Unlocking Wealthtech Innovation and Growth With Vickie Lewin

Vickie Lewin is the Chief Growth Officer at Amplify, a leading wealthtech platform designed to streamline operations for RIAs and enterprise firms. With over 30 years of experience in financial services, fintech, and asset management, she previously served as Senior Vice President and Chief Success Officer at AssetMark, where she played a pivotal role in scaling the firm from a $1 billion TAMP to an industry leader managing over $100 billion in assets. At Amplify, Vickie leads sales and marketing efforts, driving strategic growth and aligning product development with market needs. She is also a passionate advocate for increasing the representation of women in the financial services industry and actively mentors the next generation of female leaders.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:56] Vickie Lewin discusses how Amplify supports RIAs through an all-in-one wealthtech platform

• [4:00] When are advisors most likely to switch to a new platform like Amplify?

• [6:24] How Amplify balances innovation with ongoing customer support

• [8:46] Competing against best-in-class tools while maintaining integration options

• [11:12] Vickie explains where RIA firms place the highest value in their technology stack

• [13:08] Challenges of standing out in the oversaturated Kitces advisor tech map

• [16:43] Amplify’s focus on customer experience for advisors, investors, and enterprise firms

• [23:54] Importance of clean, structured data to support meaningful AI applications

• [30:05] Why people using AI will outperform those who don’t in the future of wealthtech
  

In this episode…

In a rapidly evolving financial technology ecosystem, RIAs are overwhelmed by the complexity of choosing the right tech stack to support their growth and streamline operations. With hundreds of tools on the market and many offering overlapping functionality, how can advisory firms confidently select solutions that deliver long-term value without creating more operational headaches?

Vickie Lewin, an expert in sales strategy and customer success, highlights two key inflection points that drive advisors to seek new platforms, namely breaking away to start independent firms and growing frustrated with outdated systems. She shares that the solution lies in offering flexible, all-in-one systems that integrate with existing tools while still delivering best-in-class capabilities for functions like trading and risk scoring. She emphasizes the importance of innovation, thoughtful customer experience, and a roadmap that prioritizes meaningful feedback over sheer volume. Vickie advises firms to innovate proactively, value service over product, and always stay close to client needs.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Vickie Lewin, Chief Growth Officer at Amplify, about how financial advisors can make smarter tech choices. Vickie discusses the challenges of technology overload, how to balance innovation with client service, and the future role of AI in the wealthtech industry. She also explores integration strategies, the power of user experience, and navigating a crowded advisor tech market.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Vickie Lewin on LinkedIn

• Amplify

• "[AI Series] Transforming Meeting Management for Financial Advisors With Arnulf Hsu" on The Customer Wins

• "Redefining Client Discovery in Finance With Marla Sofer" on The Customer Wins

• "Inside Boutique Wealth Management: Navigating Wealth and Ethics With Joshua D. Rogers" on The Customer Wins

Quotable Moments:

• “The pain of not changing becomes bigger than the pain of change.”

• “You're never finished. There's always something else to do. There's always something else to build.”

• “We can do anything, but not everything. And picking the ‘anythings’ is really challenging.”

• “AI is not going to replace people. People using AI are going to replace people not using AI.”

• “Perfect can absolutely be the enemy of progress.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Offer flexible platform integrations: Allowing advisors to keep preferred tools like CRMs or planning software reduces onboarding friction and boosts satisfaction.

2. Prioritize innovation without sacrificing support: Building new features while maintaining strong client service differentiates your platform in a crowded market.

3. Use client feedback to inform the roadmap: Input from advisors, enterprises, and investors helps prioritize features that address real-world needs.

4. Focus on simplifying multi-custodian operations: Streamlining trading, reporting, and portfolio management across custodians increases advisor efficiency and scalability.

5. Embrace AI as an enhancement, not a replacement: Using AI for productivity with human oversight maintains compliance while improving performance.

