Parham Nasseri is the Vice President of Product and Regulatory Strategy for InvestorCOM, a leading provider of regulatory compliance software and communications solutions for the financial services industry. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) with an MBA from the Schulich School of Business.
Parham has progressive experience in data-centric roles relating to technology and finance. He is involved in the Canadian RegTech Association, CFA Society Toronto, and was the Chair of The Canadian Advocacy Council.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Parham Nasseri talks about InvestorCOM and how it helps people
Tips for adopting regulatory requirements through tech
How InvestorCOM creates better customer experiences for compliance
The value of client feedback on the product development cycle
Parham’s thoughts on how AI is impacting the regulatory and compliance environment
People that have impacted Parham’s leadership style
In this episode…
As an investor, are you hesitant to make financial decisions because of the complex regulatory requirements in the industry? How can you meet your regulatory obligations and drive better financial decisions?
The regulatory requirements in the financial services industry are constantly evolving. It calls for innovative solutions to be able to comply efficiently and intuitively. According to Parham Nasseri, you can take the guesswork out of making compliant product recommendations through technology. He shares how they help wealth and asset managers turn compliance into a strategic advantage.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Parham Nasseri, Vice President of Product and Regulatory Strategy for InvestorCOM, to discuss tips for addressing compliance requirements in the financial service industry. Parham talks about how to adopt regulatory requirements through tech, the value of client feedback on the product development cycle, and the impacts of AI on the regulatory and compliance environment.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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.
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.
Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.
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. Some of our past guests have included Aaron Klein of Nitrogen and Randy Cass of Nest Wealth. Today I'm excited to speak with Parham Nasseri, vice president at InvestorCOM, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms automation. When the last step to earning your clients business requires filling out paperwork, don't ruin a good relationship with a bad experience. Instead, get Quik Forms to make filling out forms a great experience and the easiest part of your transaction. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Chip Kispert of Beacon Strategies. Go check out their website at beaconstrategiesllc.com and consider attending one of their amazing roundtables. Also watch for an upcoming episode where I talk with Chip about what he does best. All right, now it's time to talk to our guests. Parham Nasseri has spent his careers translating technical regulatory concepts into technology solutions for the wealth management industry, with a focus on improving investor and advisor dynamics. Mr. Nasseri currently serves as vice president, product and regulatory strategy at InvestorCOM. He is also an active voice in attack and wealth communities and serves several boards including the Canadian Advocacy Council of CFA societies Canada, and the Canadian RegTech Association. Parham, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Parham Nasseri 1:53
Richard, thank you for having me.
Richard Walker 1:54
I'm super excited to have you today. Now, if you haven't heard this podcast before, I talked with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenges to grow their own company. Parham, I want to understand your business a little better, maybe a lot better, in fact, because I don't think I fully understand it. How does your company help people?
Parham Nasseri 2:16
So I always joke with our CEO that he founded one of the first FinTech firms back in 1992. The company's been around for obviously, over 30 years, and there's been a lot of, I'd say, evolutionary processes with any business that's been around for that long, I sort of going back to your question around how it's been impacting customers, I sort of point to one of the stories or trajectories of how we were involved in this particular segment of the market segment. And its impact on investors or how customers end up winning. I want to say about maybe four or five years ago, there were parallel regulations across I'd say, sort of North America or call it kind of Western economies that said, hey, wealth management firm, you need to go beyond just disclosing to the investor their costs or particular risks of their investments, you need to go beyond that. And you need to actually make sure that that recommendation, that advice you're providing is in the investors best interest. Principle base regulations across Canada and the US. And in the US, the fall was called reg bi and Canada's, it was called something similar, but they got to transition to client focus reforms. So to your question, Richard, around impact on investors. And so the best data point I have on this as a company is, we did a analysis over a two-year period, or one of our first clients in the US market who adopted our technology. And so one of the requirements was as part of doing that analysis as part of making an investment recommendation to Richard Walker to end consumer, you got to compare costs and reasonably available alternatives. So guess what, over that two-year period, when we looked at our clients data across a time, we observed a consistent trend in an improvement of outcome for the consumer. Right? The line was you got to compare costs and reasonably available alternatives. How do you do that without having some utility, some technology that makes that analysis fairly readily available, and digestible, for the end financial advisor? They've got a billion things to do. Right? We started observing, as I said, off the top, a consistent and incremental improvement in the quality of those outcomes for the end investors, the cost of the products, measured through management expense ratio started improving standard deviation, or risk metrics of those products started improving over time. And so over the two-year period, if you kind of take the first data point It's compared against the data points that were available at the end of the two-year period, we saw a almost a 39 38% improvement over those respective metrics. So what is our motto? It's about improving, making sure there's better investment decisions at the end of the day, better financial decisions, I should say. And so how do you do that? You do that through adopting technology and making sure you're following the spirit of the regulations to the best degree possible?
