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The Connector.
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The Connector Podcast - FinanceX #19 - WealthTech
Your money choices no longer start inside a banking app—they start with a question to an AI. We unpack how that single shift rewires the entire financial stack: banks scramble to reclaim the decision moment with governed insights, advisors fight the “swivel chair” of disconnected tools, and investors treat digital businesses like rental properties while silver surges on AI and solar demand.
We walk through the new playbook for banks: stop being a toll booth and become a trusted guide. That means using verified data, personal risk profiles, and legal accountability to outclass generic models and earn the moment of conviction. On the human side, we dig into portfolio intelligence that quietly reduces drag, flags the one action that matters, and gives advisors time to deliver the real value—timely calls, calm in volatility, and clear communication.
The asset map has expanded. Online businesses now trade through matching engines that bundle diligence and legal workflows, creating liquidity for the missing middle. At the same time, silver’s rally is a tech story, not a doomsday hedge: inelastic supply collides with soaring demand from chips and solar. Infrastructure tells its own story too—Latvia’s embrace of MIFID compliance turned regulation into a trust signal, while tokenization shed its hype and became plumbing for faster settlement and fractional access.
All of this meets a generational tide: $83.5 trillion shifting to younger investors who want education over sales. We highlight platforms that teach through micro-lessons and safe sandboxes, and small-business tools that bring back relationship banking with data-driven empathy. The throughline is simple: technology wins when it makes finance feel human and accountable. If algorithms move faster than oversight, governance and trust become the hard currency. Stream the conversation, then tell us: who earns your first question—and why? Subscribe, share, and leave a review to help others find the show.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome back to the deep dive. All right, so today is February 1st, 2026. And we are planting our feet firmly in the present, taking a really hard look at the financial landscape through uh Finance X edition 19. And I have to say, going through this whole stag of research, all these articles, reports, data sheets, it really feels like we've, you know, we've finally crossed some kind of threshold. Yeah. We spent the last, what, three years talking about what technology might do to our money. And now we're looking at what it has done.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell That is exactly the feeling I got reading this too. You know, back in 2023, maybe 2024, every single report was a prediction. It was all AI will change banking eventually.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Right. It was always on the horizon.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Exactly. But this edition, it isn't about prediction. It's about deployment. We are literally seeing the plumbing of the financial world change in well, in real time.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell It's the difference between looking at the blueprints and actually walking through the finished house.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
SPEAKER_01:And the House of Wealth Management has some really strange new furniture. I mean, we're gonna talk about shortages in physical assets like silver. We're gonna look at why buying a website is now a standard asset class. And we're gonna unpack why being a financial advisor might actually be one of the most frustrating jobs in the world right now.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell It is a paradox, isn't it? We have more tools than ever, but somehow more friction than ever.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Before we get to that friction though, let's start with the user experience. I want to throw a scenario at you. Two years ago, if I wanted to check my financial health, see how my portfolio was doing, my muscle memory was simple. Okay. Pull out my phone, tap the banking app, face ID, look at the number, done.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell Right. That was the front door. The app dashboard was like the beginning and the end of the whole interaction.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell But the research in here suggests that front door has moved. It's not the ab anymore.
SPEAKER_00:It's moved way upstream. This is this whole concept of the decision moment. There's an article, investors skip the trading app, and it highlights this massive shift in behavior. People aren't starting their journey inside the bank's ecosystem.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell So where are they starting?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell They're starting with a conversation, usually with a large language model.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Okay. So walk me through that. Instead of logging into my brokerage to search for a ticker symbol, I'm opening a chat window first.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Exactly. You're opening a generative AI, you know, maybe it's chat GPD, maybe it's some specialized financial model, and you're just asking it questions. How does the semiconductor supply chain look this quarter? Or is now a good time to get into the municipal bond market? Right. You're doing all your synthesis, your research, and you're pretty much making your decision outside of the bank.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell I do this. I think a lot of us do. It's just so much faster to ask a question than to dig through like five different tabs of equity research. Of course. But play devil's advocate for me. Why is this a crisis for the banks? I mean, at the end of the day, if I decide to buy Apple stock, I still have to log into the bank to actually push the button. They still get the trade.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell They get the trade, sure. But they lose the value. They lose the entire context. If you've already made up your mind using some generic AI before you even open your banking app, the bank just gets demoted. Demoted to what? It becomes a utility. It's just a dumb pipe for execution. And in finance, utilities command the absolute lowest margins. If you're just a button pusher, I'm going to go to whoever charges me the least to push that button. Aaron Powell Right.
SPEAKER_01:If they aren't helping me decide, they're just a toll booth.
