Transcript

Matt Heine (MH):

Santi, welcome to the show.

Santiago Burridge (SB):

Hey, Matt, good to be here.

MH:

Santi, as with all my guests, but probably more so with you, been really looking forward to this interview and it's always good when you start off with a comment or a discussion beforehand, and you say, "I have no idea what we're going to talk about today." How have you been?

SB:

This is completely unscripted. I'm a US citizen, at least I feel like it at the moment. So, six trips to the US this year, so that's been tough. But yeah, otherwise well. How you've been?

MH:

Yeah. Good thanks. I was actually going to ask you, are you in Australia or in the US at the moment?

SB:

No, no. I'm in Sydney. I'm back on last Friday and I'm off again this weekend.

MH:

Fantastic. For those of you that have been following Santi's career, you'd know that he is in fact an Australian citizen, but we will look back to why you're spending so much time in the US because certainly, I know Santi's excited about it and it's quite different to what many of the guests have been up to.

Santi, before we kick-off though. We've obviously known each other for a long time. You've done a lot of interesting things in your time, started off as a financial planner before you got to your current role at Lumiant. Do you want to just give us a bit of a potted history about how you've arrived at what you're doing?

SB:

Brisbane boy, out of uni, paraplanner, back then obviously just became an advisor overnight pretty much. So, 1999, bought into an advice firm in Sydney in 2003. 2008, decided that we needed to fix the investment management space. So built an internal business, which ended up being called Implemented Portfolios, which looks after about 2 billion now. And into that journey, I decided that I may have got it wrong and have been fixing the wrong problem. And I've been exploring what best practise might look like on the other side of advice. Nothing to do with investment management, and decided in March 2020 exactly on COVID, I approached my lovely chairman and said, "I'd pretty much reach the end of my career in the other business. And I wanted to do something that was passionate to me." I started building Lumiant and that gets me to where I am today. Two years later, title says global CEO. I'm not quite sure what that means, but I'm running a global business.

MH:

I think that means that you're earning a lot of frequent flyer points and spending a lot of time on a plane. One of the comments you just made then, and certainly this is one that's always resonated with me, is that you left financial planning to start up Implemented Portfolios. We might spend a little bit of time here, if that's all right, to solve a problem. And at the time, you were picking stocks, seeing clients and realised that there was a better way. Do you want to just talk us through that journey and how you arrived at that, but more importantly, how you actually evolved your thinking throughout that period?

SB:

Yeah. Look, it started in 2003. I bought into this advice business, which I still own today. I realised that I was at the bottom of the food chain. So, everyone else was getting paid more than me, the fundies were getting paid more than me and I was getting paid last and I was taking all the risk. And so as a young bloke does, says, "I can do it better than the rest." So, I decided to build my in-house models and strip out the fund managers and build model portfolios. And we build an SMA business back in 2005, which was interesting. That's well before the time of the industry trend. And then we kind of hit the dead-end on that.

But I mean, I've always run my career pretty much around my values and you've always tried to do what's right. You definitely get things wrong and I've made plenty of mistakes and I regret them, but I've always tried to do what's right. And the building Implemented was this idea that, "Geez, we can't sell the same thing to everyone who walks in the door." Surely people are different, right. We need to care about what's important to them and what's their values and what's their tax objectives? And so that got me trying to work out how we could deliver a model portfolio while customising it and not smashing the business, like we did in 2003. We built all these model portfolios and customised it, and it's just an extraordinary administration nightmare.

So, we got that working in 2008 and then I went over to the US to meet a whole bunch of firms and a particular one I met in San Diego just gave me the vision, which was, it was nuts. That me, as an advisor, had anything to do with managing money. I had no CFA. I had no right to be doing that, picking anything. I realised I had to separate the function. So, we'd worked out how to technology-enable the investment experience. We then need to build a world-class investment team that could care for our client's wealth. So me as the advisor could do what I'm great at, which was spending time with clients. So, we separated the businesses up, 2010. As about a year later, I realised we'd done something that had some value. So, I decided to see if I could run the business that's now Implemented Portfolios and passed that onto Greg Kirk three or four years later. He's run it ever since, much better than I could.

