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An interview with Trevor Greenway, Co-Founder and CEO of interVal
Business owners are often the most desirable clients of financial advisors and their firms. Helping advisors attract, retain and better serve high-value business-owner clients is Trevor Greenway’s goal at interVal. Coupling hands-on knowledge of M&A with technology, interVal provides business owners with valuable insights that lead to greater net worth — and provides advisors and their firms with an incalculable business-building opportunity. We recently sat down with Trevor to find out more.
Do you think technology and artificial intelligence (AI) is helping or hindering wealth advisors?
Technology and AI are helping wealth advisors assemble and deliver more valuable information to their clients. The challenge is making sense of all the information and delivering it in easy-to-use ways that are meaningful and understandable to clients. As advisors know all too well, when clients feel overloaded with information, they can become paralyzed. But when important information is presented clearly, succinctly, and in an actionable way, it is much more valued and appreciated.
How can wealth managers become a business-owner’s most-trusted advisor?
Many advisors provide excellent financial planning, portfolio management and other wealth services to their business-owning clients. If an advisor can go beyond that level of service and provide proactive financial advice and tools that can help grow that business — which is their client’s most valuable asset — and thereby demonstrably increase its value, then that advisor can truly become a business-owner’s most trusted advisor.
What is interVal, and how does it solve this pain point in the industry?
We build better financial futures for business owners and those advising them. Essentially, we provide business owners with a tool that values their business on a real-time, ongoing basis. InterVal's principals come from the world of business valuation, where we realized that owners — if they had the right tools — could and should start working to increase the value of their business well before getting involved in a transition or liquidity event.
We started interVal with the idea that if we start at the desired endpoint first, which is a high valuation for a business, we could work backward and determine precisely how a business owner can get to that point. Wealth managers who can help their business-owner clients increase the value of the owner’s greatest asset easily become one of the owner’s most trusted advisors.
How does interVal help wealth firms grow their AUM?
In addition to demonstrating their value as a trusted advisor, wealth managers have found that offering interVal has helped them attract the accounts of established business owners as well as those of start-up entrepreneurs by enabling the advisor to stand out from the crowd. It demonstrates their interest in going beyond financial investments to help a client grow their most valuable asset in a creative way. In addition, the information unearthed by interVal — about excess working capital, serviceable debt and investable assets, for example — often results in advisors and their firms being able to offer many useful solutions in the areas of lending, investment management, tax, and insurance and retirement planning that can increase AUM and fee income.
Can interVal help wealth managers capitalize on the impending Great Wealth Transfer with their business-owner clients?
For the vast majority of business owners approaching retirement, a liquidity event of some kind is the goal in order to provide a comfortable retirement as well as to fund bequests owners wish to make to family members and others. When this occurs, wealth managers and advisors can find themselves managing considerably more liquid wealth for business-owner clients, as well as their families in many cases. Offering interVal to business-owner clients can help to affect this transfer of wealth at the greatest possible value.
Are business owners any closer to receiving proactive advice from their wealth manager?
Wealth managers often wish to give their business-owners proactive advice but are limited by time, and available tools. By sharing a tool like interVal that embeds artificial intelligence and years of business valuation experience, wealth managers can give business owners the proactive experience they want to give, and which is greatly valued.
To learn more, visit https://www.inter-val.ai/wm2024
