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An AI that Reads Client Emotions and Takes Perfect Meeting Notes
An AI that Reads Client Emotions and Takes Perfect Meeting Notes
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- [00:00]
A
What if every client call automatically turned into action? In this episode of Lead with AI, I sit down with Daniel Yu, founder and CEO of finmate AI, an AI powered platform transforming how financial advisors serve their clients. Finmate AI listens to your client calls, pulls out all the key action items, drafts the summary, and even sends the follow up email automatically. It's like having a junior advisor who never sleeps, never forgets, and never misses a beat. If you're in finance or just tired of losing opportunities in the follow up, this episode will change how you think about client service forever. Let's get into it. Welcome to lead with AI. I'm Dr. Tamara Nall. In each episode, we will take you behind the scenes with visionary leaders shaping the future of AI across public and private sectors. Join us as we explore groundbreaking projects and innovations that are transforming industries and making a real impact on people's lives. Let's dive in. So, hi everyone, how are you? It's your host, Dr. T with the Lead with AI podcast. And I'm so excited to have Daniel Yu, who is the founder and CEO of of finmate AI. Hi, Daniel, how are you?
- [01:30]
B
Hey, doing well.
- [01:32]
A
Awesome. Welcome to the show. I'm really excited to hear about finmate.
- [01:36]
B
Glad to be here and share what we're working on.
- [01:39]
A
Awesome. So let's get started with you as the founder. Talk to us a little bit about who you are at your core and how you started finmate and what problem existed that you knew you could solve, what with your technology.
- [01:55]
B
Great question. So my background is I'm not a technologist. I am a financial advisor at my core. I started my career in financial services as a financial advisor that eventually worked for TD Ameritrade as a senior advisor for them. Managed about 800 mil of client assets, over 300 clients and did that until the shop takeover ended up happening. So, so that's my background, that's my industry, that's what I know. And that's all I've ever really worked in. And so yeah, I realized that operating as a financial advisor in a high volume environment, there's a lot of regulatory, operational, back office work that I had to be in charge of and complete properly, namely note taking.
- [02:43]
A
Okay.
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B
And so I realized that this was a pretty low hanging fruit that I could probably solve for a lot of advisors. And so that's where we got going is let's just solve that pain point and see what else we can do for them.
- [02:57]
A
Amazing. Amazing. I love that, you know, you were in the heart of it. You could see the Pain points, you could see the aches and therefore came up with a solution with it. Like I love, I love when companies are founded based on those.
- [03:09]
B
Yep, that's, that's our background and that's why we haven't really touched any other vertical. This is the industry we know.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, no, that's amazing. So talk to us about the holy smokes moment. Tell us a time where a customer used ThinMate AI and it just changed everything for them. They were literally blown out of this world. Take us there.
- [03:30]
B
Yeah. So this, let's go back to maybe May of 2023. This was when GPT OpenAI had their GPT 2.0. They're just rolling into their next version. So back to when it was called like da Vinci, I had called up one of my own co workers at TD Ameritrade and said, hey, I have this wild idea. AI notetakers in general already exists, but it's not really fit for our marketplace. Can you test this out? And back then we had the AI specifically for discovery meetings for clients where the advisor was getting all this information about a prospective client's financial background so that they can prepare out a financial plan for them in the subsequent meetings. Obviously none of this existed back then. We were the only players. And so when I first showed my advisor friend the prototype, that was a mind blowing experience for him at the time because again, nothing like this existed.
- [04:27]
A
Wow, that's amazing. And you did mention, you said that you know, at the time there were no other key players and that there are other note taking companies out there. What sets finmate apart?
