Nexhelm AI with Brian Abatemarco | E418

0:00Hello and welcome to FinTech Impact. I'm your host, Jason Pereira. Today, I show you Brian Amit Marco, founding head of sales for Next Helm AI. Next Helm AI is big surprise in AI company, but one specifically focused on helping advisors with workflow and getting stuff done effectively. And with that, here's my interview with Brian. Brian, thanks for having the time of the day. Yeah, thank you. So Brian Amit Marco of Next Helm talks about Next Helm. Yeah. So Next Helm, we are an AI platform for financial services companies. Basically, what we do is we allow users to link up their software tools and prompt our system to perform tasks in those software tools. Okay. That's the synopsis. Talk to me about the origin. I'm guessing it didn't, you guys can guess when around five years ago, we officially rolled stuff out in December of 2025. And how we got started is so I've been in the financial

1:05services industry for over 12 years. I'm a certified financial planner. And I was working in the industry as an advisor. I got together with Lona, our founder. And we just started networking and just workshopping some ideas. And she had a pretty interesting idea. I had some additions to it. And we just said, Hey, look, let's put this thing in motion. We rolled out in December 2025. I started full time in November of last year. Before that, I was at some of the large RAs. I was at creative planning, which I love fantastic experience there. But I really had like an entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to execute on that stuff. All right. So when you started the company, what was the opportunity you identified? So when we started the company, sort of like the impetus for starting the company was something that I had experienced as being an advisor, okay, as an advisor, you might have 100, 150 clients. And at least for me, I was always concerned like, okay, I have maybe one to two tasks per

2:11client. And gosh, I'm afraid that I'm going to drop the ball somewhere. I don't really have anywhere that all my tasks are organized and things being automated for me. And essentially that was the impetus to creating the product. And we got to the point where we put some of these things into play. That's where we're at. All right. And of course, this was post the release of Gen AI, right? So that became the crux of basically of how you got this done. So walk me through the advisor experience. I decide that, okay, this sounds great. I need to make sure nothing slips to the cracks. How do you get to help me do that? And what does onboarding look like? Yeah. So how it works is we link up your software tools that you're using your business. So we have many integrations now. You would simply integrate the tools that you're using. So for instance, Outlook, you wouldn't link up your CRM, you'd link up any of the DocuSci Dropbox box.com. Okay. And then you'd be able to prompt them, prompt our model just by simply a sentence or two.

3:14Hey, I want you to send this email to this client. I want you to send them a Dropbox link to upload documents to me. I want you to update their contact information and CRM, right? So all of these small use cases. And then we also have what we're really well known for the core value of our product, which is more end-to-end task and workflow completion. So what that looks like is, for instance, you have an onboarding process. We hear onboarding the client. So you're onboarding an individual client of yours. It might have five to 10 steps. So what you do is you can onboard, you can track all those steps for you. And we can complete and automate the steps that you have software tools linked into our platform. So that's like the value proposition of the product. And then how it would work if you wanted to become a customer and you want to use our platform is we typically take anywhere from two weeks to a month to onboard where we're making sure

4:14all of our integrations are working for you. We're making sure that all of our clients are showing up in the platform. Everything that you need to get up and running, that is all going to be done by her team and our tech team. Okay. So yeah, that's the process. As you were describing it, it struck me as this is not a small lift, right? It's one thing to to connect into APIs or MCPs on other systems and be able to draw from all of them. But when you start talking about a workflow for a company like that is specific to the company on and so many levels. This is not just a turnkey thing. So you're literally doing a wake love implementation at this point. It's mostly wake love a lot of customization. But that being said, as we've onboarded new folks, we've gotten better at developing workflows based on what prior customers are using. We have a lot of pre-built workflows built out that we upload into a user's platform before they get started. So a lot of the workflows are different in small ways, but similar in the main core functionality that they

5:17accomplish. Okay. Fair enough. That's not surprising. It has been entire companies instead of based on just giving advisors workflows for when they didn't have one or creating best-in-class ones. Right. So then at this point, is it safe to say you're targeting more of an enterprise-demand market to play or before? Yeah, just like most of the tools that have been launched out there, the initial go-to-market strategy has been smaller firms and then working your way up. So we're at the point now where we're targeting middle market firms, regional firms, middle market firms. And what we've also seen kind of surprising is a lot of the larger the mega is like they are trying to build a lot of the stuff in house, which personally I have my own opinions on. I personally think that's going to take a lot of time and energy and it's going to be a futile effort for some of these firms. But yes, so to answer your question, middle market is where we're targeting now. Yeah. It's interesting you say that because this one thing I've noticed in talking to many people in the space is that the entire build versus buy dynamic in the world