SPEAKER_00:Precisely. This is the big risk of disintermediation. The bank becomes invisible. So the strategic response we're seeing now in 2026 is this push to own the decision moment.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Which sounds like a really fancy way of saying the banks need to build their own chatbots.
SPEAKER_00:It's a bit deeper than just a chatbot. The research argues that the generic LLMs, you know, the ones we all use on the open web, they have a huge weakness. They hallucinate.
SPEAKER_01:They make things up.
SPEAKER_00:They make things up, they give generic, sometimes really dangerous advice because they don't know you. Banks have this massive advantage. They have verified data and they have your entire transaction history. To win, they have to integrate what they're calling governed insights.
SPEAKER_01:Governed feels like the key word there.
SPEAKER_00:It is. They have to prove that asking their AI is safer and ultimately more profitable than asking the open web. So it's not just here's a chart of NVIDIA. It's based on your personal risk profile and your current exposure to tech, buying NVIDIA right now would push you out of your safety zone. That is a governed insight.
SPEAKER_01:Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So it's a trust arbitrage. You go to the bank's AI, not because it's smarter in a general sense, but because it's legally liable if it gives you bad data and it knows your personal context.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell That's maybe a cynical way to put it. But trust and liability are the modes. If they can't capture that moment where you decide what to do, they just lose the relationship.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So if the banks are scrambling to use AI to keep customers, you would assume the human financial advisors working there are having a great time. They have all these new tools. Productivity should be through the roof.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell You would absolutely think so. But there's this one article: the real battle in wealth tech isn't innovation, it's friction. And it paints a pretty uh miserable picture for the average advisor in 2026.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell It mentions the swivel chair problem. I love that term because it's so visual.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell It is the perfect description. I mean, just imagine an advisor sitting at their desk. They're not in a flow state. They're just swiveling.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Screen one, market research, maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal, screen two, a CRM to log all their client notes, screen three, a totally different, completely disconnected system for compliance and portfolio construction.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell And I'm guessing these systems don't really talk to each other.
SPEAKER_00:Rarely, and rarely will. So the advisor's day is just copy pasting data, manually entering numbers, checking for errors between screens. The report on Strat XAI notes that this context switching is the number one killer of productivity. Every time you swivel, your brain has to completely reset.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It seems wild that in 2026, with all this tech, we're still talking about copy pasting as a major industry bottleneck.
SPEAKER_00:It's just the reality of legacy infrastructure. And the danger here is that in a mature market where investment products are basically commodities, I mean anyone can sell you a Vanguard ETF, the experience is the only product left. Right. If your advisor is too busy wrestling with their compliance software to call you back when the market dips, you fire them.
SPEAKER_01:So when we talk about AI for advisors in this context, it's not really about the AI picking stocks, it's about fixing the swivel chair.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. The term they use is less drag. It's all about compression.
SPEAKER_01:Compression of effort.
SPEAKER_00:Right. There's this concept in the notes called portfolio intelligence. The idea is that an AI just runs silently in the background of all those disconnected systems. It basically acts as the glue, it monitors the client's life events, their portfolio risk, market drift. It doesn't nag the advisor with data. It just surfaces the one thing that matters.
SPEAKER_01:So instead of the advisor digging for an hour to find a problem, the AI just pops up and says, Hey, Mr. Smith's portfolio just drifted 5% out of alignment, call him.
SPEAKER_00:Precisely. It allows the advisor to stop being a data entry clerk and go back to being a relationship manager. Because at the end of the day, the relationship is the one thing a robot can't replicate. The empathy, the hand holding during a crash, that's the real job. The AI just clears the desk so they can do it.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Speaking of things robots can't replicate, let's pivot to the assets themselves because there's a fascinating shift in this research stack. We're seeing a move toward, well, tangible value, but also some very new types of digital value.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell The whole definition of an asset has just exploded in the last two years.
SPEAKER_01:I want to start with the digital side, specifically this online business economy. The report talks about buying websites and apps not as stocks, but as if they were rental properties.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell This is a huge, huge trend. The data from FLIPA is just eye-opening. They call it the Quiet Revolution in MA. As of 2025, nearly 30% of all new business entities were created entirely online. No physical HQ, no storefront, just code and content.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell And these are being treated as what, tradable assets?
SPEAKER_00:They are. And this is addressing a sort of missing middle in the market.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You have these businesses valued between, say,$100,000 and$10 million. These are profitable saucer tools, niche content sites, e-commerce stores. But they're in a dead zone. Investment banks won't touch deals that small. The fees just don't cover the paperwork. But they're too big and complex for like a handshake deal.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell So it's too small for Goldman Sachs, but too big for Craigslist.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And that is where technology has stepped in. The sources highlight this engine called Lauren AI.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Which acts as a kind of matchmaker.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell It acts as an investment banker, a lawyer, and a matchmaker all wrapped in code. It scans this whole universe of digital businesses and it matches them to buyers globally. It creates a liquidity layer where there wasn't one before.