- [04:41]
B
Yeah, great question. So back in those early days where we're the only AI note taker for advisors, it was that, yes, we were for advisors, we were incorporating into the Advisor tech system and tech stack. But also in terms of the notes that we are outputting, it was fit for that marketplace. Now, you know, two years since, you know, I'm sure as all of your folks working, I know it's very easy to copy certain AI products. And so there's about 20 of these things now in the marketplace. And so how we stand apart now is in two things. Number one, the user experience. We are considered one of the easiest platforms to get on and use. My industry is not really known for its, you know, tech savviness among our operators. And so we want to make it as simple and straightforward as possible to use as well as having very good customer service and responsiveness. Right. And then secondly, in terms of the data management, we're the only AI company to proactively delete everything. Again, you don't want to be considered books and records, liable for audits. But also my belief is that if any a company is keeping your data by default, they're eventually going to use it for something else down the road.
- [05:52]
A
Got it. Love that. So those two things are your key differentiators. Now, my guests are very nosy people. We're like very nosy, very curious. Talk to us about finmate AI and like, how does it work? What's going through its brain if we open up the hood, what's there?
- [06:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm not going to pretend this is some amazing technology at this point. It was kind of mind blowing two years ago, but at the speed that AI grows, it's a pretty simple to understand, easy to use tool. Right. So what it is is you get audio files or snippets of audio files. It goes through a transcription AI and a diarization AI. So it gets you a text, text version of that audio clip along with who the speakers are. Cool. And then it gets passed to another AI where we have certain templates that we apply against that transcript to get it into the final note system that people are looking for, as well as generating all tasks and then connecting that to CRMs and other financial planning softwares to get that data through. Again, it's not rocket science, but the key is in how usable is it for the end user.
- [06:58]
A
Right. And that is the key right there. So tell us. So we have listeners who are your ideal customers. If I'm listening, how do I know, you know what? I need to go and sign up for Fanmade and try it out right now.
- [07:13]
B
Yeah. So it's just all the people that were doing what I used to do, financial advisors, insurance agents, folks that help people with their financials are the key demographic for us.
- [07:25]
A
Got it. And is there a particular size? Or you can be kind of like a solo entrepreneur or a solo person that is providing, you know, financial advisory services.
- [07:33]
B
Yeah. So everywhere from very small to kind of brand names that we're talking to that everyone recognizes.
- [07:39]
A
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, great. I always like to kind of like set the stage for people so that they know to definitely reach out. Now you gave us an example of your reaching out to one of your prior colleagues and friends in the industry and how he was wowed by it. Take us to a place where you were wowed by finmate AI. Like, what was that? That real world magic where you're like, oh, my gosh. I used to sit in this seat. And these were my issues. But now I have created something that is blowing my mind. Take us there. And if you had a victory dance or some little shout or that's. That's good too. We just take us there. We want to just be there with you.
- [08:22]
B
Sure. So, I mean, before I called my friend and asked him to try it out, you know, I actually tried it out myself and, you know, ran a test meeting internally. So I put on my old financial advisor hat, sat one of my coworkers or co founders down and said, all right, let's run through a financial advisory meeting. You're the client, I'm the advisor. Let's do it. We extracted out that meeting, we ran it through our system. I was like, great. This would have been so much helpful when I was back in the seat as an advisor. It would have saved me so much time. It would have saved my manager so much heartache because my notes are pretty bad if I had to handwrite them. And so that was the moment where I said, I think we have something awesome.
- [09:01]
A
That's amazing. And you talked about this before. You were saying that finmate AI deletes all of the data. So obviously you're thinking about privacy as related to the data. Talk to us about ethics and how do you manage these ethical decision points that you need to make, knowing that at the end of all this, so many humans are being impacted, not only the advisor, but his or her customers, et cetera. How do you view ethics?
- [09:29]
B
Yeah, that's kind of the gray area in all of this. Right. Especially for AI. How I've approached it is as a financial advisor would. In general, advisory business is a very personal business where you get to know your clients very personally, you're dealing with their money that they've, you know, saved painstakingly over the years. And so you need to build that trustworth and relationship. Right. And so the key to good financial advising is that the financial advisor should be working in your best interest. Right. We call that fiduciary. We call that, you know, responsibility. And so I wanted to approach this from a similar mindset where we're building finmate for the benefit of the advisors. We're not building this necessary for the benefit of us. Purely. Right. And so I think in that mindset, if we want to maximize what we're doing, we would scrape all your data, combine it, collect it, maybe even try to sell it down the road or use it to train our AI. But we want to be focused primarily on our actual clients. Clients and not Using our clients to purchase another or get to another client down the road. Right. And that's where we landed on. We want to get rid of everything. We don't want to take our clients data into our system and use it for some other purposes. Right. So we wanted to maintain a clean level of separation and really be a nice, simple, easy to use tool that helps advisors in their day to day lives.
