Daniel Yoo is the Founder of FinMate AI, an AI note-taking assistant designed by financial advisors, for financial advisors. He spent the first seven years of his career as a financial advisor for renowned firms such as Equitable, TD Ameritrade, and Schwab before transitioning to lead operations and fintech. Drawing on his experience in the advisory and tech spaces, he has created valuable tools for the financial community. In addition, he holds his FINRA series license.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Daniel Yoo explains how FinMate AI helps financial advisors
The work process of FinMate AI
What are the advantages of taking notes during a meeting?
Daniel shares his insights on security with AI products
How FinMate AI is continuously improving
The drivers for building a fintech company
The influence of AI in the financial space
In this episode…
As a financial advisor, taking accurate and detailed notes during client meetings is a crucial part of the job. However, it is a time-consuming task. Using AI can be a game-changer.
Renowned FinTech entrepreneur Daniel Yoo recognized that note-taking in meetings helped him better serve his clients. He developed an AI-powered platform to help advisors concentrate on their clients during meetings without worrying about recording every detail. This allows them to build stronger relationships with clients by valuing their time and input.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Daniel Yoo, Founder of FinMate AI, to discuss how advisors can leverage AI for taking notes in client meetings. Daniel explains how FinMate AI helps financial advisors take notes, the advantages of taking notes during meetings, insights on security with AI products, and customer success stories.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
"[AI Series] AI for Wealth Management Marketing With Jonathan Michael" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] Streamlining Operations With Cutting-Edge AI Technology With Babu Sivadasan" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] Building an AI Tool for Financial Compliance With Mamal Amini" on The Customer Wins
"How Being High-Tech Leads To Being High-Touch With Customers" on The Customer Wins
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today as a special episode in my series on artificial intelligence and some of our past guests in this series have included Wealth I/O, JIFFY.ai, GovernGPT, and several others. Today's guest is Daniel Yoo, the founder of FinMate AI, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time reviewing the forms. Instead get Quik!, using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started. And before I introduce today's guest, I like to give a huge thank you to Joe Moss at Pro Advisor Suite for creating the connection between Daniel and I. Check out Joe's episode on this podcast and learn all about proadvisorsuite.com. All right now to meet our guests. Daniel is the founder of FinMate AI the only AI note taking assistant designed by financial advisors for financial advisors. He holds two bachelor's degrees from UC Berkeley and economics as well as molecular cell biology development genetics, as well as a Master's of Science from John Hopkins and Applied Economics focusing on using machine learning and AI for asset price predictions. Daniel currently maintains his FINRA series licenses as well. Daniel has spent the first seven years of his career working as a financial advisor for major firms such as Equitable, TD Ameritrade, and Schwab, before transitioning over to lead operations, and product and fintech. He has since combined his experiences in the advisor space as well as the tech space to develop tools useful for the financial advisor community. Daniel, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Daniel Yoo 2:11
Thank you Rich, good to see you again.
Richard Walker 2:13
You as well. So look, if you haven't heard this podcast before, I like to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver great customer experience and the challenges to grow in their own company. Daniel, let's understand your business a little better. How does your company help people?
Daniel Yoo 2:29
Sure, I think the biggest thing that people come to, you FinMate is mainly the time savings as well as the mindshare savings. And I'll break those down into a little up into this individual components here. When I was an advisor, one of the biggest issues I had was taking notes, as well as organizing notes in a fashion that I can use later on to develop my financial plan and further interactions with the client. And so by my estimation, with about a full week's worth of meetings, I would be spending about four to five hours per week on those notes and those organizations. And so I wanted to create something that can help save advisors that time. But it's not only the time saved, or what I found was that I had a harder time engaging with the client and really listening to my clients, if I had focused on taking notes instead of just being present. And so I wanted to give that gift to advisors. And I wish this is something I had when back when I was an advisor. And so I think that's kind of how we want to help advisors win is to really take their mind off of note taking off of the operations and really be present for the clients.