SPEAKER_01:So I could be in London and want to buy a newsletter business based in Brazil.
SPEAKER_00:You could. And the AI handles the verification, the translation, the financials.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell It effectively democratizes private equity. You don't need to be a partner at some big firm to buy a company anymore. You can just buy a revenue stream.
SPEAKER_00:You just need the capital and the appetite for risk. It's treating a business like a product on a shelf. But you know, if digital real estate feels a bit too ephemeral for you, if you want something you can hold in your hand, the sources also point to a massive resurgence in something very old school.
SPEAKER_01:Silver, the report calls it beyond gold.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Silver broke$50 an ounce back in October 2025.
SPEAKER_01:Which, for anyone who tracks commodities, is a massive psychological barrier. That's a huge number.
SPEAKER_00:It is. But I want to be really clear here. The why is crucial. This isn't just inflation hedging. This isn't people buying coins to bury in the backyard because they think the world is ending. This is a technology story.
SPEAKER_01:How so? I usually think of silver as, you know, jewelry or silverware.
SPEAKER_00:That's the Victorian view of it. In 2026, silver is a tech metal. It is the most conductive element on the periodic table. You physically cannot build high-efficiency solar panels without silver paste. And more importantly, for our current context, you need it for the interconnects in high-performance AI chips.
SPEAKER_01:So the AI boom we talked about at the top of the show is actually driving the price of silver.
SPEAKER_00:It's a direct correlation. We have this vertical demand from the two biggest sectors on Earth, green energy and AI. But here's the kicker, and this is the part that I think most investors miss. The supply is inelastic.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, unpack that for us. Inelastic. Why can't we just dig faster? If the price is 50 bucks, shouldn't miners be rushing to dig it up?
SPEAKER_00:You'd think so, but well, geology doesn't care about the market price. The source notes that 72% of all silver produced is a byproduct of mining other metals.
SPEAKER_01:A byproduct.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Most miners don't set out to find silver. They set out to find a copper mine or a zinc mine. And when they process that ore, they find a little bit of silver on the side.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I see. So if the world doesn't need more zinc, the miners aren't going to dig just to get the silver.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Exactly. You can't just ramp up silver. To double silver production, you'd essentially have the double global copper mining, which just isn't happening because silver is expensive. So we have a structural deficit that's been building since 2021. We are training inventories, and the industrial demand is hitting a wall of fixed supply.
SPEAKER_01:Oh.
SPEAKER_00:That's why the price is moving. It's just basic economics, high demand, stuck supply. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01:That is the perfect storm. So we have digital assets becoming liquid and physical assets becoming scarce.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell And underneath all of this, we need a way to actually trade these things without it taking three days to settle. Which brings us to the infrastructure. And uh we have to talk about regulation.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell I know regulation is usually the cue for listeners to tune out. But stick with us because there's a really weird success story in here involving Latvia.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Latvia is the unsung hero of 2026 FinTech. Seriously. They've cornered 24% of the entire European peer-to-peer investment market.
SPEAKER_01:That is punching way above their weight. How on earth did a small Baltic nation pull that off?
SPEAKER_00:They flipped the script on regulation. Usually fintech startups run away from heavy regulation. They try to find all the loopholes. Latvia's platforms did the opposite. They embraced MIFID 2.
SPEAKER_01:And MIFID 2 is that heavy-duty European financial framework. It's usually seen as a massive burden.
SPEAKER_00:It's expensive, it's annoying to implement, it requires strict reporting, transparency, audits. But here's the insight. For an investor, regulation is a due diligence shortcut.
SPEAKER_01:If I see the MIFID stamp, I know the books are audited. I know my funds are segregated. I don't have to do the background check myself.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. In a world of scams and rug pools, boring regulation became a premium feature. Capital just flowed to LatView because it was the safe harbor. Trust is a currency.
SPEAKER_01:That makes total sense. It's like the difference between buying a car from a proper dealership versus some guy in a parking lot. You pay a premium for the certainty.
SPEAKER_00:And speaking of plumbing and certainty, the other big infrastructure shift mentioned is tokenization. And before anyone rolls their eyes, the sources are very clear. This is not about crypto bros.
SPEAKER_01:We aren't talking about Dogecoin going to the moon.
SPEAKER_00:No, thank God that era is over. By 2026, tokenization is being described as operational plumbing. Banks aren't asking, should we sell Bitcoin? They're asking, can we use tokenized Rails to make our database cheaper?
SPEAKER_01:So it's all about efficiency.