6:21of Gen.A.I. has completely flipped. The trend in the last 20 years has been, you know what, we had all these companies with these financial institutions that built proprietary softwares that, you know, are legacy now and been used for years and they're just we can't build best in class and sat the SaaS market took off with all these vendors to solve almost every problem possible in a scalable way. And now it's like the entire conversation has changed. It's so this has gotten so easy now and basically everything from vibe coding to MCPs in the access to data. Like it's the conversations now turning back to no, we can take control of the core functionality and get away from these SaaS products which are starting to become a real big bite into our line item. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because that same principle goes along with our product. So, for instance, you have the native apps that every advisor used to using Salesforce and Vesnet, what have you. And I think those tools will have their own AI functionality within

7:22that specific app. But then you look, we're trying to accomplish something across your entire tech stack. That's where companies like ours. That's where we come in and that's where we really add a lot of value because there's a lot of data, a lot of functionality that these teams need. That's where our value lies. And I would say in particular, look, large size enterprise has enough bodies to throw at the problem over and over again until they solve it or attempt to solve it, whatever it might be, but the mid market's just not going to be able to do that. So, I think that what you're doing is going to have a lot of compelling, as it can be compelling offering to them market altogether. But that said, you are again, you are systemizing, you are learning from it. The question becomes like, how do you see, do you see a role or a way that in the future, you basically just say, here's a package product with stock integrations and stock workflows and the ability for you to edit it, go ahead and swipe a credit card. And if you're a single advisor, you can make it work. Yeah. We do have smaller, more simple tasks that we do where it's not at like the full custom buildout. If we were targeting a larger firm, we would do a full custom buildout.

8:27Really build something that's specific to their workflows and everything. But yeah, what you described is what we've seen a lot of these advisors that we're working with, they love our product for some of us more simple tasks like, for instance, scheduling a calendar appointment, right? Scheduling something under calendar, like before you would have to go and look at your calendar, find some dates and times that worked, looking okay, this, this date works, this time doesn't, okay. But now you can simply prompt our model and I've done this and I've shown many advisors and they love this feature of ours where you can just give it the outcome and say, hey, book send this client a couple of dates and times for my calendar and prompt that, put that in email and send it out. And our tool will literally create that email for you. You can go work on other stuff. You put the request in, you go work on other stuff, you come back, it's all ready for you. Take one look at it, you can edit stuff and then you send it out. It's extremely impactful. Good stuff. All right. Give me some examples and you're going to push on the spot here. Give me

9:29example of a complex workflow that when people hear you can do this, they're like, okay, you can actually pull that off. This is why you mentioned that because that has been one of our main objections, is people literally not believing what we're saying. It's too good to be true. And we literally have to show them like, well, we're not kidding. This is what we do. So yes, one example of that, the biggest, I would say heavy lift that advisors are working on is onboarding clients, right? You're onboarding a new client. It's a super burdensome process. There's many, many steps, steps from as simple as emailing a client, letting them know, okay, hey, we've got your documents. Here's what's next to actually taking those documents, saving them in a file. So that would be an example of a heavy lift workflow is, okay, we are taking you through steps one through 12 in your onboarding process. And not only that, but also coordinating with other folks in your team. So for instance, when I was an advisor onboarding clients and you know

10:32this too, things get lost in translation. Stuff gets lost and you have to go looking for it. Where are we at with this client? Did we transfer these things in? Did this all come in correctly? And so that is a huge pain point for advisors and that's something that we really have focused and honed it on pretty hard. So that's one example of the onboarding stuff. Another one that I really like is we have a feature on our website, task schedules. We can schedule tasks to occur automatically. So like for instance, you can have us monitor your email and if a client sends it an email with some attachments in it, it can automatically extract those attachments and save them and that client's Google Drive. So something that you know would be a couple minutes of your time just done automatically for you. So that's been a pretty nice one. And then you can get really crafty with these things, right? You can have it extract the email attachments then review the attachments and send you or the client synopsis of what the

11:33attachment said. So it's very interesting. Like the world is your oyster with a tool like this because you can, it's endless. Like you can, whatever you can describe and think of, you can prompt our model. Now whether it accomplishes it, that's that remains to be seen. But if it needs more information, it will ask you and it will create the task and loop and whoever needs to pin. But it's very, very endless. It's an endless tool. Excellent. So that's for you right now and you give some interesting examples there. The just even, hey, not only we have this. Here's a quick summary of what you sent us. That's pretty fantastic. Talk to me where we see it going. So it's very interesting. Like, you know, where we're at now, we almost believe that we're maybe creating like a new ether of this sort of automation tech in wealth management. Because some of the other competitors, we do things a little bit differently than them. So we really can't be putting the same bucket as like the socks and the jumps out there. Okay. But we do