Richard Walker 3:42
I love that. So I got to tell you a funny story. In my 20s, I worked at Arthur Andersen and I'd go to meetings with the senior leader of the team, the partner, whoever it was, and I was supposed to take notes, but I didn't think about that. Because in my head, I could record it all just to hear because I wasn't talking. I wasn't engaging, I was just present. So I'm taking all these notes in my head, oh, my gosh, I get yelled at so many times for not taking good notes. And even today, I find that to be a really difficult thing. Because what tool do you go to? I was using a plugin to Chrome for a while notepad. What is it Microsoft OneNote years ago? And so what you're really talking about is the challenge of how do you stay present in the conversation and engaging and also take notes, that is so hard to do. So how does your product solve that problem then?
Daniel Yoo 4:29
Sure. So I will say there are plenty of generic alternatives to our platform out there. Great companies like Fireflies and Grain folks like that. The issue that I had was when I had used these tools during my time in FinTech, the notes were very generic and was specific. And the data privacy was a little bit questionable because of this new technology. And so the reason I started FinMate AI was because I wanted to tailor make the all of the features to be truly useful specifically for the advisory community, and not necessarily just shoehorn in general sales tools for the advisors. And so I guess to get very specific, what we do is we have different formats for these notes, depending on the kind of meetings that advisors run. So typically, you have the advisors running, introductory or discovery meetings, you have the annual or quarterly review meetings, you have vendor calls, you have a center of influence calls, things like that. So we're trying to really develop these modules to tackle those individual kinds of meetings. And then create additional tooling to help advisors may be trained some of their junior advisors, or do some call reviews, with some behavioral things that are coming down the pipeline.
Richard Walker 5:42
So it's not simply an AI, like zoom has AI now, and I've used several of them like sembly and fathom, where they listened to the call, and they give you a transcript, maybe some action items, some things like that, but you're doing more than that, you're making a specific type of conversation. Does that mean, your AI is interpreting the conversation then?
Daniel Yoo 6:01
Correct. So there is a layer of education and a layer of, let's say, guard railing, where we have the a focus on specific areas, for example, during the discovery meeting, that's a lot. That's a meeting where a lot of data is getting transferred from the client to the advisor. Right? And, at least in my practice, that was my chance to then create a initial financial plan, money guy pro e-money, what have you asset map, which I've used throughout my career, the notes I want for that kind of meeting are very, very different than the notes I want for a review meeting where I want details about what are the personal updates? What are their taxes from this past year look like? Did they have any concerns about their investments. And so because each meeting has a very different purpose, I felt like a generic note taker was not sufficient. And then to also piggyback off of that, we helped generate a response email to the client, where it gives you a quick summary of what they talked about during the meeting, the advisors to dues and of course, the clients to dues because every nudge helps move the sale along.
Richard Walker 7:03
I got a couple of questions about this. But first of all, it sounds like if you're doing a discovery meeting, the AI is more attuned to financial numbers, net worth, liquid investments, those types of questions. Whereas in the ongoing meetings, it's more sentiment, it's more behavior, like what are your fears? Or what's happened or what's new?
Daniel Yoo 7:22
Right. So the review meeting is very much focusing on updates, right. So, what is your work or business updates from the past time we talked, how are your investments doing? Do you have any changes to retirement or financial goals? Right? What are your motivations, much more focused on that, whereas the discovery is, what are your liquid assets? What are your illiquid assets? Where's your liabilities? What's your insurances? Very much helping the adviser build out that initial financial plan.
Richard Walker 7:47
So here's something else that happens. I feel like if you're really good at active listening, when you're done with the conversation, the conversation can feel like a blur. Because you're so in the moment, I mean, it's like being a performer on stage, just like what just happened, I just finished, right. And the notes, I'm sure fill that gap. But do you feel like this enables advisors to recall and actually ingest more information better?
Daniel Yoo 8:11
I find that when I personally use it for my own meetings, now, my short term memory is a lot more active, because I'm not so concerned about writing things down, or thinking about what to write down, I can just focus in on okay, this is an important piece of information that I need to bring up in a later part of the conversation. And so I do believe that reducing this burden helps with the short term memory, because our brains only have so much capacity to hold things at once.
Richard Walker 8:35
Yeah. Well, do you also think that it's helping advisors see things they didn't catch?