Sponsor for this episode...

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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: 00:02 

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: 00:16

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 my past guests have included Arnulf Hsu of GReminders, Marla Sofer of Knomee, and Joshua D. Rogers of Arete Wealth. Today, I'm speaking with Vickie Lewin, chief growth officer of Amplify. 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 manually reviewing the forms.

Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, let me tell you more about today's guest. As the Chief Growth Officer, Vickie leads the Amplify sales and marketing team, driving strategic direction, business development, and market positioning.

Prior to joining Amplify, Vickie was senior VP and Chief Success Officer at Assetmark and served in various roles at Fund Investment Advisory Network and Nuveen. Vickie, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Vickie Lewin: 01:34

Hi, Rich. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Richard Walker: 01:37

Oh, I'm excited to talk to you. So, for those who haven't heard my podcast before, I'd love to talk to 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 growing their own companies. So, Vickie, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Vickie Lewin: 01:56

So Amplify is an all-in-one wealthtech platform serving Rias and the companies that they work for. And we help people by making it easier to run all aspects of their business so that they can free up time to spend more client-facing time with clients, prospects, and centers of influence. So it's about productivity and alignment and time savings and growth.

Richard Walker: 02:24

All right. That's awesome. I love hearing about the kind of I'm going to use the phrase business in a box concepts, but I often see that they fit within certain areas and not in others. I mean, there's so many facets to running an RIA. What are the core strengths of your product?

Where does it really fit?

Vickie Lewin: 02:42

Yeah. So sometimes our technology is referred to as a tamp because it has all of the elements that a classic turnkey asset management provider has, like a proposal tool and portfolio construction and third party managers, performance reporting and billing. But there's also a CRM and research tools. And then, as with any technology, we're constantly listening to our clients to see what else they want us to add, what else they want us to build. And in the modern era of technology, the integrations out to other tools are are easier as well.

So all in one really rich all the way from the client relationship management, client lifecycle management tools all the way to performance reporting and billing. And what we want to do. And I'll go back to your first question. What we really want to do is we want to make it easier for financial advisors to get clients, keep clients and and and grow their clients.

Richard Walker: 03:39

Nice. I think that's a great ambition because that's the core of their business. Okay. So you're in sales, business development, etc.. How hard is it for somebody to say, I want this all in one system because I'm already on Redtail or Wealthbox.

I already have XYZ portfolio management, etc.. How do people make this decision to move on to your platform?

Vickie Lewin: 04:00 

Yeah, it's hard, it's hard. Change is hard. As you know, from being a business leader and business owner for a long time. So you know, the change tends to come in at two moments we're finding. One of the changes happens when an advisor who perhaps is part of a big broker dealer or part of a regional broker dealer, comes when they say, I want to go build my own business.

And when they say, I want to go build my own business, they're leaving behind whatever technology that, that, that prior company provided. And an all in one can be a really easy first step instead of trying to piece it all together, because the variety of choices today is just massive and it can be paralyzing. So that's probably the easier one. And then the second one that comes to us typically comes when an Ria owner is frustrated with whatever tool they're using now, and it tends to be the portfolio operating system, the build the portfolio trade, the portfolio report on the portfolio part of the application. It tends to be that that they're getting frustrated with.

There are some really terrific systems out there, but some of them are getting a little dated. Some of our prospects are telling me that those systems are getting a little tired and they're not keeping up. And so we're finding that people are interested in, you know, a piece of our offering. And that's fine. Somebody can start with a piece of our offering and then decide whether they want to use the other features over time.

But it tends to be firms who are breaking away, and they need to start to start from the very beginning. And all in one can be an easy choice. Or firms, you know, when the pain is great enough where you are or you get frustrated enough, the pain of not changing becomes bigger than the pain of change. So that's those are the two we tend to talk the most to.