Richard Walker 5:31
Yeah, so that's actually quite complicated. I mean, I was listening to your bio as I read it, and I said, you're translating regulation into tech. And really, what you're looking at is kind of two sides of the coin from my perspective, one is regulation and who likes it? And two, is it enforcement? Or is it best practice? And so how do you guys look at I mean, your title is regulations? Do you like regulations?
Parham Nasseri 5:56
Richard, I guess sort of my path into the industry and sort of seeing things is somewhat like nonlinear and traditional, I started my path into the industry working on the other side of the fence working on it within a regulatory capacity, and Rich, you kind of see some consistent problems in the industry over and over and over again, right, when you're working on that side of the fence, whether it's firm ABC or XYZ, there are consistent problems in the industry. And some of those challenges, I'd sort of say is they're solvable, right? They're solvable if those firms or those financial professionals have tools or practices in place to mitigate those potential risks. One of these issues as an example is, going back to your point about sort of how do you adapt regulations? How do you embrace those regulations? Sometimes there's a little bit of a, anytime there's new regulations, there's a little bit of, oh, my God, what's this all about? Now, you're encroaching on my workspace and telling me how to do my job. And I sort of challenge that a little bit, given my path, right. I've seen some harm being done to the end investors by firms or financial professionals, not necessarily sort of meeting the best spirit of those requirements, right. And so I sort of look at some of those requirements, some those regulations as a way for regulators to say, look, obviously, you're acting your investors best interest. That's why you're in that game. That's why you're in that financial advisory capacity. And is there a compensation involved for you as a financial professional at the end of the day? Hell yeah. Right. There needs to be some compensation model. And so how do you translate those requirements around ensuring you're acting in your investors best interest into a repeatable process? That's where technology comes in?
Richard Walker 7:56
Yeah, I was thinking about this, every time regulation comes out, it can increase the cost of the advisor, the firm, even the investor who ends up paying that costs. And I suppose your focus at InvestorCOM is to lower that cost through automation and technology, that probably more than just in implements the guardrails of the regulation, but helps create visibility and insight. And then of course, the automation to deliver. Is that a fair assessment of what your intent is?
Parham Nasseri 8:26
Absolutely. And I sort of say Rich, between what your company does and what ours does the underlying impetus is the same, the thesis is the same, right? So there are requirements, and there are process improvements that technology can foster and consistently improve over time.
Richard Walker 8:43
It's funny, Parham, when I started Quik!, way back in the early days, it was my partner and I, we were both building the forums that our customers used. I mean, I personally have built over 1000 forms in the library. And certainly my team has done more than that by now. But when the Patriot Act came out, suddenly, every single form in our library changed. And everybody in the industry is complaining about, oh my gosh, we have to get all this data. And I'm sitting there say, I have to rebuild 1000 forms.