12:37things really well. And so we're like, are we our own animal in this other ether of the industry? We think we are. And personally, where I think it's heading is I personally think that we're going to see a lot of change in terms of like small tasks, how advisors are accomplishing small tasks. And I do genuinely feel like they're going to use a tool like ours, right? An email tool that automates emails, prompts emails for you. It's just an easier, more efficient way of doing business. I think you can see a lot of small use cases happen easily because they're smaller. They're easy to adopt. Folks can understand it very easily. The larger workflows like we will do those for the larger companies. And that'll be a very custom job. But what I think is going to happen is you're going to see two sort of dichotomies happen where we're doing smaller tasks for more individual advisors. And then the larger workflows are being built out custom for the larger firms.

13:40Curious because this is a question I've had with other AI companies in the past. How much of your developments being guided by what people are prompting you to do that you never expected? That's one of the parts about our product that we really love is the customers that we're working with are really good about telling us, Hey, here's a new thing that we can do. Can you build this for us? And the answer is always yes. By the way, we put a lot of this stuff into production. It works really well. And then we just copy and paste with other customers. So it's really we talked about effectively like an economic moat. And I do believe that as we gain market share and as we gain critical mass, like these things are just going to compound. And we're going to develop more and more unique use cases and more features. And that's how we're going to gain market share. Getting market share. So here's the thing. A lot of what you talked about. You mentioned a lot of competition. I think I've said this before. There's really no moat that I found in the AI world when it comes to services at this point. When you think about your business and the emerging value proposition, right? You mentioned some competitors and different attacking from different

14:44ways. I can see you all tiny and converged when you look at unique value proposition and how you want to compete in the future. What direction do you want to steer towards? Yeah. First off, I do believe like we can break this question down in two parts. We have the short term and the long term. So in the short term, I do believe that it's going to be hard for firms. I know that everyone talks about vibe coding and all this stuff. I do think that the fact of the matter is once you start building this stuff out, you do realize how technical it is. I do think that a lot of firms that try to do this stuff and vibe code this stuff by themselves. I think they're going to really come and hit a lot of hurdles along the way. So like short term, I feel that if you're going to try to copy some of this stuff or if you're going to try to create a new firm from scratch, it's going to take longer than people think. Okay. So that is my feeling. I know that some people think that you can just vibe code and do these things overnight. My personal belief and stuff that I've seen is that's just not true.

15:49But I do think longer term, I do think longer term to go to my second part of this answer. Long term, I do think that firms are going to figure it out and they're going to adopt. Maybe they might piecemeal the system together using smaller tools and piecemeal stuff to get. It's just going to come back to firms that realize that this isn't their core value and they don't know how to do this and they're just going to buy a system like ours. Or it's like the buy build fallacy, right? And it firms. Yeah. They're going to try buyer. They're going to try to build. So it remains to be seen. It's going to be very interesting by the time this era is, which is the 10th. I will on the 8th be presented a vibe coding presentation at future proof citywide and part of the message is just because you can just doesn't mean you should. Yeah. Look, you're as someone who does a lot of internal live coding and playing with stuff. A, you're not going to build something without knowing how to code. That's ready for commercial use at scale non star non star. As for your in your practice, the issue comes down into it is not just because the thing gets stood up really

16:54quickly and really fast and it's pretty doesn't mean it works the way you wanted it to. So your ability to audit and make sure that you're getting the results you want takes time. And I go through these bursts. I go through these sprints where I, hey, I've built this feature. Now it's, I got a test and like I'm working on right now. It's like, Oh crap, I don't really have the data I need for this stewarded properly. So now I'm back filling out spreadsheets and compiling that before I can move on the next stage. So it's a time investment that does have productivity gains, but also not one that most firms are willing to make should be making. And frankly, may not even have the internal capacity to understand what it is they're going to build and make sense because it's only as good as that you have to know what needs to be built in the first place. Right. That's a double is an ideation. So 100%. I totally agree. There is a fair amount of trial and error, right? You build something and then if there are bugs, you'd have to fix the bugs before you can move on. And then the other thing is like cost, right? A system like ours isn't as expensive as people think. So at what point do you just say, let's just buy something and not