MH:

And through that journey, you had a bit of a moment where you also decided that maybe active management wasn't the way of the future as well. When did that occur?

SB:

Well, that was validated in New York in 2008 where we were coasted by BlackRock and they took us through around a lot of their businesses. And then I just started educating myself. I quickly realised that asset allocation was the primary driver of risk and reward, risk and return. And all the evidence kind of seemed to back that up and that there was not a lot of evidence that me or anyone else could pick the next winning fund or stock. So said, "Well, if we can't do it, then why bother? Let's focus on what we can control."

Now, I was trained by an industry that said, "You did this meaningless risk profile and you're balanced and you stay balanced regardless of what the market conditions are." And I think to anyone with wealth, that's nuts. That is insane. It doesn't make any sense, to me. It still doesn't today. And I'm sure there's people who disagree, but everything that I could learn, everything I saw in practise, suggested asset allocation was the driver.

And then in 2008, we built index in the ETF model portfolios with about, I don't know how many were on the ASX back then, probably 20, but we did it. Again, it was also a learning from the GFC that we learnt the hard way that liquidity matters. And we were never going to invest in anything that wasn't liquid, that we couldn't press the button and sell it the next minute. So, ETS ticked that box too. I remember back then saying, "Liquidity first, liquidity second, liquidity third," and ETFs just provided it. I still haven't changed my view today, 14 years later. I think that was the right call.

MH:

I was going to say these days, in many ways, you're probably preaching to the converted. But when you first started talking to the market about some of these views, they were pretty radical. And it's fair to say, you probably polarised a lot of people in the industry. How did you get through that? And why did you stick with it for 10 years?

SB:

Mate, I remember people come and tell me, saying, "I don't trust those EFTs." They didn't know how to spell ETF. I mean, it was laughable. So, that's what we were up against. At the end of the day, whatever you're doing in life, you've got to have values and principles. And I have a few that I live by. It's got to be just, fair, and equitable, and it's got to be right, and I'm not going to do what's right for me. We've got to do what's right for our clients and the customer and our shareholders and our staff and that guides you through life. And it's unquestionable in my mind. Back then, we made a decision to do what was right. And quite frankly, that's in my DNA. I'm not going to go do something that's wrong. And people in this industry for too long, haven't acted in that way. It's caused a lot of problems and it's guided me to this point and no intent on changing it.

MH:

Yeah. Persistence would probably be another value that you hold dearly. Was there a moment through that 10 years that you think there was suddenly a major turnaround in the way that the industry thought? Was it FOFA? Was it the Royal Commission? Markets? When was the point that you actually saw the industry start to take note?

SB:

Look, my lowest moment in the industry was FOFA. That was when I saw the worst behaviour I've ever seen, where I saw really good people taking checks to conflict themselves. And you would have seen it too, Matt, on being on the other side of that equation and not being willing to do that. I know you didn't. It was awful. People I respected making a decision to act in their own best interests, not their clients. So, that was the lowest point, but that all had a three-year tenure. So, these people were taking those decisions to make a conflicted decision to sell product or platform for another three years and take a check upfront for that. And that industry, really all of us who were involved in that industry then, should be really ashamed because that was a poor reflection on leadership, in institutions who were actually making those decisions, dealer groups. Three years later, that ended.

If our minds got me right, so we're now in 2018. And then we just saw this independence movement start. People started to think like business people and started to go, "Well, what's the best decision for my business, not for my conflict?" And the conflicts were there. I used to liken it to drug addicts. I'm quite happy to call this out now, probably four or five years ago, I wouldn't have said it, but the licensees were addicting advisors to stuff, be it conflicted revenue, paying for stuff that they shouldn't have been paying for, and the advisors got addicted to it. Once that stopped, we saw them start acting as independents and think about themselves like business people should. And how do we run a good business? And what's the best platform to run our money on? I'm sitting here looking at one of the major beneficiaries of that independents and you guys and what you achieved because you sat there proudly and stood for it. And you guys should be proud of that. But that, probably '18 is when I saw it turn.

