joining us here on the beacon flash podcast. We’re super excited. Thank you very much.

Geoff:

Thank you, Chip. Stay safe.

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