Daniel Yoo 8:40
I think so. The interesting thing is, we do have a audio video recording that we show in the bottom right corner. It's very useful, I think, especially for video calls. So we also have an app available for in person meetings, which is audio only. But for answer video calls, I think you can miss certain micro expressions, if you're split focus too much. And so because you can just focus in on your conversation partner, your client, you can really try to dig into what they're feeling, not just by their words, but by paying attention to their facial expressions.
Richard Walker 9:14
When I discover companies like yours and your product, I think, okay, the bar keeps going higher and higher for my advisor, like they have to do all these things. Otherwise, I don't feel like I'm getting enough value.
Daniel Yoo 9:24
Oh, absolutely. And like I said, we're coming out with some behavioral things that are kind of in the reps, that we're working with some psychologists and folks in the defi space to really help the adviser understand the psychology and the motivations and their philosophy of money. And so we're hoping that this can help elevate financial advisors next year.
Richard Walker 9:46
Yeah, that's great. So let's go back to something else you had brought up. You said you didn't think the other AI note takers were as secure as perhaps you needed them to be. What is the challenge was security with artificial intelligence products?
Daniel Yoo 10:00
So, AI is trained on data, right. And so the more data people have access to the more powerful the AI. So what a lot of these companies are doing is they are monetizing the data that clients give them by training there. Okay, we do not want to do that, mainly because I understand that's a financial adviser. And that can get very hairy. And there's been some high profile lawsuits already on the books, because of this improper use of training data taken from clients. So for us, our security, our data policies, they're all set to delete client data after a certain expiration period, but the client says, and so if you want them to delete it pretty much immediately you can do so if you want to keep it for six months, you can do so. But at the end of the day, this is your data. And I have no interest in taking it and repackaging it and training our AI ourselves.
Richard Walker 10:52
So what did you train it on them?
Daniel Yoo 10:55
So the training is based on my personal experiences and the different nudges and guardrails we put in. And then we layer multiple on things of the AI. And so it's trained on a general dataset. And I'm sure as these bigger corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple, and open AI, of course, get better and better, will just be taking advantage of the advances they make.
Richard Walker 11:20
Got it. Okay, so that answers another question about how you're going to continually make it better. Does the customers data get used to train a private model for them? Or is it just simply data that is not kept?
Daniel Yoo 11:32
It's not kept yet. Again, we do not want to be your data repository. So what I've told clients is you have your CRM, that's what they're there for, you have your drop boxes or your boxes. That's what your long term data storage is for. We just want to help you get client notes in says about clients. Maybe a quick follow up letter just saves you some time. And so let's use the tools that are appropriate.
Richard Walker 11:54
Yeah, right, no, that's awesome. So going back to behavior, you said, you're going to put out some capabilities, products features, I'm not sure which related to behavior, what is it about behavior you're trying to capture and help advisors with?
Daniel Yoo 12:07
Yeah, there's a couple of dimensions that we're looking at. Obviously, this is pretty on the cutting edge. And so there's a lot more testing that we need to do, and I can't go into too much detail. But we're trying to identify the client's personality traits, their behavioral patterns, just so number one, the advisor knows how to relate to individual clients better, because based on the personality, things that they can take are different. And also to kind of uncover their philosophy of money, their history of money, their upbringing, things like that, that will really help shape that advisor client relationship.
Richard Walker 12:39
So after three years of working with me, my advisors gonna say rich every December, you come up with the same fear.
Daniel Yoo 12:46
That's though, and so they can maybe predict and even give you a call before it happens.
Richard Walker 12:51
Yeah, no, that's fascinating. So maybe it's even predictive to help the adviser be a step ahead, which actually, I think speaks to one of the biggest challenges advisors have, like, what is your reason for being in front of your client? And how do you stay in front of them all the time? Newsletters only go so far, they're important, obviously. But to have points of meaning. We had Philipp Hecker from Bento Engine talking about these points in life. Do you know him?
Daniel Yoo 13:17
No, no, I'm familiar with Bento Engine.
Richard Walker 13:19
Yeah. So they're talking about like, all these different events in life that come up that you should drive a conversation with, I wonder if you would start looking at that maybe partner with a company like that to even offer some of those reflections ahead of time too.
Daniel Yoo 13:31
That would be a fun thing to work on. We've been behind the scenes working on a lot of integrations with a lot of different advisor tech focus companies. I can shout out Ross Marino for his human first conference happening in March that's very much focused on the behavioral finance piece. So yeah, if you want to connect equity connect on.