Now it's exciting again. I'm loving the profession globally for what I'm seeing, because we're seeing great businesses be born. And just because I started it doesn't mean I should run it. People are making commercial decisions and thinking about technology in different ways. And it's exciting. It's a great time to be in the industry. Probably the best in my career, I've got to say. Best in the 24 years I've been in it.

MH:

And if you think about that journey, one of the things that you've done quite differently as well to others is you spent a lot of time overseas and you just mentioned global advice as opposed to advice in Australia. What was it that first tempted you to go and have a look overseas in the US and even I think Europe at the time?

SB:

Oh, I didn't think I could learn much here. There wasn't a lot of thought leadership. It was lowest common denominator led by licensees who wanted to keep it to that way. So, I had to go overseas to try and learn. Not only that, if you think about your own professional development, spending a week or two a year going to learn from the best, that should be status quo. So, that's helped me guide all my businesses. And it's great to go spend that time either way, but the ideas you learn, the people you meet, the connections you have, the level of intellect, the maturity.

If I pick on the US in relation to Australia, it's different, right? I'm in the US market a lot. And I have to explain the difference between Australia and the US a lot. The US is commercially 10 to 15 years ahead. From a financial planning perspective, Australia's ahead. We've really got it right, the model now. We understand the value of advice here better than they do. It's still very much anchored in a investment experience in the US. Where here, we understand what advice means. And there's great businesses that I know of that are maturely charging for the value advice here, which US hasn't worked out. So, there's streaks and weaknesses, but if I think about the level of leadership in financial services, I'm in awe of the quality of people I've surrounded myself with the US and the people you get to learn from. So, that's why you've got to go do it.

​

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MH:

And since you've offered, why don't we spend a bit of time unpacking it. The investment propositions, the investment model, clearly you've learnt a lot from being over in the US. Technology, you're one of the very early adopters of Salesforce within the industry. What are some of the other key areas where you see that they are 10 to 15 years ahead?

SB:

Let's think about M&A. You've got in a thriving, independent advice market, with terms that are worth in excess of a hundred billion of managing, that have incredible processes and systems and infrastructure where they're just buying up six to eight times EBIT advice businesses, raising it 15 to 20 times. Again, let's just play that math back. If we're raising at 15 times and we're buying at seven and a half, we're doubling our money the moment we buy that advice business. They've really built incredible commercial propositions. The capital's flowing into it because it's so commercial. Owning an advice business is a spectacularly good investment, spectacular. I'm going to get a really stable dividend yield, really stable. If a good firm that's running, I know exactly what I'm going to earn next year at a minimum. And if I can help it grow 5% a year, then I've got probably a 15 to 20% return per annum for not a lot of risk.

Let's think about it. Owning advice business models is a phenomenal business and Americans have worked it out. They've really worked it out, where we haven't here. Lot of egos are stuck in a way, but we haven't quite worked it out here. And so I think about probably the number one commercial, I'm in awe and I'm working with a group over there to help them out too... I'm in awe of what I see from that side of the equation. They haven't sorted tech out like Australian advisors. Data aggregation's a massive issue. They haven't sorted that out yet. I like to think of it, a text being used for the three months of the advice relationship is very much focused around that initial sale. Not for the 30 years. No one's worked out the 30 years.

It's all very much I've got this incredible risk profiling tool that's going to show you how you move from 58 to 65 and your score, and that's going to mean an extra 1% per year for the next 10 years. Beautifully represented, but it's all for that upfront sale. I can take you in and I can show what your best life looks like over the next 20 years. But again, goes into the filing cabinet for the upfront sale. So, they haven't sorted that piece out at all yet, though their technology is more advanced than it is in Australia.

The reason why it is, it hurts to say it, but the American technology really hasn't wanted to come to Australia because there hasn't been a thriving, independent market. It's been kind of controlled, as we know, by a half a dozen businesses that haven't invested into the client experience. They've invested into the compliance experience and that's kept tech away, which has been such a disappointment for me because knowing what's over there and if we got it in the hands of an Australian advisor, how that could help change their business and someone who's so much, so passionate about seeing advisors achieve their potential, it's been a bummer that we haven't been able to get it over here.

