Welcome back to the 256th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Vincent Barbera. Vince is the founder of Newbridge Wealth Management, an independent RIA based right outside of Philadelphia that oversees nearly $120 million of assets under management for 75 client households.
What's unique about Vince, though, is the way he stays on the cutting—or sometimes bleeding—edge of advisor technology by continuously experimenting with new tech tools for his advisory firm, setting a new strategic focus every year to identify a new category of solutions to try out, either internally with his team, or externally with his clients.
In this episode, we talk in depth about the new technology tools that Vince has been trying this year with a theme of improving his client experience, including using Knudge to keep track of and collaborate with his clients on their financial planning tasks, Pulse360 to keep his meeting agendas and post-meeting notes more organized, and Hubley to help systematize the firm’s workflows above and beyond what his CRM alone can accomplish.
We also talk about how Vince manages his technology choices and budget to avoid having the cost spiral upward out of control by just adding more and more technology, how Vince compares the cost of new technology tools with his financial planning software to determine if it’s a "reasonable" price (because if it costs more than his planning software, he’d better be using it more than his planning software!), how Vince regularly assesses how often he’s logging into his technology tools to decide what to prune, and where Vince goes to find the latest and greatest tools to try out (and the gaps he still can’t find a solution for!).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Vince shares his own journey through the financial services industry, from starting out at a major asset manager’s HNW advice department but finding that the advice was still too focused on the firm’s asset management products and not the rest of the client’s financial advice needs, how Vince made the transition to go out and launch his own independent firm (with an eye toward using all the technology tools that are available today to stay competitive without an asset manager’s size and scale), and why Vince ultimately decided that he did not want to try to build the next billion-dollar firm and has actually felt even happier in his business by consciously deciding to take his foot off the gas and grow a little slower for a while.
And so with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Vincent Barbera.