Richard Walker: 05:54

So you revealed something that is very near and dear to me. And that is how software companies survive in the long run. And that is to reinvent themselves and keep innovating because so many companies don't. And oftentimes, your competitive advantage is simply being modern, right?

Vickie Lewin: 06:11

For sure.

Richard Walker: 06:13

So, how do you guys keep innovating? How do you keep pushing the envelope forward? Because it's a huge investment. It's a major resource draw when you still have customers to serve, etc.. How do you guys approach that?

Vickie Lewin: 06:24

Yeah it is. Well, maybe one of the advantages that we have, actually rich, is not only that our first line of code was written in 2018, but also that we are not currently serving thousands and thousands of clients we're serving. We have $20 billion in AUM. We have about 650 financial advisors on the system right now. So for us, the keep the lights on investment is not as great as some of the older, more mature platforms that, you know, have trillions of dollars in assets under management and thousands and thousands of clients.

So our, you know, the size of us being a little smaller does give us an opportunity to invest more in innovation and less in keeping the lights on. Yes, we have to invest in keeping the lights on because we have clients. We want to keep happy. You know, the thing about the thing about software sales, wealth, technology, and I, and I guess I'd say this was true across my tenure in financial services, is you're never finished. There's always something else to do.

There's always something else to build. There's always something else to create, something else to consider. And you can let that be frustrating. Or you can let it be exciting, that you know, the roadmap of building Amplify. And this is true for any technology firm. The roadmap is never finished.

Richard Walker: 07:45

Oh my gosh, there's so much truth to that. So I want to share with you our philosophy. But really, it's my philosophy since before I started my company. And that is, I'm trying to always put myself out of business. I'm looking at innovation in terms of there's somebody who could come in and disrupt everything we do and change it so dramatically.

I get put out of business. So why don't I do that instead? And being a 23-year-old company, maybe it's inspiring. I don't know, maybe it's a clue. Maybe we've done it wrong.

But we keep pushing ahead, and I'm watching my main competitor not innovate for eight years, and it's just making it easier and easier for clients to realize there's better value out there. So I want to come back to something else because you offer so many variables in your product set. How do you compete against the best in class for any given part of your product? When I mean, I don't know if you're trying to be the best CRM and the best portfolio management system and the best you know, etc., how do you compete with that?

Vickie Lewin: 08:46

Yeah, we are. We are trying to provide in our platform the best of some of those best-in-class features as it relates to CRM. Just I'll use that one as it relates to CRM. It's one of the areas of the platform that when somebody loves their CRM, they love their CRM. If they've invested time and effort and resources into building out or building something on top of Salesforce, as an example right there, they're not going to be eager to replace their.

So there are certain components of our platform where we know that we need to provide integration options and choices in addition to having it live internally if they don't need the power of all of that. So there's some flexibility there. And then there's other areas of our platform like our risk scoring methodology and you know, Riskalyze and nitrogen. Now they are they've done some really great work. But you know, we're we're willing to go head to head with them on the risk scoring capabilities that we have.

We think our methodology is a little a little bit better than theirs. So there are areas where we go head to head and our risk scoring is an example of that. And there's areas where we provide integrations and our CRM is that our trading. We would go head to head with any of the more of the older, more tenured trading systems. We think ours is a little more intuitive.

You can get to where you want to go with fewer clicks. There's a little more guardrails, guardrails on risk. So there are certain areas of the platform. And I guess I highlighted too, where we would go head to head with the others, but others where we know we need to provide the integrations. And the other example, rich of the integrations would be the financial planning software, the estate planning software, the tax planning software.

We have no plans to build those in-house. Those really require a lot of dedication and focus. And that'd be another area where we would we would integrate.

Richard Walker: 10:43

Yeah. Okay, so I want to ask a question, but I'm going to preface this as a tech vendor myself. I always think my products are the most valuable. I'm going to save you the most time and give you the most value for what you're going to pay us, that kind of thing. But I know that's not exactly true.