Parham Nasseri 9:12
It's real. And I think I commend, we've talked about this in the past, Richard, there's adopting technology is never easy, right? You think about it, somebody who came up with chatGPT, or next new application, there's always in natural human behavior. There's always this hindrance to just adopt new technology. Now, it's a new process. Now you need to learn how to prompt the technology well enough for it to function or give me the results and to your point, anytime new regulatory requirements are sort of put out there, in my opinion, there's a directional kind of decision that needs to be made. Are we going to adopt the best spirit of those requirements? Are we going to fight them at a firm? I think if you go down the adopting of the blue pill or the red pill, if you go down the blue pill and say, look, I want to try to meet the requirements in the best light possible. I think the next question that comes down that sort of decision tree naturally is, how do I do it? Right? Am I going to require manual processes across my organization, the larger the organization, the bigger pain point or technical debt that's created? Or should I look at it tech-first strategy, and I love this point. And I love that you brought it up. Because we believe that anytime there is a shift in requirements, regulatory requirements, to say the least, it's a huge opportunity for our respective clients to sort of lift the foot. Right. And so strategically, what do I do? Is this an opportunity for me to foster efficiencies by way of technology adoptions holistically? Or am I going to resist sort of the blue pill and the red pill example again?
Richard Walker 11:09
Yeah, I have a saying that efficiency stems from great design. And exactly that, if you take the time to look under the hood, and say, what are we doing? How are we doing it? Can we do it differently, and therefore come up with a better design? I suppose some of these regulations can actually improve certain processes, because they're taking a chance to look at it fresh and embrace it, like you're saying, and I think that's an interesting point you're making, because I'm sitting here thinking, wow, first of all, I hate regulation, right? I don't know people who really love regulation. And I would think that in your company, you could take two different mindsets, you could take the mindset of, hey, there's a new regulation, we get to produce a new product, or you're agnostic to it, how do we embrace it, enforce it, comply with it, and still create an excellent experience? Right? So I'm curious, Parham, how do you as a company, or even in your role, how do you create a better experience for customers with technology when it comes to this compliance world?
Parham Nasseri 12:07
That's our goal, right? Our sort of call it guiding lights, Northstar, whatever it is to effectively help our clients make better financial decisions, then you work backwards from that. And you say, look, how do we foster that better financial decisions as an organization with our technology, right? To your point, we're not standing there and kind of high fiving each other throwing out chest bumps, every time he lands up on the desk, it's more about how do we help our clients, right, eliminate the compliance requirements, the pain or the that's associated with that. And fundamentally, it comes down to with great technology, right? For us a big sort of guiding light Rich, it's got to be simple, right. You can take a lot of these regulatory requirements, quote, unquote, literally right and say, all right, you got to turn left, right, make products really, really complex to adopt. Our motto is, you got to keep it simple. Right. So I think that's one of the ways we sort of tackle that problem. And at the end of the day, in my opinion, I think if you look at the spirit of where regulations have ended up, they moved away from very rule specific, and they're much more principles-based. So those principles and bringing those principles to light by way of a repeatable technology solution, in my opinion, it's a never-ending battle, it's a problem that's never gonna kind of be fully resolved. And I think that's what excites me because you bring on clients, then the clients become effectively the CEO of the organization by guiding where the product needs to go from day one, tackling a problem from a specific regulatory, right, so we can now evolve the product with our clients on the platform, which I'm sure you've done as well at Quik!,
Richard Walker 13:54
I like how you said that, the client becomes the CEO of your product, because they're driving the behavior that needs, which also says that you truly care about what they believe what they think what they're asking for, and you're taking in their feedback, I presume. I'm curious, I mean, really, on a very technical process approach. I know how my company is doing it, but how are you guys taking in feedback and feeding that through your entire product development cycle?