Richard Walker 13:49
That's awesome. That's totally awesome. So let me ask you a question. Because you have learned machine learning and AI. I mean, you took courses on this, right? Yes. What do you think the average person doesn't understand about AI that you find kind of amazing or interesting?
Daniel Yoo 14:05
Yeah, so the interesting thing is, I guess number one, there are different kinds of AIs, right? So the big explosion that happened last year was with LLM or large language models. My area of focus was unfortunately not LLM, it was acid price predictions, right? And so predicting numbers from pattern, and the fun thing about that is AI, all the different models, random forests, stochastic gradient descent, all of these newfangled models don't actually perform that well compared to some very, very old tech, I think what 1970s It's called the ARIMA model, auto regressive, integrated moving average model, which is a lot cheaper to run. But unfortunately, that piece of AI hasn't quite exceeded expectations. And so the LLM was actually is the part that took off. And so I think what people don't understand is kind of the differences. And on a basic level, it's just statistics. It's just a lot of statistics using a lot of computing power. And that's all it is.
Richard Walker 15:05
No, I love that. I love that because I started looking at AI as a long time ago, but not at the level you are. I was just saying, would this help my business? Can I help my customers? I saw dolly come out with image generation, I was like, oh my gosh, that was April of the year and a half ago, I think. And then when chatGPT came out at the end of 22, I was blown away, like everybody, and then this spurred so much talk, everyone is now an AI company. Everybody's got an AI product. It's almost a bad word in some ways. Yeah. You've got it in your name, though. You guys are so confident about its power.
Daniel Yoo 15:42
Oh, I was just gonna say yes. I mean, that's kind of the core of the company is this new tech, and we're trying to find ways to wrangle it into the advisor space. One of the great limits I had, while a financial adviser was the lack of alacrity, in which financial companies took up new tech. And so I was hoping that because of my background, I can actually develop things very, very well for the advisor space.
Richard Walker 16:07
So you're focused on the conversation of the advisors having with their client, do you Yeah. foresee AI pre-empting, the conversation?
Daniel Yoo 16:14
Ooh, that's interesting. I think there's been some developments in different tech spaces can think Orion is coming up with an AI that helps folks tailor their messaging based on certain events and their personalities. And so I think there will come a time when there's going to be very deep integration within CRM systems that can help preempt these conversations. But I think a lot of these will be pretty generalist that could to be good. So birthdays, anniversaries, kind of things that people already know to reach out for. It'll just help optimize that. I think, really getting deep into anticipating client conversations will only happen if the client psychology is really well understood, because people will react to the same events differently.
Richard Walker 17:04
So I want to ask you another question. Before I ask it, I'm thinking about how your product plays in the sense that if I'm the advisor, and now I'm fully focused on the client conversation, do you think there's a chance the clients gonna say, you're not taking notes? Like, are you really paying attention to me?
Daniel Yoo 17:21
Well, mainly, because in most states, there is a two party consent of recording, most advisors do let the clients know, like, hey, we're using this AI tool to have so that I can focus more on you at the beginning of every conversation. And so after a while, I think clients will understand like, hey, yes, this notetakers there, I know what it's doing. And I know what my advisor is just looking at me the whole time.
Richard Walker 17:45
Yeah. So do you know, I don't know this? I really don't know, are there advisors who have an assistant who does the note taking? And are your product actually displaced, that person's need to be the note taker.
Daniel Yoo 17:57
So usually, those people, their title is a paraplanner. And so they do more than just notetaking. Right? They do a lot of the initial financial planning prep and things like that. And so I've talked to a couple of my old advisor friends who say, like, hey, like paraplanners, or whatever. And so not necessary because of their note taking, but because of everything else that follows after the note taking, right, so what I am trying to do is not to cut paraplanner jobs, it's just to say, hey, this really, really tedious part of your job, you don't need to do that anymore. Let's focus you on the client experience for your financial provides clients, generating better financial plans, and having better customer support.