So I'm curious from your perspective, as you talk to Ria firms, where do you think they place the most value in their tech stack? What is the hardest problem to solve that's the most valuable or the easiest lift and therefore the most valuable? Just what's your perspective?

Vickie Lewin: 11:12

Oh, it's such a good question. So I was reading through the study this morning, and really talks about financial planning software being the most important for a financial advisor, and I don't disagree with that as it relates to the great work that financial advisors do with their investors. And that's an area where we integrate. But as it relates to an Ria, the enterprise that really is our client, it's the trading functionality. And I think the ability to give every advisor what each advisor wants.

Right. When you're in an Ria enterprise, some advisors may want to build portfolios one way. Some may want to build them another. An Ria may want to provide models to the firm. They may want access to a model marketplace.

They want all that to be easy to build inside of an Ooma construct. They want it to be easy to trade. I don't think they want advisors spending all kinds of time on portfolio construction and trading. And that's where, you know, a tool like ours is really valuable to the RA enterprise. Flexibility and choice for the advisors in terms of what they want to build and how they want to serve their investors, but the ability to build and trade and analyze across multiple custodians in an easy way is where we really come in to to serve the Ria enterprises.

Richard Walker: 12:34

So, you know what with RA, it's similar with quick. They want us to help them when they're multi custodial. The paperwork related to going to multiple platforms is too much, so they want it in a centralized way that's integrated and fast, etc. so that's fascinating. I'm sure you're familiar with the Kitces tech map.

Vickie Lewin: 12:52

Oh, wow. Yes.

Richard Walker: 12:55

My question is, how do you break through the noise? There's so many solutions out there now. It's hard to even read the map even. I mean, you have to have a magnifying glass to even see it. So how do you break through the noise?

And I'll share my secret in a second.

Vickie Lewin: 13:08

Yeah, I think I need your I think I need your secret because I haven't figured it out. So I looked at Kitsy. What a great concept. You know, kudos to. Kudos to him for thinking of that.

And I've seen lots of other folks do, you know, in other industries do something similar. But I looked at his map from 2018 and you could see the logos and you could see the categories, and there weren't that many. And you could imagine how if you were an RA and you were wanting to piece together a tech stack, that you could make sense of it. You could even probably survey all of them in 2018. But fast forward to now, Rich.

 I don't know how anybody makes sense of it. I can't, I can't even with my reading glasses on, I can't read all the logos. It's hard to discern the categories. Some of the logos are in multiple categories, but the map has a hard time showing that. And I don't know, I always believe the Choi choice is a great thing because I can, you know, you can get what you what you can get what you want.

But man, I think we've gotten to a place in the technology offerings for registered advisors that there's so there's so many choices. I don't know how people make sense of it. Maybe that's why the consultants have all popped up like crazy to come in and help you choose. They've come in to help, you know, navigate navigate across I you know, I kind of I kind of think and I hope I'm, you know, around long enough to see if what I think is true. But I kind of think that we've exploded in terms of choices.

And I think the next stage of what happens with our technology is there starts to be some consolidation, because if I'm a business owner, if I'm a business owner, managing, you know, five different vendors is is is hard enough versus managing ten. And so I think firms I have to believe firms will start to consolidate and package together to just make that a little bit easier for people to to just manage all the stuff that they have.

Richard Walker: 15:14

I agree, I think there's going to be consolidation. There's also. I just forgot the word people are going to fall off. Companies are going to fail. I don't know how they manage who gets on the map, but I would think you have to be at least like a two-year-old company.

Proven success. Record something so you don't go out of business next year. But regardless, it is a challenge to kind of organize and capture all that to help the industry make good quality choices. And I find I talk to people and they're like, well, I'm looking at this and this and this and this, and that's a lot of phone calls. That's a lot of demos.

That's a lot of analysis. How do you make sense of it all? So I'm going to share two secrets actually. One, I have absolutely nothing to do with. But somehow Quik! is the only one in its category on the map.