- [10:59]
A
Got it. Okay. That is amazing. You're like thinking about that and I mean obviously you said that two years ago, you're the only one. There are probably 20 of you in the market now. What does the future look like for finmate AI? Like you had to fast forward, fast forward and the world is taught, the financial services world, advisement world is totally powered by finmate AI. What does that mean?
- [11:23]
B
Yeah, so like I was mentioning before, I think AI develops very, very quickly and so note taking is kind of becoming commoditized. Not going to lie. Right. It's become something where people are able to create these things fairly easily. Like I mentioned before, what's under the hood is not that crazy. It's not rocket science. It's a very simple concept. You take audio, you turn into text and you layer some additional processing on top of it and then you get it to the right systems. It's a closed loop. It does what it does. Great. So then the question is, what next? Well, there's a lot of new AI capabilities that are coming online and nowadays thanks to folks that are on the more ground level of developing this new technology. And so it's on people like us to then take that new technology and again make it applicable and easy to use for our end users. And so what we're exploring right now is some custom builds for some of our existing clients. You know, the buzzwords on the street are, you know, rag and Agentix. And so yeah, we are trying to make AI solutions that helps with the operational processing of our clients, advisory firms and practices and highly customizing it because we're realizing two things. Number one, advisory firms operate very differently from one another even though the core business is pretty much the same. Right. The broad chunks are the same, but how it gets done is very different. Right. And so we had a choice to make. Do we make another platform like Vidmate AI where we have everyone kind of come in and customize everything on their own or do we do this custom installation for people? And I think we're going in the custom installation AI consultancy route because the questions that people are now asking me is hey Daniel, we know you know the industry, we know you know AI. The people that know AI tend to not know the industry, and people that know the industry tend not to know AI.
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A
Right, right.
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B
You're one of the few that knows both. Can you tell us what to do?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Right. Because a lot of technology folks are coming in and pitching their wares, but oftentimes there's now thousands of these tools out there. Not only that they're taking space, but in all different verticals of the industry. And frankly, for a lot of advisors, it's just getting to be a little too much like, hey, Daniel, what do we do?
- [13:51]
A
Right, right.
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B
And so I think that's the direction we'll be moving in is with our expertise in both the industry, financial services as well as the AI, I think we can help create some operational efficiencies, custom AIs for our clients, and that's where we're moving.
- [14:08]
A
Well, that's amazing. You know, and you find that in the life cycle often of a product company, right. Either they're going to have kind of like certified consultancies that can help or they do it themselves to kind of add that value to their customers.
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B
Right.
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A
So two comments that we're going to make. One, going back to something that was earlier around note taking. So it's not for financial advisors. But you know, I've tried out different note taking technologies and there's one where I am amazed because I was on a call one time and there were probably about 15 people on there. And you know, sometimes when you have calls, there's the gossip at the beginning. So there was gossip and it was my note taker on there because for some reason the host did not remove it. And I was so nervous, I'm like, oh my goodness, this note taker tells you who's talking and all of that. And I didn't say anything. And when they sent, when it was sent out afterwards, there was no gossip, they just kept it to business. So I was really appreciative of that. And then I was thinking in terms of you kind of with FINMA AI and thinking about the evolution of the company and maybe it already does this, but something at least when I think about working with my financial advisor that's helpful is for that person to really listen and to read between the lines. And in this case, if, you know, with Finmate AI having emotional intelligence, meaning, oh wait, ding, ding, ding, Dr. T said this, this could be an opportunity. You know, for instance, I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, what can I do. You know, with taxes and being strategic and are there other things that I can invest in and all of that, you know, you say it, but sometimes they don't really listen. And so to the point that when the notes, it says, hey, key areas that you might want to consider that would be really, really important. Because honestly, I'm at a point where I am really like, if this, this, if, if this firm or if this person is not giving me ways to like, help me as I move into this new phase of my life and I not directly tell them because I don't know everything. Like, I don't know, you know, for instance, like forming a donor advis fund or all that kind of stuff. I am really depending on my advisor to tell me that until the extent that this fin mate, you know, M A T E can like help with the EQ of it all, I really, really think that's a gap, at least from what I experienced with, with, with some advisors that I've worked with.