Richard Walker 18:34
I mean, I know personally, even if I've had AI is helping me, I still take some notes. Because there's certain things that are just there. They're keyed in your head that tied to something that you want to look at later talk about whatever. So I'm sure there's still that happening, even though your product is making it like capture everything. Yes. So let me take this a different level because again, I my interest in AI and you're in the AI space, have you seen products that allow you to replicate yourself as an avatar, there's a company called Hey Jen, that could take your video and translate it other languages. There's like sales there, I think AI for sales, which is more audio than visual, but I'm just wondering, do you think any of these visual AIs will get in use and financial advisor space to start taking these meetings?
Daniel Yoo 19:23
Interesting. I can see that potentially happening with the mass market. I don't necessarily see that happening with high net worth, or ultra-high net worth clients. The reason those folks, everyone can invest themselves given enough study, right? The financial advisor is there to be their helper, their listener, their advisor, right? They're not just there to kind of give you wrote pieces of information. And so, my opinion on that is I think people are coming to advice from that human touch. And so, I think it'll be pretty hard pressed for people to be okay with AI disability.
Richard Walker 19:59
So you're not going to say Have my AI, talk to your AI and come back and tell us what happened.
Daniel Yoo 20:04
I can see that happening in like, maybe business to business conversations, but definitely not for something so human centric, as deeply human as kind of the concept of money. Yeah, we're in people's lives.
Richard Walker 20:16
So, there's not a lot of advisors. I mean, there's definitely some knowledge, a lot of advisors who then say, I'm going to become a technologist, and go into this tech field, and I understand the desire to help other advisors. But what was that catalyst for you that said, I'm going to be better off building a fin tech company than being an advisor still?
Daniel Yoo 20:34
Well, so background and my education as I had been coding since elementary school. So I do have a background in technology. And I just want liked working with people more than sitting in front of a computer just making code. And so that's why I didn't pursue technology initially, and move into the financial advisors' space. And so I've always had that background. And you remember some conversation early on in my financial advisor career, just asking some folks up the chain in my company like, hey, if you guys have like a incubator space, like, let me help you build better tools, because the tools we're using look like they're from the 80s. And they are, and they are right, and I still remember this one, one holiday where I had to cover a branch of our offices, because the manager was out for holidays. And we were faxing forms for Roth conversions at the end of the year. And because there's no direct feedback to me, the fax machine was working or was not working, I come back into New Year's and find out the facts, I've only sent half the forms. Now I had to help draft the IRS letters explaining like, hey, this is our company screw up, it wasn't, please forgive our client, like, please help them process this Roth conversion properly. Right. And so there's been a lot of frustrations and in my personal practice of technology being the limiting factor. And so I figured, because I have a tech background, I might as well use that to for good purposes.
Richard Walker 21:57
And that is a familiar story. I mean, at least for me, and I think for other advisors who became technologists as well. Back in the 90s, I worked at Paine Webber. And I remember the old Bloomberg machine with the very special buttons to do things. And I was able to get articles off the Bloomberg as text, I dropped it into Word. And I'm like, I don't like the format of this article to send out to a client. And the advisor I worked for didn't either. So I ended up writing a macro and word that would format that headline, and the byline and the date and all these things. And all I have to do is click a button and boom, in about two seconds, the whole thing was formatted. That's what led me to tech. That's what made me think, wow, we can make things so much faster and easier for people. But I still loved finance. I still love what we're doing with our clients.
Daniel Yoo 22:40
Yeah, I mean, this is why I still maintain my licenses. This is why I enjoy being in the spaces. This is what I've known my entire career. And so, so do you still have clients? So currently, my licenses are in the dormant state that the FINRA just released, actually, my thesis advisor at Hopkins worked for FINRA, and it was like, hey, just let you know, like this is coming down the pipe, you should definitely apply for this five year dormancy period. And so yeah, so it was a very serendipitous meeting with my professor Hopkins.
Richard Walker 23:11
Yeah, I had to let my licenses go. But truthfully, I wanted to because I realized I could do we have better helping more advisors help more people than me, just helping the individuals that I worked with. So that's the other thing I really love about tech. So let's see. Do you think that with behavioral stuff, AI is the answer to make it happen? Or are there other ways to approach the problems?
