John O’Connell was recently featured in Connect Money on meeting workflows as a profitability problem for wealth firms. Drawing on his Oasis Group white paper, sponsored by GReminders, his argument is that firms chasing scale should focus less on expanding advisor reach and more on redesigning the work around client meetings, since fragmented scheduling,...
John O’Connell was recently published in Investing.com on the limits of financial influencers for high earners. His argument is that finfluencers filled a real vacuum, with 79% of millennial and Gen Z consumers turning to social media for financial advice, and the best creators genuinely help with the foundational layer: emergency funds, debt payoff,...
John O'Connell was recently published in PowerAdvice on what Schwab and Robinhood are really building. Schwab is industrializing the personalized client relationship, pushing AI-generated portfolio commentary to the millions of sub-$1M clients who don't qualify for a human relationship manager, while Robinhood is building infrastructure that captures the client either way, through live agentic...
Wealth Solutions Report featured our newest white paper, sponsored by GReminders, on the hidden cost of client meetings. The paper's core argument is that firms treat scheduling, prep, note capture, and follow-up as separate admin jobs when they're really one process that quietly drains advisor and staff capacity. We pointed to Cerulli data showing...
The Oasis Group has published a new white paper, Why Meeting Management Is a Profitability Problem in Wealth Management, sponsored by GReminders, examining how the administrative work around client meetings, scheduling, prep, note capture, and follow-up, has become a measurable drag on advisor capacity and firm profitability. Its central argument is that scalability isn't an...
You signed a contract for an AI feature priced like software has always been priced: one fee, one number, adjusted once a year at renewal. That assumption is now wrong, and the vendor you signed with knows it before you do. Per-seat licensing worked because the marginal cost of one more login stayed close to zero....
John O'Connell was recently published in ThinkAdvisor where he argued that the wealth transfer is a retention event most firms are already losing. Cerulli finds only 27% of investors expecting an inheritance plan to keep the family advisor, falling to 20% once it transfers, while Capgemini finds 81% switch within a year or two....
John O'Connell was recently published in PowerAdvice on who really wins and loses now that Vanguard is buying Altruist. He walks through six constituencies. Schwab is exposed but not endangered, with its cash sweep business the clearest target. Altruist's existing advisors are the clearest winners, gaining Vanguard's balance sheet for free, while Fidelity, Robinhood,...
John O'Connell was recently featured in Wealth Solutions Report where he discussed a new legal risk from AI notetakers. The notetaker in your client meetings isn't a passive tool, it's a third party recording people who may never have agreed to be recorded. A federal judge in the Otter.ai privacy litigation let the core...
Most loop failures are not loop-design failures. They are model-capability failures wearing a design problem's clothes. Your termination logic was sound, your goal was testable, your spine tracked state correctly, and the loop still drifted, because the model running inside it could not sustain coherent reasoning across the number of cycles the task required. Claude...