So, long-winded, I'd say the M&A in the US is just exciting and way ahead, and they've got it and they've worked it out. There's better models. Some are better than others, their commercial nature of it. And then just look, let's be honest. The scale of the market kind of blows it out of the window too. You've got 300 million people and 200 years more of wealth creation. I heard this said, don't quote me on it, but I heard it, "It is the most profitable industry in the US." It's 1% of every client's money that they're managing. Do the maths. Soon as you reach your break-even threshold, you're making 1% of profit. It's an extraordinary business model and the Americans are happy to pay commission because they tip every day of the week. They're happy to pay a percent. It doesn't bother them.

Though I will tell you a funny story, Matt. In certain states who'll remain unnamed in the US, charging a dollar fee for advice is deemed unethical.

MH:

I think most of the firms over there are still a percentage though, aren't they?

SB:

They are. So, the young ones are moving to dollar fees and their local regulators, because it's all state-based under a certain size, are saying, "That's on the nose. You're charging a dollar fees. You should be charging a percent".

MH:

And what's the argument?

SB:

To be honest, the states, I want to be careful of the politics of this, but you could probably work it out. I'm not sure. Honestly, you've got to laugh, right? That's insane.

MH:

Maybe they're not taking market risk as a result of the flat fee. Who knows?

SB:

Charging too much hourly rates. But yeah, I think Michael Kitts just did a piece of research that showed the average hourly rate of a US advisor is somewhere between 350 to $800 an hour based on their 1% commission that they're charging their clients. So yeah, that's not a bad hourly rate.

MH:

Question for you, maybe an observation. You talk about M&A as being a key differentiator in these huge mega-firms managing a hundred billion dollars. The cynic in me would sit there and say, "Well, how much service can you actually be providing and how much customization and value can you be providing at a business of that scale?" When you look at their satisfaction scores, they're typically on par or well above what they might be in Australia. How does that happen?

SB:

The economic argument of those businesses scale is critical to success. You need to invest into scalable model otherwise how can you service your clients so that it's counter to what you just said. So, they actually think they can service themselves better. I think the jury's out. There's a fair bit of evidence that customer satisfaction is going down on these roll-ups. Why? Because the conflict's coming in. So we've seen that. We know that how that story ends in Australia. So, I've seen early statistics that are suggesting it's not working. It probably supports your intuitive view, Matt. Yeah. The channels being used to deliver product and just we know how that ends. So, that's not all of them, but yeah, it's definitely happening.

MH:

And thinking through some of the other observations from the time I've known you. ETF was obviously a bit of a watershed moment for you. TAMPs or turnkey asset management solutions, which is the modern day Implemented Portfolios in Australia. Goals-based advice and value-based advice was something that you've always felt passionate about and something you adopted and in many ways started building out while still in your role at Implemented Portfolios and has now led to what you're doing at Lumiant. Do you want to talk through, I guess, where it differs from what you're building, what you've seen and maybe what goals-based advice means in Australia?

SB:

It's really straightforward what we're doing. It became clear to me that the current tech stack is serving only 50% of our customer base. I say that, 50% at a max. So, what do I mean? We do this fact-find, the financial spouse does it. Historically, it's been him. We do this risk profile. The financial spouse does it. We produce a SOA, statement of advice, and an investment proposal. The financial spouse reads it. And then we give them a log-on to an investment to see how they're going into something we have no control over. And the investment financial spouse may log-on.

We got it all wrong. And that was my epiphany. That it's the non-financial spouse who we've completely disengaged. They're empathised with. They're placated. And I'm being a bit mean. I was in the room too, being an advisor. As an advisor said to me a couple weeks ago in Florida, he said, "Ph no, every time I got him and her in the room, I just focus on her the whole time. Because I know she's the decision-maker." I wanted to slap him because he didn't realise what he was saying. I've slapped myself in the past because I've said it. What he was saying was I'm selling to her, not servicing her, I'm selling to her. And we haven't thought about how we service that client, that non-financial spouse.