Daniel Yoo 23:36
I see? No, in general, I think AI isn't a replacement for anything. It's a cheap, quick substitute for a lot of things. So paraplanners are really, really good at your job will take better notes. And I can tell you that right now. Psychologists like financial therapists will be a better judge of people than anything we develop. And I can tell you that right now. But we want to make these avenues available for folks who don't necessarily have access to a absolutely wonderful care plan or have access to financial therapist plus the lots of provide a great customer experience for their clients. So no, I don't think it'll replace them anytime soon.
Richard Walker 24:16
Yeah, no. That's good. I don't either, I really think AI is helping people move up in skills. And to focus on what's more important. We have a new product coming out called Form Xtract. And it eliminates the need to look at forms and type data into systems. And originally, when I was putting this together, I thought there must be a bunch of data entry people who just do this job. And as I talked to all my customers, no, none of them have data entry people. They have high value operational people, directors of compliance and operations. And people doing trades are like, oh, I'm missing this piece of data. I got to go look at the form and I've got to type it in, because the systems out there just aren't accurate enough to push the data through. So I mean, you're taking somebody who's making 40 50 $60 An hour and telling them good type data for a living. Yeah. So I don't think AI is going to replace them. No way.
Daniel Yoo 25:08
No help go to do more important things.
Richard Walker 25:11
Yeah. So let's see, when did you start your company, I'm going to ask you the question of how long you've been doing it.
Daniel Yoo 25:18
So our company started in 2022, we had a couple of pivots in our product, all mostly in the financial investment space. And because of the rising interest rates, more of our previous products wasn't working out. Because it was very much based on an income investing democratizing income investing. But with higher interest rates, that kind of doesn't make sense anymore. And so I was playing through kind of like my past experiences in FinTech. And I remember a lot of this AI note taking tools on us thinking, hey, this doesn't quite fit advisors use cases. So I called some of my old buddies at different RIAs and say, hey, I have this idea. Would you use this? And I gotten great responses. And so yeah, we started development about a year ago, I want to say, after pivoting for a little while, so the company has been around for about two years.
Richard Walker 26:09
And how long has your product been used by customers now?
Daniel Yoo 26:13
Product has been used by customers for, I want to say about nine months now.
Richard Walker 26:18
Okay. What's, what's one of your earliest success stories that you'd love to talk about?
Daniel Yoo 26:24
One of the early success stories...
Richard Walker 26:26
Or any success story? Yeah, you're telling me something privately, I think maybe we could talk about?
Daniel Yoo 26:31
Oh, sure. Yeah. This was a use case that I had never thought of. But thanks to some connection, I think, through Joe as well, I was introduced to a company where one of their advisors was paralyzed from the neck down. And so he had been using a voice recorder to dictate his notes after the meeting. So he had to memorize all of this information during the meeting, and then quickly blurt it out. And, you know, it was time, there was a lot of stress in terms of making sure he had all the details memorized. And so when we heard that, we kind of rushed to create a lot of accessibility tools inside our platform. So Ral laid links, so you can call it different buttons, without having to kind of mouse over them, and just reduce that mental burden for him. And so that was a really fun one.
Richard Walker 26:31
Oh, that's incredible. I really is incredible. So you're making it possible for people to use your product to really help with a disability and alleviate the disability almost entirely? I'm not going to say that exactly, but...
Daniel Yoo 27:31
Not exactly. We're trying to help as much as possible. Yes.
Richard Walker 27:35
But for that part of the process, where they're just can't do it, now they can and they can do it better. I mean, I hope that's the outcome of this advisor and their team.
Daniel Yoo 27:43
I hope so too.
Richard Walker 27:44
Yeah, no, that's really awesome. I love hearing stuff like that. You know, you're also an example of, I think what a lot of entrepreneurs go through, and you talked about pivot, and making changes to your model, because you're learning from your customers. But I have this kind of theory, and I want to see if you can bear it out with me a little bit. My theory is that it's easier to start a business today. I'm not saying easy, by the way, just still hard to run a business and start one. But it's easier to start a business today. Because of the tools and technologies out there. Do you think AI is making it easier to start and build a company, especially a tech company?