- [16:43]
B
So, yeah, there's, there's two comments to address that. Number one, you know, again, if they're focused on making sure they write down everything, you know, they're going to be distracted. So hopefully just having a note taker in general will help with that.
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A
Yeah, that's a good point.
- [16:57]
B
And then secondarily, we do have a, a sentiment analysis section on our analytics page that tracks mood over time. And so we have that tool where people who are advisors can go review, see the negative spikes, and then go jump to that part of the call, see what the negativity was about, see if it's a concern they can address. And so there's two ways you can handle it. Using AI note taking.
- [17:22]
A
Okay, Daniel, you should have mentioned that earlier. The sentiment evaluator is huge.
- [17:28]
B
Yep, Y.
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A
It's really, really huge. And like you said, it's taking away. If I'm not taking, you know, these notes, then I can focus on what my customers, my partners, my clients are saying. And then I love that sentiment dashboard, if you will, to show the trends, because then you can see. Oh, that didn't go so well. Let me see if I can turn that around or not bring that up. And oh, this got a spike. So I'm gonna need you to say that earlier, Daniel.
- [17:56]
B
Well, there's a lot to talk about, so, you know, we'll get to it. And yeah, I mean, not every negative sentiment is a bad thing, right? Maybe there are legitimate concerns about your financial picture and it should be negative and it should be caught and Your advisor is there to help you through it. And so yeah, I don't think necessarily all negativity is bad, but it's a point where the advisor can really flex their muscles and show you know, why you're paying them.
- [18:25]
A
Right, right. No, absolutely. Now, so what else? So you brought that up. And so what else? You said there's a lot to tell. Tell us some more goodies that we need to know about finmate AI.
- [18:35]
B
Yeah, I mean so part of it is also in that user experience, right. Getting that data to your core systems. Again, we're not trying to come in and replace everything for you, whether on the note taker on or where we're going. It's, you know, we know how you operate your business, we know you're comfortable with it. You know, we don't want to necessarily get change everything about it. Right. It's just, let's just layer some things on top that can smooth over some of the transitions and the rough patches in your operation workflow and that's where we think we shine. It's just helping you optimize where you're already doing.
- [19:06]
A
Right, okay, absolutely. Wonderful. Now for my listeners that are like, okay Daniel, yeah, blah blah, blah, blah, we want to believe. So what's something that you know, a financial advisor who's listening now can do, you know, this week to try, build or explore finmate AI.
- [19:27]
B
I mean easiest thing we have a free trial for the note taking side so you can sign up and try us out. You get 10 hours of meeting reporting time to give it a shot if you're interested in more of that consultancy. Hey Daniel, help me figure out AI holistically. You can sign up on our website to book a call with me and we can go through what your, what you're thinking through and we can help you shape how you're thinking about AI in general. And lastly, you know, to make you believe. I mean there's nothing better than just waiting six months and you know, whatever is in the dream world now it comes to reality. And so give it six months and everything will be very different than where we're currently at.
- [20:07]
A
Yeah, no, I understand that. And the website, give everybody the website.
- [20:11]
B
Website is www.finmate AI. That's F I N M A T.
- [20:17]
A
E A I. Amazing, amazing. Well, I'm going to tell them, don't wait six months. Go there now finmate AI and try it out. There's a free trial. You have nothing to lose. You can only get better from there. So everybody knows and they look forward to this portion of our discussion where we say from one genius to another. And Daniel, do I have a question for you from our last guest, and that question is, how long before AI kills us all off?
