Beyond Numbers: Using Communication to Drive Advisor/Client Relationships, a Conversation with Brendan Kenalty

The advisor-client relationship has evolved from the days of an annual face-to-face meeting. Today’s investors expect more communication, and more personalized communication, from their financial advisors, who are under pressure to be readily accessible, proactive, and well informed at all times.

This is something that ReachStack’s CMO, Data Scientist, and Advisor Content Strategist Brendan Kenalty understands deeply. “We need to scale up the communication, so the question becomes, how do we do it?” he says.

In conversation with Beacon Strategies’ Managing Director Chip Kispert on the latest Beacon Flash podcast episode, Brendan shares insights about how communication is transforming the way wealth firms work with their clients.

He talks about the importance of firms building their relevance using communication in order to grow and scale, touching on three trends that support this:

  1. The shift from do-it-yourself tools to done-for-me services.
  2. Using personalized communication to get in front of clients and increase advisors’ visibility.
  3. Using communication to deliver actionable insights to advisors.

Brendan and Chip also discuss how advisors can leverage technology and data-driven insights to enhance their performance and deliver superior client service. Many of today’s communication tools incorporate AI-powered content sourcing and automated distribution elements, ideal for the modern advisor-client relationship. 

The question is, are enough firms making the most of this technology?

As Brendan says, “It will be interesting to see how we adjust these client and advisor relationships over the next few years.” 

Listen to the full episode here to hear more from Brendan and Chip!


Using Technology to Create a Safe Haven for Investments – A Conversation with Matt Radgowski, Halo Investing

With the pace of innovation in financial services, today’s advisors have an array of tools at their fingertips. But using those tools in the right way to manage a client’s portfolio can be daunting. They’re looking for positive outcomes, manageable costs, and minimized risk.   

For Matt Radgowski, COO of Halo Investing, helping advisors and investors achieve their goals through the development of pioneering solutions is what drives him. And powerful outcomes require powerful tools. “What keeps me up at night is the pace of innovation outpacing the ability to harness it,” he says.

In a chat with Beacon Strategies’ Managing Director Chip Kispert on a recent Beacon Flash podcast episode, Matt talks about how aligning outcomes is key to guarding investments, including what Halo has termed “protective investing.”

That protection is what both advisors and investors are looking for.

Solution providers and advisors are constantly on a journey to generate returns within client portfolios while including an element of downside risk mitigation, “Whether that’s protecting against downward market movements and volatility, or securing of income,” Matt shares.

He talks about how the advisor/investor relationship is shifting, with an increasing focus on questioning the process – What impact are we looking to make with this investment? What outcome are we driving towards? How can investors actually personalize investments? How can they make a portfolio really reflect who they are?

Today’s advisory landscape has the framework and the technology that enables advisors to achieve more. Take Halo, creating an environment in which the advisor gets the best experience in terms of product features. As Matt explains, “The best protection, the best income, the best growth opportunity, at the lowest cost.”Listen to the full episode here for more from Matt Radgowski and Chip Kispert on making the most of technology to deliver an excellent, protected, client experience.


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Are the Regulators asking for more and more information about your vendors and how you are managing that risk?  As the industry outsources systems to the cloud, regulators are demanding a robust annual review of your mission critical vendors that host your client’s personal and private information. 

At Beacon, we have developed a Vendor Management Toolkit to help address these and other issues. Automated questionnaires and scoring of submissions couple with a repository to house the responses can assist in your next audit or exam. Click here to learn more.