17:58worry about this? You're absolutely right. And I would say yes. It's going to, it's going to shift back to the, look, it's just not worth with the, I remember one company who showed me like, yeah, we didn't really like the note takers. So we built our own note taker and I'm sitting there going, you spent how many developers, they have the consulting team do a four then I'm like, you didn't want to spend $40 a month per user. And so we spent like 500 X to build this. This is the worst trade off I've ever seen. So yeah, yes, the entire, I think that there is just because the time to implement now is reduced. It doesn't just, it's changed the equation on the time versus is it worth your time to try this or not math, but not sufficiently enough that most people should try to do it themselves. I totally agree. Maybe we should bring you in on our sales meetings. Jason fair enough. But the first time I've heard of this podcast. So overall, like exciting times lots of places to go. And really at the end of the day, it sounds like you really have honed in on workflow as opposed to I think other people are focusing it on one workflow or acquisition of information stewardship. You seem to really have focused in on multi-point workflows.

19:02Is that the sir to say? That's well said. Yeah, multi-point and also just building killer features for the advisor, right? With my background, I know what advisors like and what they want to see and what's helpful. So I think that's something that we've leaned into just as we've built stuff. Yep, definitely helps to have an end user doing the work there. All right. So before we wrap up, there's three questions like to ask end of the positive note. The first question is if you had one wish for something to change in your company, new series of hole, what would it be? One wish for I'm sorry, say it last part again. You had one wish for something to change in your company or the industry as a whole, what would it be? I've actually put a lot of thought into this. I don't know if you saw there was a piece that McKinsey consulting did and it showed where the industry is. Just the fact all these people need the service. There's tons of advisors were tiring at a rapid rate. Where's the talent going to come from? It's going to service this next generation of clients that really need the service. And so if it was one thing that I would change, it would be allowing a more

20:06a sharpened talent pool to enter the industry. Where are we finding this next generation of talent from? We need to train people. We'd have more see if P programs in schools. So the people are actually thinking of this as a career right out of college as opposed to doing what a lot of people have done in the past, which is being career changers into the industry. So yeah, that's what I would look for is a talent medium, if you will, to get more talent in the industry. Yeah, I will say I think it's specifically in the US happening. You guys have the fact that I think you have more financial program planning programs in the US and probably every other country combined at university. So consider yourself well into that journey. And I suggest you take a look at what Josh Brown broke several months back called you can't stop or comes next or stuff like that. And it was about even he's being asked to talk to friends kids about a career in wealth. And these are people graduating from Ivy League universities. So the reality is as opposed to career changers and we're starting to attract the best and the brightest young people. So that's going to definitely change the way things

21:08happen and work going forward. Fantastic. Yep. Second question I have for you is what's been the biggest challenging in the company to where it is to date? Biggest challenge. I would say just building the product. It's going back to my thing where anyone could just vibe code together a platform. I really disagree with that statement. I will say they can vibe code together a point solution for something very specific. You can actually validate the outputs. Right. Platform is something that you build off of. Yep. And as many points of failure that the permutations are enormous, but it's right to interject there. Yeah. You're totally spawned. So yeah, that's been difficult. It's just whipping together the entire in the logic all behind how it works and flows. Thank God we have a great CTO and a great tech team doing that. Yep. And then the last question I have for you is actually no one can take a step back. And I like in it to like the thinking around DIY investing is go ahead. Some of you will pull this off. Many of you will blow yourself up. And it's the entire like you were not going to spend enough time and effort and energy to understand

22:10how this works to actually become proficient at it. So the there is no amount of AI proficiency that makes up for lack of human proficiency when it comes to understand because it's a sick a fanatic tool that will constantly tell you you're doing the right thing. 100%. Yep. The last question I have for you is what is it that excites you about what it is you're working on and keeps you getting out of bed in the morning to fight the good fight. Yeah. Bringing this incredible new technology to the industry that I love. Right. Like bringing AI intelligence to the financial playing industry. I've spent over 12 years in the industry certified financial planner bringing this to the industry in a responsible way and making sure that it actually adds an impact for the wealth management industry and advisors and ultimately clients. That's the big thing for me. Excellent. Brian, thanks so much for taking the time. Very much appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Jason. So that was Brian and Betamarco of Next Tell Me AI. If you're a company looking to better integrate its workflows and do so in an intelligent way that's actually proven to work as opposed to fiddling around in a dark yourself, by all means, please reach out to

23:11next time. As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a like, a podcast, sound class, Spotify or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And until next time, take care. This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award-winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, or find more episodes at jsonprarera.ca.