Parham Nasseri 14:21
We have a process and we've got a client success team and we've got clients we interact with all the time we've got surveys but I want to sort of take quick step back because software as a service, or calling a call it a technology organization, the fact that there is now this feedback loop that's available through our clients. There is no dollar amount you can associate to that, in my opinion. I think now you're getting paying clients for providing us feedback, and helping you prioritize them. And that process in of itself, the ability to do that, in my opinion is a gift. If you're intellectually stimulated by those types of conversations, I think anybody in the product role would just love it. Right? How do we do it? Specifically, we've got a prioritization matrix. Obviously, there's different product lines, and to be able to kind of just, frankly, speaking, filter and bring, find commonalities between what our clients are identifying. Everybody in our game, in our industry Rich, you've got tremendous experience on that front as well, given what you've done with Quik prioritization is the name of the game, right? Being able to meet your client's needs, and, is it always who screams loudest or whatnot. And I think what we committed to was, let's have a consistent process, right? So whether it's from ABC or XYZ, who's asking us for stuff, let's make sure it goes through the same funnel, where we kind of say, look, are there any other clients were asking about this particular feature this particular add on? And do we want to be everything to everyone? Or do we want to find out where we belong? What value we can add to the FinTech universe in the grand scheme of things? And I think that's a hard conversation. It's not a conversation that goes away. I wish it did. I really wish it sort of like hits you, we're seeing on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. It's like, oh, God, do we have this right. And I think, actually, this is what I value about our conversations, Rich, I've come to you from time to time as a sounding board. And I do believe it's important to have mentors in this space and people we kind of bounce decisions off of as well. So you're not just doing it in silo?
Richard Walker 16:44
Yeah, no, I always enjoy our conversations, too. We've talked over the years. And I always get so much insight. In fact, I got an insight just from something you said, and I want to go back to it. I hadn't thought of it this before. When people bought traditional software, they paid one-time fee 200 bucks for a software product, and then they don't upgrade it for three or four years, they don't have the same incentive or the same lever from the software companies perspective, as compared to somebody who's paying ongoing 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, whatever their price is. Because the truth is, this way, I love software as a service to when I have a customer who's just paying us every single month, I will listen to them 10 times more than a prospect, because they are the paying customer and they're consistently paying. And we promise to keep improving our product because they keep paying. And I think people who buy products should understand that, they should know that about software companies as software as a service companies, that we have this innate incentive to keep serving what they're doing, and adding value to what they're doing. I'll add another kind of puzzle piece to this with prioritization. Because at our company, we have a roadmap. I think most software companies, technology companies have a roadmap, and we do everything we can to keep all the incoming requests highly aligned with the roadmap, if a request from a customer is way outside the roadmap, we probably won't build it, if ever, if it's perfectly aligned, it goes in. And then if it's small, easy, medium or hard, that kind of helps with the prioritization, just to give people even more insight as to how we kind of put it into play.
Parham Nasseri 18:17
I mean, what you just said, you've simplified, like, basically the architecture of product roadmap, right? Or product prioritization. And the jargon kills me in my opinion, in our industry, sometimes they'll say the technology industry because there's so much terminology and jargon that's added to an already jargon complex financial services industry, right? It's like Agile Scrum and absence, like, hold on. This is a simple concept of, to your point, customers wining, right doing this all for the sake of if the customer doesn't win, guess what? No one's gonna buy your product. Right? So I think fundamentally, the goals and alignments, especially in software as a service, airline, antis more than that transactional, hey, you want to buy a CD ROM, then they'll know that you're software into a program, I shouldn't laugh about it, it's it was exactly what we lived through in our lifetime.
Richard Walker 19:17
Hey, let's switch gears a little bit, because I know you care a ton about automation. And I am obviously a fan of automation. In the extent that it adds value creates efficiency as a more intelligent design, etc. So I'm curious now and we can go further than I typically go in conversations on this podcast about it. I want to hear more about your thoughts of AI and how you think AI is going to impact the regulatory environment, the compliance with it, the experience with it, give me some of your views on how you're seeing artificial intelligence impacts your view of the world.