- [20:48]
B
Very good question. Let's do six months. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I. Listen, I'm fairly optimistic in terms of humanity and I'm fairly pessimistic when it comes to tech. This might be kind of strange to hear coming from me after this whole podcast has gone. Gone its course, but I'm a bit of a Luddite. You know, I. I'm not that big of a believer in tech overall. Again, I'm an advisor. I'm not a tech guy. And the easiest thing to do is, hey, listen, I mean, what is the biggest, one of the biggest pieces of technology in our lives? Let's just say, you know, for example, it's cars, right? Cars are very complicated, technical animals. When's the last time you ran across a car that you're like, yes, this will last me 10 plus years for sure.
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A
Okay.
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B
It doesn't. Tech is very complicated, but it's also very fragile. Right? So the more power technology has, the more fragile and complicated and easier to break down. It does. And so in order to kill all of us, it needs to be very, very meticulous. I think humans are very resilient and kind of like cockroaches. You know, there's going to be corners that survive. Right. And so, you know, there might be some catastrophic events here and there, isolated. But I. I don't believe that tech is that robust to be all of us. Yeah. So, no, I don't think we're ever going to all die because of AI. Might. We might all die because something else.
- [22:15]
A
You know, something else. But definitely not.
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B
But no, technology is very fragile. Things break. Things don't go wrong. And coming from someone that's trying to build a system that works consistently.
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A
Right.
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B
For an AI to be consistently driving towards human extinction, I think will be very, very hard to develop.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah, Yeah, I love it.
- [22:36]
A
He thought he was going to get you with that question. He didn't.
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B
I'm sure he did think that. I'm sure he thought it would be a very fun thing to ask.
- [22:45]
A
Yeah, no, I'm gonna. He kind of laughed when he gave it to me, so.
- [22:48]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure he doesn't think we're all gonna die either, because if he did, I'm sure he'd be investing in bunkers right now.
- [22:57]
A
Right, right, exactly. All right, so now it's time for our bonus rapid fire. I'm going to ask you four questions quickly, and you're going to give me the first response that comes to your mind.
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B
Yeah. Okay.
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A
What most overrated tech trend?
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B
Most overrated tech trend is AI.
- [23:14]
A
Okay, you're actually not the first to say that, so I'm not surprised. But yeah, yeah, AI is all the noise these days.
- [23:22]
B
Again, the key is in usability. AI is great. It can do a lot of things, but a lot of times it's just overblown hype, fluff, right? A lot of these AI companies getting funded with millions of dollars. And then you try the tech, it doesn't really work. Right. And so ultimately it's brushing the gap between the theory and actual practicality. And that's where the real value is. If you asked me this question two, three years ago, I would have said web three or blockchain. You know, kind of feels the same way where everyone's talking about it. And, you know, some of the people that are talking about AI are like, you know, you're not very technical. I don't think you know what you're talking about, and yet everyone and their aunts are talking about it. And that's kind of how, you know, things are overhyped is when truly people are talking about it.
- [24:05]
A
All right, got it. I dig it. AI Most hyped AI breakthrough.
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B
Underhyped AI breakthrough. I think the real magic of AI is in operational efficiency processes, right? It's not hyped because most people don't think about it. It's not something that's like shiny or cool. It's just very simple things. Like, when we think about our current tech stack, everything is very disparate, separated, and it doesn't really talk to each other. Well, I think AI represents a very nice opportunity for disparate systems to be connected together. And so who knows, maybe it'll be hyped in about by the time this comes out. But at least for now, I think it's an under hyped part of AI.
- [24:49]
A
Okay, one book everyone should read in general on AI the future. Just give us a.
- [24:57]
B
Let me think about that for a few minutes here. I can't remember the title exactly, but I do recommend Benjamin Graham's Fundamentals of Investing. I forget what the exact title is. Okay, but yeah, I mean, coming from the advisory space, that's generally something that everyone should read.
