FintekNews is pleased to offer our readers our “3 Questions With…” column, where we chat with a thought leader within a unique sector of fintech and ask them to answer just 3 questions for our audience in their vernacular. This week, we’d like to introduce you to Adam Holt of Asset-Map, an advisor financial technology company that visualizes a client’s complete financial inventory on one page and informs progress to financial goals.

Name:

Adam Holt

Title:

CEO and founder

Firm:

Asset-Map

Website:

https://www.asset-map.com/

What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?

There are so many corners of the financial services industry that remain untouched by disruptive technology. Mostly this is due to the fact that the traditional approaches work, they generate revenue and have significant legacy mindsets and processes. However the area that I think will see the most growth (since it's basically starting at zero), is the engagement advances around human-delivered advice. Right now this is a combination of remote screen sharing from one platform, online portal access from another, planning tools and presentations from yet another and implementation/CRM platforms all cobbled together. I think we will see incredible innovations in the entire advice-delivery experience, in both the traditional environments including face-to-face advice, and remote and self-service experiences that consumers and professionals will actually use.

What do you think the next major innovation in financial technology will be and why?

The ironic nature of the next big innovation will be around helping consumers make better decisions that serve them. This may come in the form of financial product acquisition and shopping (think amazon.com for financial products), or efficiency-driven apps that save or move money automatically to optimize idle capital (consider what Acorns.com has done). This is not radical innovation, but merely tech-driven efficiency that is focused on the implementation of solutions without the context for structural decisions, including not only investments and insurance, but also legal and tax implications. This professional advice space, typically dominated by human advisers, will see a new innovation that will enable better access and cross pollination of advice delivery. Of course, massive innovation in this space may also have the capacity to disrupt the whole advice-delivery system.

What has been the biggest success in your firm to date?

Asset-Map has grown to its current state almost entirely by word of mouth between financial professionals who have had a validated response from customers in the field. It's one of our cherished outcomes that Asset-Map Platform just works well at facilitating better financial advice conversations using its visual framework. But the amazing success is simply the volume of its use and impact.

With over $400 billion in mapped financial instruments including investments, insurance policies, liabilities and income sources, (in multiple languages and currencies) it feels at times like we've literally built an atlas of asset location. What Asset-Map tends to shows us is that many households have a haphazard financial inventory, are under-saved and under insured. That the average household has not taken action on thinking about who legally owns what in the family or whether there is a better tax structure.

There's a lot of work to be done in the financial space, and we are excited to be a big part of identifying the underlying issues on one page that humans can understand.


Adam Holt, ChFC®, is founder and CEO of Asset-Map, a Philadelphia-based financial technology company that launched in 2008. A former financial advisor, Holt founded Asset-Map to allow busy clients and advisors to have a meaningful conversation about insights uncovered – and prioritize key decisions together to take action.