Parham Nasseri 19:51
I got to caveat the conversation with you're gonna have to cut me off at some point on this topic. Well, all jokes aside, I'm so excited. I'm so excited by what we're seeing in the marketplace. I'm not much on the camp where people are sort of saying our jobs are going to be taken away, and these machines are going to come and haunt us down. I just to be completely transparent kind of state the obvious, I think, I believe technology is an enabler as Steve Jobs said, it's the bicycle to human beings. And I think it's going to continue to be that and we're gonna continue to learn from it over the next, I was gonna say decades, and they realized every week it's changing. And so in our world of regulation, in my world, at least some regulations and technology solutions and whatnot, I still think we still have a little bit of time to figure it out. But what I'm excited about is all those operational inefficiencies, order ticket entry, as an example, right? It's a dead obvious one, there are repeatable processes, like clients suitability is at the very least, in my opinion, to be automated to a much more higher fidelity degree. Right. The bigger question that I think you touched on, is what's going to happen with regulation? Right? So I serve on industry associations, I serve on kind of on the regulatory side of things as well. And this question comes up always, which is like, do we know what's behind that black box? And suddenly, from an evolutionary process? regulators who regulated traditional, hey, how do you raise capital? What are the foundational principles of financial advisor giving advice through investors shifts towards hey, Mr. Walker, walk me through the code there, and make sure that code is transparent, and is it ethical, so on and so forth. So I think there's a lot more learning, there's a lot of evolution and change that's going to happen in our industry as a result of that. But what I would advocate for holistically is embracing that change, and not from a fear perspective, as opposed to, it should be viewed much more as an enabler. Right. So if financial professional could document their analysis like this, right, as invisible as possible through technology, if the financial professional or firm can do surveillance, on activity on across their firm, right, and have much more, this is gonna sound super sort of in the weeds. But what's been the challenge for surveillance over the past 10 years, as firms have adopted technology has been, look, you get a lot of false positives, right? Now AI can kind of actually add the contextual element, right, and look at the holistic element of surveillance is looking at the problem of surveillance much more holistically and say, look, if Parham's giving advice to Richard Walker in that financial advisory capacity, what else are we missing? All? Right. So I'm holistically excited about AI and what its capabilities are, I think that sort of caveat the world's about to end sort of caution that I don't know if it will, I think there should be a lot of excitement in the industry. And the biggest question I have is, how are regulators going to get to a position where they can actually look whether do they need to look underneath the hood and look at the code? Is that their job? Is that their Band-Aid? I don't know. I think those are kind of future problems that are going to continue to persist in our industry.
Richard Walker 23:40
Well, especially as we leverage code that's not our own right? We use AWS machine learning code, we're not going to look at that code. We just kind of trust it's industry standard, or what have you. So first of all, I love the Terminator movies. But I still think Skynet is a fantasy. I'm not really worried about robots taking over the world with AI. Maybe that's a possibility. I'm also not as concerned about people having their jobs taken by an AI, I think their jobs will be taken by people who operate AI better. And it's going to lead to more competitive advantages. So when we talk about regulation, a new regulation comes in, it puts pressure on the firm, it lowers their net income and their profitability, and therefore their commission rates etc. A company like yours if you're leveraging AI can improve that, lower the cost of that which then re improves their process and therefore their profitability, right. So I was also thinking, I've talked to some people recently, one firm they're using AI to read legacy documents when they onboard another firm or another advisor. And I said why are you doing that? Why would you care about the legacy? They said, well, we need to note we have to adhere to what did this advisor agreed to that now our firm has to agree to in terms of rap fees or different types of structures, what have you. Another company they built an AI, they are going to be reading trusts a state documents, wills, things like that to help you understand what those documents have without hiring a lawyer to interpret it. So I think there's a ton of opportunity with how AI can impact the business. What is some of the data points that you guys are working with to potentially feed AI and drive AI?