Now, in my mind, probably 80 to 90% of clients of a financial advisor are non-financial spouses. That's why they come in to see an advisor. They're obviously the engineers and teachers are a little bit different, potentially, but we all know that. But most people who walk in, see an advisor, don't know they need help. And we need to talk to them. We need to talk to them about what's important to that.

That kind of leads to the second part of your question, Matt, which is I can't lead with, "I've got a better product," because that's just not true. The book's not written. It won't be written. If it is written, it's fictional. But I can lead with, "I can help you lead a better life." The foundations of that is to understand what drives people in life. That's their values. Who you are, who I'm as a person hasn't changed. The reason why I was asked to leave my high school in year 10 was because I told the headmaster what I thought. Who I am as a person has not fundamentally changed in my whole life and my values, and maybe they change in priority as you get older, but who you are is who you are.

And so we took the view that values are the primary driver of all the experiences. We need to understand what drives people in life. And then we can help them understand, to help them achieve what they want to lead in life. And that's their goals. And they come off the back of values. So, the values versus goals thing, it's a good debate. It's kind of uninteresting. They're both. It's both. Values are critical.

Give you some US stats. So, the biggest financial planning tool in the US is called MoneyGuidePro. From their CEO, they have 1.3 goals that they track in their financial planning model. One of them's retirement. Now, that is a disgrace. Again, I know, understand that, I get it, but people have more than 1.3 goals. We're just not asking the right questions. By taking people through a values process, we've been identifying 10 to 15 goals per client that we're now tracking to help them lead the lives that they want. Now that's again targeting that non-financial spouse, that's the game in town for me.

I think about maybe at a more emotive level, and Matt, I'm sure you've got similar experience with this. You think about those non-financial spouses in your life and what drove them in life and the risks that they took. My mother migrating from Spain to Australia, not being able to speak English really, to get out of a dictatorship. Wasn't about retirement. It wasn't about money. It was about giving her family the best chance of the success in their lives. And that's the real goals in advice. That's the incredible human connection. That's the stuff that matters. That's the things we need to unpack. And off the back of that, we create extraordinary relationships with both spouses and we can help them truly live their best lives.

Financial planning, last time I saw it, was the 17th most noble profession in the world. It should be the first. It should be higher than a doctor. We have more of an outcome over our clients' lives. We're involved in them, much more of them. We have so much say over it. We should be the most noble profession in the world. But to do that, we've got to start talking to both spouses about what's truly important to them and their lives. It's not a better managed account. The answer is helping people understand what drives them in life. And that's why I focused Lumiant around that.

MH:

It's an incredibly gallant take, what you're doing, and to start a new tech startup midway through your life, I guess that's fair, incredibly brave, but you have been outspoken and I know you fundamentally believe in it.

Before we get onto the tech startup piece, some of the things that you've talked about are very different skillsets to what many advisors would have today. I'll go as far as suggest as having some of these conversations might be incredibly uncomfortable. And certainly, there's been stories I've heard from advisors that have been following a similar path where the husband and the wife have gone through a similar process and swapped goals for the first time and actually ended up in tears in the office. It was the first time they'd actually understood or realised what the other party was feeling or wanted. How do you go about training advisors or changing the focus of advisors that have traditionally been very much around investments and retirement?

SB:

It's interesting. I'm not sure that's a fair statement. So again, I was brought up by the life insurance industry. So maybe I was trained a bit differently, but we were trained to empathise and spend a whole bunch of time getting to know people and understanding what's important to them. And I genuinely still believe that most advisors do that. That's their intent. They join this profession to help people. They've just been told that their experience has got to be anchored in something they have no control over. And we wanted to create a tech that showed them that they can actually anchor their experience in something they do have control over, which is their clients' best lives. So, I instinctively and want to believe that most advisors are bringing at this anyway. They love empathising with their clients and do it. You are, and we are, and we do have.

When I was starting thinking about Lumiant, I was testing on my mates and I'd have to stop at the first question, because you could see them welling up and wanting to cry. And if you asked me the same question, I'd probably cry too. What is that the most important thing in your life? Holy smokes, you are going to get an emotional response. Now, cool.