So we have a category to ourselves now. But honestly, I think the secret is to kill them with kindness. Your service your customer success and service has to outperform your product. And if you're doing that, you're going to stand out no matter what. So we have always just pushed and pushed on.

How can we improve customer success? How can we do better with it? And honestly, it is talking to people like yourself through this podcast that I'm learning so much. In fact, that whole idea of you must outperform service over product came through talking to people on this podcast, that kind of clarity. How do you guys go about customer success?

What are some of the things that you think make you unique?

Vickie Lewin: 16:43

Yeah, I love the question. And and and and I love the concept. And we couldn't we couldn't agree more. You know, the Amplified platform is the technology. It's certainly the product that we offer.

It's the product that we support. But we are always thinking about the experience. We're always thinking about the experience of the investor, the person at the end of the, you know, at the end of the day that we're all trying to serve and help them make sure that they're getting the outcome that they and their advisor have worked to achieve. So we're thinking about the investor experience. We're certainly thinking about the advisor experience.

How are they interacting with all of our tools? Are they using them? Do they need more training? Do they need more support? What else can we do to make that better?

And then of course, we're thinking about the experience for the Aria enterprise. How can we make it easier for them when there's an audit? How can we make it easier for them to recruit new advisors? How can we make it easier for them to train? So experience the experience that a user is having as they're interacting with our platform is something we think a lot about.

We do experience reviews. We get all kinds of feedback, you know, across all of those different folks. And that really does help to inform our roadmap, our hiring, the way that we reward employees, all of those things. And then Rich, I'll say long before, you know, long before technology became like as important or as significant or as robust of an offering as it was. You know, I always believed we're in a relationship business, an advisor is in a relationship business with their client.

Amplify is in a relationship business with our RA Aria enterprises. Those enterprises are in a relationship with their advisor. So we always have to be thinking about how we can, you know, connect deeply and and deeply and meaningful and make sure people know that they matter to us.

Richard Walker: 18:44

Yeah, it's a multi-layered problem because as you iterated, you've got the investor client, you've got the advisor, you've got the firm the advisor works with, and you've also got integration partners you've got to contend with as well, and be nice with them. And kind of made me think about this. Like how many companies in different industries have this multi-layered problem of who do they serve? I was just listening to a presentation on food from a company that built one of these Chinese sauces. It's Mr. Bing, in fact.

And it was fascinating because they started with a food truck, like a little cart, and people loved the food. And then people were like, well, we need the sauce. So they wanted to get the sauce out in little jars. And then the owners of the cafeteria was like, no, no, no, we need gallons. So now they're serving different constituencies with Differences with different product types and SKUs, of course.

And I think about our business from that standpoint because we want to sell to bigger and bigger clients. But if we don't serve the end user really, really well, why would they buy us in the first place? And then they come to us at the enterprise level and say, oh, but we have these administrative needs. I just heard a new request today from a customer I was talking to that I'd never heard before. So how do we make decisions to what features we build?

Where do we spend our resources? It is such a complicated problem, and maybe that's why we see so many different solutions out there in the marketplace, I don't know.

Vickie Lewin: 20:02

Yeah, it may, it may be, it may be listening to all of those constituents and. And I think listening to all those constituents and helping them inform your roadmap is, is is really important. And as you know, from building your company project prioritization is such a great challenge because of whatever you hear from any of your constituents. You know, your end client, your your you know, your service associates. Any of that feedback, all of that feedback is good and valuable, but you can't do it all.

I worked for a fellow that I really admired. He used to say, we can do anything, but not everything. And picking anything is really challenging when you want to do everything.

Richard Walker: 20:49

Yeah, we're very focused on our roadmap development right now, and the backlog of ideas that we've heard from customers is so, so long. We just can't do them all. But we're about to release one of those features that's taken us a year and a half which is going to transform what we do. It's coming out. Well, it'll be past the time this episode comes out so people can see it.

