Hearsay Summit’s opening keynote provided various perspectives on one common theme: empowering firms, agents, and advisors to succeed in today’s digital world. To kick it off, Hearsay CEO Mike Boese offered a broad view of the many changes impacting financial service firms this year.

Building momentum after disruption

“We’ve seen it all. A pandemic, economic fluctuations, supply chain disruptions, social and political unrest, and expansive enforcement actions,” said Mike. “Yet through all of these challenges, we’ve seen the strength and resilience of your organizations and your ability to roll out new customer-facing programs in record time.” 

So what now? Mike said, “It’s time to think about the impact and challenges the next wave of change—brought on by things like the introduction of artificial intelligence, further economic shifts, and updated regulations—will have on financial services organizations, agents, and advisors.”

Industry insight from customers and thought leaders

Diverse speakers took the stage to offer first-person points of view on how these changes impact various roles within their organizations. Each offered advice on tackling unique challenges, leaning into evolving technology, and embracing growth opportunities.

First, Karen Shakoske, the Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing and Corporate Communications at Janney Montgomery Scott provided guidance on how to balance competing corporate brand marketing and advisor marketing priorities. Using a ‘create once, publish everywhere’ philosophy that prioritizes operational efficiency, Karen’s team repurposes and repositions the best content across multiple business areas. This approach benefits marketers and advisors by delivering assets that can be used to build effective programs across the organization.

Next, Eran Agrios, the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Salesforce Financial Services, took the stage and shared a startling statistic; “Only 13% of consumers think their financial institution can meet their needs.” How do you solve that? Build a good data strategy that enables you to leverage CRM data to create personalized outreach. She said, “Rather than capturing all the data, focus on how to make the data you have usable.”

Aly Nakkache LaSpisa, the Lead Manager for Wealth Management Digital Transformation at Equitable, to discuss how Hearsay’s platform has helped her implement time-saving tools for her team of 4,000 advisors. Aly said, “We always want to think ahead, and our team focuses a lot on our digital tools and how to provide the best experience possible to our advisors. We want to make sure that our tools speak to each other—not just for advisors but for clients as well.” Pivoting from tech to people, she encouraged firm leaders to build an effective feedback loop and use it to ensure alignment on advisors’ shared challenges and opportunities. 

Hearsay product innovations

For the next portion of the keynote, Mike focused on Hearsay’s product and service innovation—including the use of AI—to give a glimpse of what’s ahead for customers. He said, “Hearsay has made significant investments in both our internal teams and our product to deliver on our promise of providing you the most innovative, compliant, last-mile digital customer engagement platform.”

More specifically, since early 2021, we:

• Grew our engineering and customer-facing teams by over 50%
• Delivered 300+ new product features that increase speed-to-lead and agility
• Increased our customer satisfaction rating by 70%

Hearsay’s goal is to equip firms, agents, and advisors with the fuel, speed, and agility they need to be successful. Thanks to a confluence of factors that made AI a viable and valuable business tool, the headline-dominating technology played a starring role in our innovation this year.

Mike said, “Companies like Hearsay that have extensive, robust data sets can apply the very best AI models to deliver brand new solutions and capabilities to delight customers.” We did exactly that, and at Summit, we introduced Content+, a social tool powered by AI. 

‍Content is fuel for financial services marketers—the kindling that powers business growth. Consistently posting content that illustrates leadership and expertise helps agents and advisors build credibility and develop a great reputation among prospects and clients. From corporate marketing to individual agent and advisor marketing, many players have a hand in building your brand—and doing so requires a strong content strategy that involves curating and creating multiple assets.

Content+ simplifies content creation. Social program owners save massive amounts of time thanks to the AI-powered content curation tools built into Content+. Designed to surface high-engagement posts that resonate with an organization’s target audiences, this tool makes it easier than ever for agents and advisors to stay top-of-mind in a crowded industry and reduce time spent on top-of-funnel efforts so they can focus on converting leads and servicing current clients. Content+ also significantly reduces the burden placed on compliance teams thanks to built-in lexicon checks that vet content before it’s added to a user’s post library.

At Summit, we also introduced our unified mobile app and our improved navigation experience—two tools that help agents provide speedy follow-up and be more agile. To be successful, busy agents and advisors need to be able to switch gears at a moment's notice with speed and accuracy, even on the go. Hearsay’s unified mobile app and improved navigation experience both support speed to service, and testing shows users can get work done 2x faster in the remodeled platform. Combined with our productivity-boosting AI-powered product innovations and automated workflows, we’re helping financial services professionals get more done in less time, with less hassle.

Additional 2023 product releases, including enhanced reporting tools, additional messaging capabilities including group texting, more social channel support with the addition of WhatsApp, compliant testimonial and endorsement tools, and artificial intelligence enhancements across our platform this year, also support these initiatives.

Summing it all up

Thank you to our speakers, who helped us kick off a mentally engaging day packed with many more learning opportunities. Each speaker provided an intimate look into their world, shared challenges, and offered ideas on how to elevate programs and embrace change as we navigate shifting priorities together.