Daniel Yoo 28:16
100% I think, the example I like to give is back when I was in college, I used to code websites to sell to small businesses. And then things like Wix and Squarespace rolled that were basically democratized the whole web building experience. And so you no longer needed to code. I think AI will eventually get to the point where there's already AIs out there helping software engineers code. And so once that gets sufficiently advanced enough, I'm sure there's going to be a natural language layer, where people can just talk to their AI or type convinced the AI and have the AI code for them. And we've seen some of beginnings of that, where there's a lot of early prototype type tech companies coming out where the founder has said, I have no coding background, I just asked chatGPT to this for me. And it's worked. And I've talked to some students at UC Berkeley, for example. And they were saying that yeah, like a lot of these coding problems are very easily solvable by currently. And so it's definitely coming. Where up, just like how normal people who couldn't code couldn't build websites. But now they can through all these wonderful tools like Squarespace and Wix. There's definitely a timeline when I think people will be able to build apps and tools without deep knowledge of coding.
Richard Walker 29:29
So I don't know if you notice my companies are 20 years old, we have some pretty legacy systems that we keep migrating forward and upgrading and refactoring and rebuilding. Do you think that we're gonna have to rebuild from scratch with a no code platform if we want to do no code?
Daniel Yoo 29:46
I guess it depends on what direction you want to take the company. So the caveat to my previous statement about there's being there not being much space left for web developers, is there's no space for entry level have developers, because Squarespace and Wix are geared towards kind of that 80% middle market of websites, if you're looking to do very niche or high end things, you're still going to need someone very advanced in coding. And so I think the no code platforms will be very useful for very simple tools. But I still see a space reserved for that very niche, or hard to build products. And so from what I understand from your products, there's a lot of moving pieces. And so I don't necessarily think that no code might be the best direction, but I could be proven wrong.
Richard Walker 30:34
It's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. I mean, with AI is helping write the code, and you still need an architect, and you still need a solution designer, to help you figure out how you want things to work. I mean, we build API's. They're very technical. But then I work with somebody who's got a no code platform, and they consume our API. Like, it's no big deal. Yeah. To me, that means we did the right thing, but at the same time, it's like, why is it so easy for you?
Daniel Yoo 30:58
Yeah, I'm just thinking the same thing when I can sell websites anymore. I guess that's just how business rolls forward.
Richard Walker 31:05
Yeah. Daniel, I really enjoyed talking to you. And I'm gonna have to wrap this up. But before I do I have another question. Before I ask that, what is the best way for people to find you and connect with you?
Daniel Yoo 31:15
Great question. Our website is called finmate.ai. So finmate.ai. On the website, there's plenty of buttons like put in there for contacting me, you can book a time with me happy to chat with you about our product or platform or any kind of integration of partnerships. And so feel free to reach out there. We do have a chat function there where you can reach our team as well. That probably would be the best place.
Richard Walker 31:38
Awesome. Yeah, please reach out to Daniel, he's really good to talk to. All right, so here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style or how you approach your role?
Daniel Yoo 31:48
Yeah, I would have to give two names for this. These are folks that will consider my startup mentors, John Saddington, who was the co-founder of a Code Academy type of thing before it got popular, called the Iron Yard. And the other one would be Holly Liu, who was a co-founder of Kabam. And so both folks have been very much encouraging me to pursue startups ever since I graduated college, and were very upset that I was sticking around in finance for this long. I would have to say, it's probably those two.
Richard Walker 32:22
If your mentor see your potential before you do you got to listen.
Daniel Yoo 32:27
Yeah, I think so. I think they'll be very happy that I finally made the jump.
Richard Walker 32:30
That's awesome. Well, I hope to hear this and can give you that congratulations, because you have you made a huge leap. All right. So I want to give a huge thank you to Daniel Yoo founder of FinMate AI for being on this episode of The Customer Wins, go check out Daniel's website at finmate.ai. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forums easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customers Win. Thanks for joining me today Daniel.
Daniel Yoo 33:01
For the last again if you don't mind. I just want one more shout out to Dan Solon. He is coming. He's a best-selling author. He's coming out with a new book in April called Wealthier. He writes in the inviter space. He was the one that really picked up our product very early on and brought us to everyone's attention helped us get on the kids us list, things like that. So shout out to Dan check out his book the Wealthier book coming out in April. Thanks.
Richard Walker 33:25
Awesome.
Outro 33:28
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