It's the new multi-package Householding feature, so that people can generate all the forms for a household together in a single process. But I mean, you go and you hear that feedback and then you run it by people and you iterate and you change. It is so dynamic and so hard to build it right the first time. I'm sure there's going to be revisions coming out of that. And then new requests we've never heard.

Vickie Lewin: 21:32

Yeah, I'm I'm smiling because the number of requests is endless. Your ability to act on all of them, it's just it's not possible. And the time, the time it takes from idea to execution and delivery is is always so much longer than we want. Because you're right. As you start to, as you start to build, you're like, but we could do this and we could do this and that.

You know, scope creep is something you have to be super careful about. And so then you start talking about minimum viable products, and you have to make sure the MVP isn't so awful that nobody will want the whole thing when you add it all and that, you know, finding that right balance is, I think, a challenge for the ages.

Richard Walker: 22:16

Man, I wonder if if customers cringe when they hear of the minimum viable product, like you're just going to give me the minimum, I need the whole thing.

Vickie Lewin: 22:23

I know, you know, inside of Amplify. And I certainly didn't make up this expression, but I say it a lot is crawl, walk, run. Like we just we have we have to start somewhere because and I'm going to do another quote because perfect can absolutely be the, the enemy of progress. If you wait and wait and wait and wait because I don't I don't know that I don't know that the Amplify platform, try as we might, will ever be perfect because there's going to be some things, some feature, some innovation that some other, you know, provider has that that we want and we won't be able to get to them. So but but yeah, I think you just have to keep making keep making progress one step at a time and do your very best to try to make sure that you're prioritizing correctly based on the volume, perhaps, and the significance of the feedback, but it is a challenge.

Richard Walker: 23:14

This is one of the reasons I do not have a scarcity mindset, because I can't solve 100% of 100% of people's problems. I just will never win 100% of the customers out there. I would love that, but that's just not possible. And what we have is good enough for some people, and what we're going to have is going to be better for some people, etc.. All right.

I want to go back in time. Two years ago, when I started this podcast, when I started talking about AI, nobody really understood it, everybody was talking about it, etc. but I think we're at a phase now where everybody has it, they're doing something with it, and maybe it's not as special anymore. But I'm still curious how artificial intelligence impacting Amplify at any level?

Vickie Lewin: 23:54

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm sure everybody at Amplify uses some of the some of the tools, you know, to help us modify an email or get some ideas for a blog post or so. We're certainly using it, you know, to help with some of our marketing stuff and some of our email communications. And I think it helps refine our messaging. You know, I anybody who's ever tried to write anything knows it's a lot easier to start with something in outline form than to start with an empty, empty page.

You know, at Amplify all of the AI tools that are out there have us. We're thinking a lot about which ones are the right ones and which ones are noise, and how do we make sure that we are enabling humans to better act with other humans? You know, not not thinking about AI as a replacement for, but as a supplement to. We're leaning in and looking hard at all the productivity tools, not just how we use the productivity tools ourselves to do our, you know, our own given jobs, but how we leverage those into the platform itself. We haven't launched any of the tools in the platform itself, rich, because we really want to make sure we get it right.

And we're not, you know, we're not we're not sure yet which ones the regulators are going to, you know, frown on. I've I've heard some stories about some of the, some of the note-taking applications that will feed right into your CRM and the watchout on that is, your CRM is books and records the minute it's in there, and that. Right. And the note-taking tool may not capture every single thing about your meeting accurately. Right?

So you've got to make sure a human is in the middle, making sure that it's valid before it goes into the note taker. I've heard stories about some of the great tools that are helping with portfolio construction, and advisors are using them to help construct a portfolio. But then when the advisor is asked, why do you own that? They can't answer the question.

Richard Walker: 26:00

They didn't do it. They don't know.