- [25:15]
A
Okay, add it to your library, folks. And then lastly, what's the boldest, biggest, scariest AI prediction You have?
- [25:24]
B
Oh, the boldest, scariest AI prediction I have is when students are coming up in our school systems, they're going to be over reliant on AI, they're going to graduate and can't think for themselves.
- [25:36]
A
Okay, yeah, that is pretty scary.
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B
Yeah, we're starting to see that right now too. You know, I have a number of professor friends and teacher friends and you know, the scariest thing is a lot of students are offloading their thinking to AI and so I feel like there should be some kind of ban institute and maybe all exams go back to in person, essay writing, things like that, or maybe even live debates as a form of testing to test to see if students are actually thinking and engaging with the subjects. Because oftentimes my teacher friends will say, oh yeah, they'll ask a question and then they'll be on their phones kind of asking what they should say.
- [26:13]
A
Yeah, I actually, this was a few months ago, I had a conversation with a professor at a university and he was complaining of the same thing, like he knows that they're using AI, etc. And I thought, well, I actually challenged him and I said maybe you need to think of a more creative format where people have to, your students have to think they're in the moment.
- [26:35]
B
Yeah.
- [26:36]
A
You know, and even if it is remote, they, that you can see or detect if they're like, you know, kind of typing stuff in. So maybe it should be more of this case based learning or testing.
- [26:51]
B
Yes. Yeah, I don't think it's possible remote to be honest with you. There's companies that are coming out right now that can take a video of me, project a fake me and have my fake AI speak for me. Right. And so anything virtual, I think it's done. AI is all over it. I think the only thing you can't do right now is you have to be in person, face to face, breathing the same air, asking questions live and make sure they don't have an earpiece in.
- [27:21]
A
Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. So that will give some of the online programs something to think about, but yes.
- [27:29]
B
Listen, I was interviewed for an article a couple months ago. Give me your hottest take about the financial services industry and AI 10 years down the road. And my thing that my hot take is listen advisors, if you've transitioned to an online only practice, you should start to reconsider that because again, an AI avatar can be created where the only way they'll know that it's really you is if you've sat down with them before.
- [27:55]
A
Right.
- [27:56]
B
And so I think we got to go back to face to face. Virtual is great, but it can so easily be copied. And you know, 10 years down the road we're going to have AI agents that can mimic people. And so if you want to be replaced, stick to virtual only.
- [28:13]
A
Right.
- [28:13]
B
Only thing that's not replaceable, I think, at least for now, is in the physical space.
- [28:18]
A
And you know, it really is these whole, you know, kind of like fake avatars, etc, it, it is becoming a problem in financial services in particular.
- [28:28]
B
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [28:30]
A
And if not financial services directly, those are like the CFO or within that whole function in terms of transferring money and having these fake board meetings where you're approving, you know, 450 million dollar transfer and the sort. So yeah, yeah, financial services needs to get his hands.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah, financial services education. You got to go back into real space, have live conversations, debates that can't be copied or, you know, faked. Right. Really engage with people and I think that's just the only way we can move on from this.
- [29:06]
A
Right, got it. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for introducing us to finmate AI. How can we get in touch with you? You mentioned we can go to finmate AI. What are the social media handles for the company for yourself? We want to stay in touch.
- [29:20]
B
Yep. So website is great. You can chat with us there. We have a LinkedIn page that we operate. You can email me directly. Danielinmate AI.
- [29:32]
A
All right, perfect. Well, we look forward to continuing the journey with finmate AI and going back to my futuristic question, seeing how it will continue to transform, transformation, transform the world. So thank you so much for your time.
- [29:45]
B
Absolutely appreciate you having me.
- [29:47]
A
Absolutely. Okay, everyone, next time. Until then, remember to lead with AI. Thanks for tuning in to lead with AI. I'll see you next time. As we continue exploring the cutting edge innovations shaping AI across the public and private sectors. Until then, keep leading with AI.