Parham Nasseri 25:20
Yeah. You've nailed it, in my opinion, Rich, it's the contextual information that makes the throughput of AI, the old analogy of garbage in garbage out, I think it's important because if the contextual information for AI or digesting kind of the prompt is more than the responses, or the results of the AI is also going to be ineffective. And so I think when it comes to kind of our company, what we're trying to do want to say that we're tremendously excited about this. And I think you go back to that mindset, better financial decisions and sort of translating those regulatory requirements into efficient processes, I think there's immense amount of help that, AI sort of gets a little bit of a, everything gets coined into AI, just think simple relational databases, can hit the mark for a lot of firms out there. And the reason I say that is, Rich, when we first embrace the US market and the regulation, best interest rate center requirements, we pulled the industry, right, we just finding Is there enough opportunity here, and I want to say, almost 80%, high 70%, for sure. A firms that were responding to a poll across the broker-dealer network, were saying, yeah, we're going to tackle the essential nature of these requirements in the manual way. Right, the old, check the box with the printed form, so on and so forth, to meet our best interest requirements. And I think you take that data point, right, we've seen that number trickled down a little bit over the years, as we're in year three of the reg bi file. But I still think if you've read Crossing The Chasm of where we are, as an industry still, while we'd like to kind of dream and think about AI and its capabilities on the financial advisors, desktop, we are seeing, I'm seeing a tremendous amount of manual workaround solutions today still, which, in my opinion, is holding our industry back. Right. And I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity there.
Richard Walker 27:31
My corollary to that Parham is paperwork. Why do people create paper forms? Well, because it's easy, right? Literally anybody with a word processor or PowerPoint, Excel, they can generate a document that looks like a form, they can print it on paper, which is cheap, and hand it to somebody to fill out and collect data. That's why forms exist, because it's super simple and cheap. And I think similar to what you're saying, when a new regulation comes out, the first thought is, okay, let's put some human labor on this. Let's build a manual process around this. And then your job is to make it easier, better, faster through technology, but their job is still to seek out that technology. So one of the things I've helped people do is create an efficient office and I say, look at your process first, what are the steps you're taking? Look at your people second, what skills do you have? What are their natural tendencies and what of the things they don't like to do? Compare those two, look for overlaps, look for duplicate steps, look at things that could be more efficient. And then select technology. Technology is a tool. It's not a cure, and use technology to serve the needs of that process and those people but best yet redesign the process? Does your company, I don't know your technology that well. Does your company implement a specific process? Is it open-ended to various processes? How do people interact with it?
Parham Nasseri 27:31
Yeah, so it's software as a service. It's web-based. And the way our applications function is basically, they can either single sign-on into the applications from where they are from wherever their advisor workstation is, or they can just access it readily. And I think, Rich, you're touching on something that somewhat I'd sort of say there's inconsistencies in our industry. We've heard it all, we've heard it from hey, we want our financial professionals to access your applications through our CRM, great Single Sign On from your CRM essence whatever it is, on to our applications web-based to your point, it just makes it that much more efficient. On the other end of the spectrum, we've seen look we give our reps is a laptop, right? So you guys go out and figure out how to make it work. And so I think even then, I think, what's been paramount from, from my perspective from InvestorCOM perspective then, is we need our applications our platform to be as flexible as possible, right? You never know, for example, the laptop example, you never know what your clients are going to need from a integration and where does this advisor technology need to sit in their general workflow. But I think it's important to that flexibility, I call it kind of the propensity to be open architecture is what I'd like to kind of undermine is important, because at the end of the day, it goes back to that customer winning, right. If the technology becomes yet another disparate, siloed process, guess what, no one was gonna adopt it. And that customer or consumer perspective doesn't wait.
Richard Walker 30:41
Yeah, I suppose that's one of the hardest parts for the advisors out there, they built their business on a certain technology stack their workflow, they join a firm, or they transition to another firm that has a different stack or a different workflow. And the hard part is to say, why is that firm I just joined doing it the way they're doing it? Is it more effective? Is it more efficient, should I adapt and adopt what they're doing? You know, let's not reinvent the wheel here, let's copy-paste what other people are doing super successfully, and implement it for ourselves wherever we can. And whenever we can, and maybe even unroot some things to reform it. That's a really, really tough thing for advisors to do, because they don't like change. Most people don't like change, and it's expensive. But I think at the end of the day, we're all trying to serve the end investor in the same manners, right? We're all have the same goals of building our businesses growing our companies serving our customers well, it's just a question of how. This has just been awesome to hear your perspective on it.