Vickie Lewin: 26:01

They can't answer the question. So, you know, we're we're we're proceeding with caution because we want to make sure that we're proceeding in ways that help advisors make better decisions, not not replacing the decisions that they need to be able to make and need to be able to to answer for the one thing we're spending a ton of time on and everybody needs to spend time on, this is data and getting all of the data into a place where it can be manageable, so that once we decide on all of the right tools that we want to employ, we know we have the data, right? Because as you know, if you don't have that right, then the tools really are, are are not very meaningful. I want to say one more thing about AI. I was at an RA conference.

I want to say it was last week, but sometimes time gets blurry. I can't remember and I've been in this business for 30-plus years. I know this business. I know our industry, I know the language. I don't know all the people anymore because there's a there's a lot of, you know, a lot of new folks.

But I was walking the hall, I was walking the exhibit hall, and I had to walk it like 3 or 4 times to make sense of all of the stuff that was there. And I think half, I think half of the exhibitors are some new AI tool that's designed to help advisors be better, be smarter. Go faster, do more, communicate faster. I mean, you think of all the things that we want to do as human beings. There's a tool now that'll that'll help you do it.

But you're trying to make sense of how to manage all of that is man. It's it's just something. And then making sure that we do so in a way that we don't get in trouble. And then I'm going to be quiet after one more thing. I think Michael Kitzis is going to need a whole map just for the AI tools to supplement his other map we talked about earlier.

Richard Walker: 27:46

Yeah, yeah. No, I feel you with all that. There's a lot in there to the map. I feel that the AI is just a tool set. It's an enabler.

And to define your world on AI is not I don't know. I mean, unless you are the best hammer maker, I wouldn't define myself as a hammer. I would look at it in terms of what we can actually accomplish. In fact, we're rethinking it here at Kwik. We've been the forms company for forever.

But do you know what we're actually doing? And I got to think a little bit of AI to this, because all my conversations with ChatGPT and my team and thinking through the future of what we're, what we're working towards, and the big vision has helped us realize that what we're really doing is we're helping the industry standardize the business transactions. We're standardizing how a new account process works because we've standardized the fields of data involved in that process, and we've normalized it. So our partners at Docupace and Science and Forms Logic all have the same data model to work with, and the forms work the same way. So eventually we could reach out further and further in the ecosystem and get a company like fidelity to say, yeah, we can accept the raw data from a Docupace because it's the data model built around the forms.

So really what we're doing is standardizing how you perform your business process. And I think when you abstract from that, it's not about AI anymore. It's not about the tool. It's about what is the benefit you're offering and therefore the leverage that you're giving to your customer, but also to your point, you know, I struggle with how many startups there are around this AI technique or this AI toolset, and then you see a ChatGPT or a Google come out with something brand new. So my wife is editing videos.

It's it's her new professional interest. And she's looking at this, and she had a panic attack a couple of weeks ago. She's like, AI's going to replace me. I don't even need to study this. I'm like, no, you don't get it, though.

They're enablers. You are going to be faster because of the tool. How can it fully replace you? Could you imagine a director talking to an AI actor and saying, I need you to act this way, and it doing it perfectly? I don't know if it can really intuit the human emotion to act on screen, and that's just kind of a litmus test in my mind.

Of all the different tools that are out there, man, there's so much in there.

Vickie Lewin: 30:05

You know, I, I heard it said and many have, have read it and certainly others. This is not anything new, but I believe it to be true. I am not going to replace people. People using AI are going to replace people not using AI, and AI. And I certainly I'm certainly a believer in that.

In, in that concept. Sounds like exactly the advice you gave your wife. And then the other thing, you know, that I, you know, I'm really glad that I get to spend this, you know, these last this last chapter, if you will, of my career being exposed to AI and being a part of this, you know, innovation, innovation era. We're in the you know, people ask, I'm on a panel, an AI panel. Somebody asked somebody who's an AI expert, are we in the early innings?