The training, Matt. And I'm probably being a bit cheeky here, but what do you do if your client cries? You cry with them or you hand them the tissues, take a pick. You don't have to solve it. It's not our job to solve it. Our job is to listen. When we hear them say that the most important thing in their life is protecting their loved ones, which for what it's worth is the number one in our platform. What does that mean to you, Matt? Well, that means I want to make sure my wife's okay, my children are okay, that my parents are looked after, that I can put them through the right schools. If something happens to me, I'm okay. Wow. Well, as a financial advisor, just heard six goals. So, now there's six things I'm working on.

So, it's not a complicated process, right? It's actually, all we've done, if you think about what a profession does, so a profession, when you go and see your lawyer, your attorney, they sit there and they go, "What's the problem, Matt?" And you explain the problem and they go, "Okay, well let me come back to you and I'll think about some solutions." They have no idea what they're going to tell you when you walk in. Because they don't know what the problem is.

That's the same for advisor. We want to be the profession we deserve to be, then I've got no idea what I'm going to tell you to do when you come in. I'm going to listen and unpack it and capture all that information and then come back with and help you live the best life that you possibly can. And I'm going to show you how you can do that and I'm going to keep you accountable to it.

For us, and what I realised is that at the start of this conversation, I thought about, talked about the lowest common denominator, business models and driven by compliance, not the client. We spent six months thinking about the world-class client experience, because it's the client that matters. And we need to hero them. Everything we think about is heroing them in a way that no other piece of technology really has ever done before. We're not interested in producing a better performance report. We want to be able to show that clients that they can live the lives that they dreamt of.

Now, we think as an advisor, wow, there is a value proposition. That's something I can now anchor and experience in. And most advisors, great advisors, they all say this. And I believe them. We don't talk about investments when the client come in. That's great, but it's still sitting in a filing cabinet or sitting in the advisor's head. Let's bring it to life. Let's hero that in a piece of technology where we can actually show the client, "When we met you five years ago, this is what we've achieved together. These are all the things that you said you wanted to achieve. We've already knocked off seven of them. And you've had a turning point in your life. You're an idiot, Santi, you decided to do a startup. So, let's reprioritize those goals." Someone should have done that for me two years ago and I may not have done it, but that's the conversation we need to be having with clients and heroing that stuff.

 

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MH:

So you've set some pretty huge goals, like all good entrepreneurs. You've made it sound easy, but we also know it's not. You've been at this for 12 months now, maybe a little bit longer. Where are you at and what are some of the challenges you've had to face into?

SB:

Stab yourself a couple times before you start and if it doesn't hurt, you still think it's a good idea, then do it. Matt, you've built a business, you get it. The first years are hard as nails. And you started it when you were a bit younger. I've started this a bit older and it's still hard. We're at 18 staff now, we're going to 24. We've had to raise capital. We raised about 7 million. That in itself is an experience. That's probably its own podcast. We've gone down some dark alleys. We've had to reverse, dead ends.

I kind of think of if you want to draw the analogy, we've been just punching the line. We can see the defence, the back line's set, but every time we hit the defence, we're just getting stuck and we're starting again. And finally, now, we're breaking the opposition down. We can see the gaps. We're clearer around what success looks like. You understand yourself for better, I think, as you go through the journey, so you start to think it's a really clear vision. I don't think we've lost our way on our vision, but geez, you've got to be willing to... I think a day in the life of a startup is a week in any other business. You have a team of people around you that are working harder than anyone's ever had to work. We're stronger, we're fitter, we're faster. We have to be. You want to grow a business way faster than you can grow revenue. We're willing to lose money every day of the life, knowing full well that in the future, the cash flow's going to come and we're going to continue to be supported through that experience. Now, we're starting to see quite significant growth, 16 months in now. So, early days still.

MH:

We've met with plenty of startups in our time together, including a number that have gone on to be wildly successful. We saw one just exited for $300 or $400 million. Actually, no, the total price was one and a half billion of which he walked away with a couple hundred million. Are you surprised at how hard it actually is?