Parham Nasseri 31:38
Yeah, I sort of say, Rich, you've got fantastic experience on this front. And I've come to you with a lot of these questions. But in our I'll call it the swivel chair sort of industry where there's all these disparate applications, you look at Michael Kitsis, sort of tech stack, it's growing. And it's just like, we've gone from like a bigger logo to like, getting me seen the logo anymore. But our position in this has been and then part of that is kind of maybe call it what I've seen in the industry in terms of kind of regulatory requirements or compliance being a bit of a hindrance at the end of the day, for the business strike for the financial professional. So we're making a living doing that, right. We believe compliance can be a key pillar to that growth. I know, it's not necessarily conventional thought, because you naturally think compliance as some hindrance to your business. But I think if you embrace that compliance pillar, right, the rest of it, whether it's generating a proposal, or a rollover recommendation, or a product recommendation can foundationally be done with that much more confidence, which improves the advisor client relationship. So that ultimately in our world means better financial decision. I want to kind of touch on one more piece on this because you mentioned Aaron Klein's name and Nitrogen, there's a recent study they did and I love data if you can tell. I think a lot of these decisions need to be data-centric decisions. There's a data point in the survey that they did around 5000 financial advisors, so big population size, where over 40% of the respondents saw increasing regulations and compliance requirements as an impediment to their growth. Nitrogen is all about growth. And so what does that say to you? We talked a little bit about AI, we talked a little bit about kind of adoption of technology. And so if you combine those, and at InvestorCOM we believe if we're able to take that 40% down to 20%, we can't eliminate it, it's not gonna go away, right. But if we can take a dent out of it, we've now created a much more efficient process that creates a flywheel effect across the industry for not just us as a technology company, not just compliance, but also the financial professionals and then investors. So a bit of a, I'll call it a stretch goal, but that's what we're going for.
Richard Walker 34:16
It is awesome. department, we got to wrap this up. So I do have another question for you. But before I ask it, what's the best way for people to connect with you?
Parham Nasseri 34:26
Rich, as an introvert, I'm kidding. I'll sort of say, LinkedIn, Parham Nasseri, you can look me up or investorcom.com is our company page. There's plenty of different ways of accessing us using that. And again, follow us on LinkedIn as well. We have a rapidly growing member base there as well.
Richard Walker 34:48
Awesome. Yeah, you're pretty straightforward to find on LinkedIn. All right, so here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style, or how you approach your role today?
Parham Nasseri 34:59
It's a loaded question. I don't know if we'll have enough time for me to tell fulsome story. But I'll sort of say this, I'll kind of give a few folks a shout-out. But I'm a big, big advocate in just being a lifelong learner. And just, if you can accumulate mentors throughout your life and just kind of, like pay that back at Rich, I've come to you for questions, right? Like just to be able to do that across the industry. So I want to sort of count my lucky stars. Like I said to you, I started my career working in the regulatory capacity, I've got to say, like, tremendous mentors through that experience. And so, over the past few years, I'd sort of shout out Tom Selman, he was an ex, senior senior individual as FINRA has kind of guided us as from a board of advisory capacity. Also shout out, I think, a common friend of ours, Rob Dearman, who's I started to say, there isn't many conversations that go on in the industry without Rob's name, and he's been tremendous in shaping our product and continuing to give us advice and obviously the leadership team is InvestorCOM, right? I think it's easy to get lost in the product matrix and kind of the nuts and bolts but I sort of say my peers at InvestorCOM the leadership team involved kind of come together in shaping my thoughts, and where we're going as a company as well.
Richard Walker 36:32
Man, I love it. I love the attitude of gratitude. That's awesome. So hey, I want to say thank you to Parham Nasseri Vice President of InvestorCOM for being on this episode of The Customer Wins, go check out their website at investorcom.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we take the work out of paperwork. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion, and we'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Parham, thank you so much for joining me today.
Parham Nasseri 37:02
Always great chatting with you, Rich, you as well.
Outro 37:06
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.