SPEAKER_00:It's about friction reduction. If you can tokenize a private equity fund or a piece of real estate, or even that online business we talked about earlier, you can trade it instantly.
SPEAKER_01:Instead of T plus two settlement where I have to wait two days for my money?
SPEAKER_00:Right. It allows for much cleaner record keeping and fractional access. It lets regular people buy small slices of assets that used to be reserved just for billionaires. The technology finally grew up and got a day job. It stopped trying to be a currency and started being a better database.
SPEAKER_01:But money is ultimately about people. And there is a massive wave of money moving hands right now that's going to force the whole industry to change how it talks to people.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell The Great Wealth Transfer. We are looking at$83.5 trillion passing to younger generations by 2048.
SPEAKER_01:That number is just impossible to visualize. It's practically the GDP of the world.
SPEAKER_00:It's staggering. And the big problem for the banks is that the people receiving this money, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they don't bank like their parents. The old model of just sell them a product doesn't work.
SPEAKER_01:That was what does.
SPEAKER_00:The sources emphasize education as infrastructure. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01:Meaning if you don't teach me how to use the money, I won't keep the money with you.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Correct. Banks can't just be vaults anymore, they have to be schools. And there's this brilliant case study in the notes called Money Chicks.
SPEAKER_01:I looked at this. It's a platform designed to gamify finance specifically for Gen Z women. And it addresses something the research calls the urban paradox. What is that?
SPEAKER_00:The urban paradox is this fascinating behavioral gap. You have these young women who are high earners, great careers in tech, law, medicine, but they're cash heavy. They aren't investing.
SPEAKER_01:Why not? If they have the money, why aren't they growing it?
SPEAKER_00:Because the investment world just feels like a club they aren't invited to. It feels opaque, and frankly, it feels really risky. They have a high fear of making a mistake. So Money Chicks tackles this by treating finance like a language. Think duolingo.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Small, repeatable lessons. But the genius part is a sandbox.
SPEAKER_01:Simulator.
SPEAKER_00:Right. You can trade with play money. You can lose that play money. You can, you know, crash the car in the parking lot before you actually get on the highway.
SPEAKER_01:That psychological safety seems key. It lets you build intuition without the penalty of, you know, bankruptcy.
SPEAKER_00:And that ties right back to what we said at the start about owning the decision moment. If a platform teaches you how to decide, you will trust that platform with your actual capital. They're building confidence, not just selling stocks.
SPEAKER_01:It's the same trend we see in small business banking with tools like the connector and narrative.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Rebuilding the Main Street Manager.
SPEAKER_01:The guy who knew your name, knew your business, and asked how your kids were doing.
SPEAKER_00:He's gone. But narrative uses data to recreate that intimacy. So instead of just sending you a list of transactions, it analyzes your cash flow. It says, hey, your your inventory costs are spiking compared to your peers. It's using tech to make banking feel human again.
SPEAKER_01:Which brings us completely full circle. Whether it's AI helping advisors avoid the swivel chair or regulations building trust in Latvia or apps teaching women how to invest. The winning strategy in 2026 seems to be using technology to enhance the human element, not replace it.
SPEAKER_00:That is the synthesis right there. The front door to wealth is digital, but the room inside has to feel human.
SPEAKER_01:So for you, the listener, sitting there in 2026, checking your portfolio. What's the one thing you should be thinking about?
SPEAKER_00:The takeaway is that you have access to tools, LLMs, fractional ownership, global marketplaces. They were just impossible a few years ago. The barriers are down, but you have to actively use them. You can't be a passive passenger anymore.
SPEAKER_01:However, I feel like there's a however coming.
SPEAKER_00:However, there is a governance gap. And this is the thought I kind of want to leave you with. As we rely more and more on these AI agents, these invisible bots, to manage our wealth, to execute trades, to optimize our taxes inside the banking system, we have to ask who is watching the watchers?
SPEAKER_01:It's the black box problem.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. When the system gets faster than human oversight, when the AI is making decisions in milliseconds based on data correlations that we can't even see, is trust the only asset that actually matters? If you can't verify the math yourself because it's just too complex, you are putting blind faith in the governance of the entire system.
SPEAKER_01:That is a chilling thought. In 2026, trust isn't just a soft skill anymore, it's the hard currency of the entire financial system.
SPEAKER_00:It is. If you lose the trust, the algorithm is worthless.
SPEAKER_01:On that slightly terrifying note, that's all the time we have for on this deep dive. A massive thank you to our expert for connecting all these dots on the Wealth Tech Revolution. Always a pleasure. And to you listening, whether you're asking your AI for stock picks, buying a slice of a website in Brazil, or just checking the price of silver, keep learning. We'll see you in the next deep dive.