SB:

Yeah. And maybe I shouldn't have been starting this at the age of 45 and built Implemented from ground up. Way harder than I possibly imagined. I've cried and I've laughed and it's been seven days a week. Just starting to crack that now because we've got a great team of people around us. Finally, when you get a great team around you, that takes a lot of pressure off you, so you can start to focus on the things that you can control. But the first 12 to 15 months, it's been insanity of, "What did I try and do?" Because it's been a very purposeful business. In my mind, someone had to do it. If all these advisors out there, that I'm right, are genuinely driven by wanting to help people lead better lives, then someone had to build it, that supported that statement because we've all been fixing the wrong problem in my life.

MH:

We started the podcast with you jumping on and off planes, and you've just hit a major milestone, probably in your career, I imagine, and opened an office in the US. Where do you see the big growth in the future? Do you see Australia adopting this or is it going to be a very US-centric story?

SB:

Global. One of the cool things about being 45, I guess, was I had the ability to go, "What are the non-negotiables about this business? What's success look like?" We wanted to, from day one, for the platform to be global. So, we're proud to say, "We can put Lumiant live in a new country in 24 hours." Now, that's the starter module. It's not everything in the platform, but within a month, we can pretty much have everything set up and going. So, we've set this up to be a global business.

The US brings different challenges. There's a million advice professionals in the US, so CPAs and financial advisors, and we're servicing both those markets and maybe there's a conversation in there, but so it's a million we can market, when Australia is probably about 50,000. So, that's CPAs and advisors and we know where the advice industry is. So, the market size, if you're going to spend a dollar, you might as well spend it over there, because the opportunity's huge. The flip side of that is the technology's much more advanced. So you're coming up in a much more competitive environment. Now, that's been an interesting challenge for us, but one that I get more and more excited about once we've got really clear in our positioning now and we still own it, that no one wants to be in our space servicing the non-financial spouse. So, we've still got that. So, the challenges in the US aren't easy and geographic size of it and it's not like going to Australia, I'm going to do a national roadshow and it's over in a week. A national roadshow, we won't leave the state in the US, it's nuts. So, that brings its own challenges.

But no, genuinely, mate, we've set up, we're live in New Zealand's, conversations in South Africa and the UK. The platform, I guess, while they gave me the title of global CEO was that we want to drive this globally within the next year. It's a global business. Everyone in the world wants to lead a better life. So, let's get this in the hands of as many people as we can, as quickly as we can. But again, that US market is... I might just on a personal note, make a comment that it's extraordinarily rewarding. You're dealing with really sharp people, making really sharp decisions every day. It got so much mate that I, and you're going to laugh at this one, but I'm 69 days without a glass of alcohol, which is just a reflection that I needed to bring my best self to every meeting because it's just insanely competitive and the people you're up against, they're just Harvard-trained. These guys are bright people. And so, you had to throw your best at it. So, that's the cool part about it though. You're just genuinely dealing with people who are making phenomenal decisions and thinking through problems so quickly. How do I compete with that? You've got to throw everything at it.

MH:

It's exciting times. Question for me. Should we see an office opening in Queenstown somewhere during ski season?

SB:

I was happy to borrow a room at Buller, to be quite frank, but I'd like to think we get an office in New Zealand, but who knows?

MH:

Yeah. Look, global expansion's got its own challenges. We've seen many success stories, but also many that don't go so well. I look forward to touching base with you in the next 12 months just to hear how it's going and which markets you're in. But look, we've gone through a huge amount of content today. We've only really scraped the surface of what Lumiant can do and what Lumiant's going to do. How do people find out more about it and what you're up to?

SB:

Www.lumiant.ao, www.lumiant.com.au. Both work. You can actually just start a tour and use it actually yourself right now. So we've set the whole tech stack up. It'll teach you how to go through the platform and what buttons to press and trial everything out on your own time. So, that's as simple as it gets really. And if you need help, you reach out to one of the amazing Lumianties.

MH:

Fantastic. Well, I can tell you after this podcast, I'm going to jump on. See where I stand. There's always things that we can do better, but look, congratulations. You've had a great career. I know you've never backed down from having an opinion and really excited and looking forward to seeing how Lumiant goes. Good luck.

SB:

Thanks, Matt. And great to catch up with you too and well done on everything you continue to achieve.