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Guest: Sean Wing, the Founder and CEO of Wing.
In a nutshell: How often do you provide high-value financial advice to your clients?
Monthly? Quarterly? Annually?
But … how often do their lives change?
How often do their feelings about their money shift?
How often are they nervously staring at market drips and trade wars on social media wondering, “Am I OK?”
If you’re waiting around for your clients to call you every time they’re pondering a career change or confused about a new tax law, then your process might be too static, too reactive.
Increasingly, AI will try fill that void in your workflow and your workforce. But advisors who embrace what I call the “human plus” model can use AI to enhance their client experience and take advantage of year-round opportunities to demonstrate your true value as a coach and decision partner.
On today’s episode, Sean Wing explains why he set out to build a “Google Maps for your financial life.” Sean and I also discuss whether AI will compress human advisor compensation or elevate the human relationship into a luxury service.
.Sean Wing and I discuss:
- The transition from episodic meetings to “always-on” financial planning that adjusts to client lives in real time.
- Why the most impactful message an automated financial planning platform can deliver is often, “You’re doing great. Go live your life.”
- How Wing uses specialized AI agents to proactively identify optimization strategies across multiple financial categories.
- Bridging the digital divide between quantitative (your client’s numbers) and qualitative (your client’s life) data.
- How actionable advice can create a “social contract” that drives a flywheel of learning, engagement, and growth.
- Will AI ever match the human advisor’s emotional confidence or behavioral coaching ability?
Sean Wing on moving from episodic to continuous financial advice:
“When we look at the planning and advice side, the advisor is only able to deliver that advice and that planning when they are sitting down with a client, getting all that information, being able to take that information, model that, and then meet with the client and provide the advice that follows that conversation. We wanted to create this within an experience where I could input my information and I could see in real time what are the opportunities and strategies that I can take advantage of to make my dollar go even farther, to unlock new opportunities across the entire financial spectrum that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to access. And that only comes down from a standpoint of time, because at the end of the day, to get that level of in-depth analysis, monitoring, research, and intelligence, you need quite a lot of bandwidth to understand that client’s life.
“It’s kind of like the family office. If I was working for you, as part of your family office, my entire job would be focused on taking what I understand about your life and doing the research, the diligence, and unpacking new ways to take your money and find ways to optimize and enhance that. And when I found a new opportunity or strategy, I would deliver it to you as a recommendation where you could say, ‘Yeah, I think we should move forward with that,’ or, ‘No, I don’t think we should,’ and just move on. We wanted to embody that level of a workforce, that level of service for each and every individual when it comes down to understanding their life and then delivering them those opportunities on a weekly or a monthly basis.”
Sean Wing on the enduring value of the human advisor and the future of fees:
“ I would distinguish between the operation and the service side. The service is what is being paid for. That is the output, the outcome, and that is what we can deliver completely autonomously. When it comes to the advisor focusing on that service, what I have seen firsthand is that when advisors come into this business, they come into it for the human side of it. It’s the interactions with individuals, understanding their lives, spending time with them, and really affirming to them — particularly the more money that individual has, where more problems take place — that I have another human partner in place that I can interact with when this stuff happens. Because it’s one thing knowing what decision to make. It is a completely other thing to have the confidence in making that decision, and that’s where humanity comes into play.
“ I go back to the most basic piece of financial advice that every single person knows, whether they have an advisor or not: When the market goes down, what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to invest. Buy. What are you not supposed to do? Sell. What does everyone do? They sell. And what does that advisor have to be? That therapist going, ‘Sean, we talked about this. We’ve got a plan. This is the plan. Let me remind you about this. This is why we made these decisions. It’s going to be okay.’ And that is where the humanity, that’s where the relationship, comes into play. And that, quite frankly, is where I see a premium coming into play because that is going to become more and more relevant.”
Sean Wing on the benefit of delivering better financial advice to more people:
“We don’t know what the future holds. It’s not going to be exactly as we think it’s going to happen, but it is going to happen faster than we think. And the age of fast followers is kind of gone, and it is really coming down to decisive innovation and leaders on this front. The thing that I think unites all of us is, whether it be someone like myself who’s speaking as a client in this equation, we all understand the power of advice and planning. And the ability to put comprehensive planning and personalized advice in more people’s hands is going to improve people’s lives and advance prosperity on an individual level that we all know is going to materially improve the world that we live in. And the more of that we can do, the better.”