Where are we in the game? And you know, we're not even in the game yet. We're still at spring training. So you know, I.

Richard Walker: 31:07

I know and we've seen this before when the.com boom started in the 2000 late 90s, how many companies came and went? How many search engines came and went? There are so many technologies that are going to be folded into other things or become standard, just standard issue. So it's hard to make those bets, but I'm going to share one other thing with you through the course of talking to people on this show. The one thing that has really made it clear to me is that we all have access to the same AI models, right?

You can use cloud, AI can use cloud, etc., so what makes us different, and really what makes us different is our unique data, what we uniquely have access to or we've built over time. And when I had Patrick Hannon of Fidelity Labs on the show, he talked about fidelity having 40 years of compliance data. So they took that 40 years and trained a model to do advertising compliance. And it does it better than anything because it has 40 years of data that they uniquely had. That's powerful to me.

And so I think when you think about your business and you ask, what data do I uniquely have? That is where you start to differentiate your usage of AI. And then the innovation. And Vicky, I'm not going to tell you everything we're working towards, but man, I'm more excited today than I've ever been about my company because AI is enabling us to go further, faster and better.

Vickie Lewin: 32:26

It's great. And think different and think differently perhaps too.

Richard Walker: 32:30 

Yeah. All right. I do have to wrap this up before I get to my last question. I want to help people connect with you. So what's the best way for people to find and connect with you, Vicky?

Vickie Lewin: 32:40 

Yeah, the best way to find me is on LinkedIn under Vicky Edwards Lewin. And you can connect to the Amplify platform right from there as well.

Richard Walker: 32:49 

Perfect. Awesome. All right. I get to ask one of my favorite questions now. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Vickie Lewin: 32:59 

Yeah, I love that question. That question makes me smile. You know, on the on the inside, I was really fortunate early in my career to get introduced to the founders of Assetmark, Brian O'Toole, Ron Curtis and Richard Stein, and those guys walked into our office at a little software company I was working for in Denver, Colorado at the time with this vision of a Tamp, a turnkey asset management platform that they wanted to build that had more than one strategy on the platform. And at the time that they built this in, you know, 1998, that was a really innovative idea. And they hired our technology to do that.

They were my absolute favorite client, so much so that I begged them to hire me in 2001. And so in 2001, Brian O'Toole became my boss, and I got to work directly for him for about 7 or 8 years. I still hear myself saying things to people that work for me the same way he said it. He was a classic entrepreneur, a thinker. He moved fast.

 Asked. He was kind. He was kind. But, you know, he never settled. He pushed the envelope.

And so it would be it would be the founders, but especially Brian, because I got to work directly for him.

Richard Walker: 34:19 

I love these stories, Vickie. To me, they're so inspiring. It's what I can only hope and dream that maybe I have that kind of impact on people I get to work with throughout my career, and I know I've had many people impact me that way too.

Vickie Lewin: 34:31 

You know.

Vickie Lewin: 34:32 

I say the same thing. So I was at Asset Mark for 23 years, and I've been at Amplify now just for one. So all my old Asset Mart colleagues heard me say often, you know, when I, when I, when I left Asset Mark. And now that I'm at Amplify, I just hope that there are a few people inside of that organization that think that I helped them in some way. I helped them advance their career, do better with a client, or whatever it was that, you know, maybe we had a conversation about it.

Would, you know, one of my most, you know, important things that I think about in my career as having made a difference for the people I got to work with somewhere.

Richard Walker: 35:08 

Yeah, no, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Vickie Lewin, Chief Growth Officer of Amplify, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Vickie's website at Amplify.com.

And don't forget to check out COVID-19, where we make processing forms easy. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Vickie. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Vickie Lewin: 35:39 

Thank you so much for having me. I could talk to you for hours.

Richard Walker: 35:42 

Let's do it next time.

Vickie Lewin: 35:43 

Absolutely.

Outro: 35:46 

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.