Season 3, Episode 8: Joe McMann
Inside AI, Risk, and Compliance: Joe McMann on the Future of Banking
In this episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers, host Jack Hubbard sits down with Joe McMann, co-founder of AIR, the company behind award-winning AI solutions for governance, risk, compliance, and cybersecurity. From Wall Street to Main Street, Joe shares how his journey from professional golfer to investment banker led to the creation of a patented AI platform transforming how financial institutions safely integrate artificial intelligence.
Jack and Joe dive deep into the real-world applications of AI in banking, exploring how community banks can leverage technology to stay competitive against industry giants. They discuss the widening gap between institutions that adopt AI and those that don’t, the critical role of fiduciary responsibility in digital transformation, and how AI-driven platforms like FIN are redefining wealth management and client engagement.
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Jack Hubbard: So, I'm at the mega conference in Indianapolis. The Indiana bankers do what I consider to be just a premier event every year in Indianapolis. I've spoken 10 times.
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Jack Hubbard: So, I talked a little bit about AI and connected it into CRM and our new AI Navigator program that I'm sure you've heard about. And a guy comes up to me afterwards in the audience and says.
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Jack Hubbard: hey, let's have dinner. And I go, wow, this is great. Somebody's gonna buy me dinner. And the guy that's gonna buy me dinner, and actually did buy me dinner, is Joe McMann. And Joe's my guest today on the show. Joe, great to see you again.
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Joe McMann: It's a pleasure to be here, Jack. Thanks very much for having us.
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Jack Hubbard: You know, and Joe and his partner Alec, and a couple of bankers, and I had a marvelous dinner. This guy really knows what's going on. Artificial intelligence risk.
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Jack Hubbard: Great company, but let's start at the beginning, Joe. Your background, who you are, what you've done, and how did we end up doing this interview today?
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Joe McMann: Yep, so, Joe McMann, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the pride of Milton, Mass.
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Joe McMann: Went to Tufts for undergrad, BU for grad school, did a little bit of golfing in between those two things, played golf professionally for about 6 years. Went back to business school primarily to get into an investment banking sales and trading program. Spent 15 years working for Solomon Smith Barney, and then underneath the Citigroup parent umbrella. As part of that exercise, I was
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Joe McMann: I like to say, once you get senior enough inside of any organization, you start to wear multiple hats. So one of my night jobs was as a senior relationship manager helping to cover the top 200 accounts across the entire firm. So one of the firms that I was assigned with was the Ziff Brothers. So Ziff is a Fortune 100 family. They were the original cedars for some of the
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Joe McMann: largest global multi-strat hedge funds in the world.
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Joe McMann: So, as part of that exercise, the global head of risk, compliance and technology at ZIF was Alec Crawford. This is now circa 2007, so literally right before the credit crisis, which was a time of extreme stress, extreme volatility all across Wall Street.
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Joe McMann: So, as part of that, Alec and I spent a tremendous amount of time together, and really had to develop a deep, trusting relationship whereby we could count on whatever the other person said to be factually correct.
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Joe McMann: So, fast forward, Alec leaves Ziff once it, unwinds and turns back into a fund of funds, and starts running, risk, compliance, and AI at Lord Abbott, which is a $300 billion asset manager in New Jersey. And then Alec and I were playing golf in, early 2023, and he turned to me and he said, well, I've been dabbling.
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Joe McMann: I've been sort of circling back to my original, plan coming out of Harvard University in 1987, when I was in the first class, the first graduating class with a computer science degree, and I actually built a platform for AI, which is gonna handle AI GRCC, at which point I turned to him and I said, what's AI?
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Joe McMann: And, we've come a long way since then, Jack.
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Joe McMann: But, in the subsequent two and a half years, I guess it's been, we now have a patented technology for AIGRCC, so artificial intelligence, governance, risk management, regulatory compliance, and cybersecurity, which is fully patented, was voted the number one solution for AI in the world for compliance and cybersecurity last year by
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Joe McMann: a vote of 3,500 members of the buy and the sell side, so real validation, not an award that we paid for, and now we're in the process of integrating high-risk AI securely, for basically for enterprises who are being told how to use the technology, so they have a governing body, the SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, etc. So primarily for financial services.
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Joe McMann: healthcare and some government entities, whereby we deploy artificial intelligence inside your existing tech stack, so it's not a SaaS solution. It's either on-prem or on your private cloud. It is an agnostic aggregator of all large language models, your entire data tech stack.
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Joe McMann: hundreds of AI agents performing agentic workflows that are all deployed internally underneath the AI GRCC wrapper.
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Jack Hubbard: it's unbelievable, and I gotta tell you, walking back from dinner.
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Jack Hubbard: I wish the walk was slower, because I learned more about AI and risk and compliance from Joe and Alec than I had ever known in my life. Now, you mentioned finance, banking, healthcare, and government. I'm curious, because you talked a little bit about
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Jack Hubbard: who you help. I'm curious how these are all different. I'm sure they tie in, Joe, but for example, banking versus healthcare. What's similar and different in AI?
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Joe McMann: Yeah, I guess, similar and different is you have to be part of the mafia of that sector, right? So, unless you face off against a bank or a broker-dealer, and you can speak their language, i.e, I speak French, you speak French, it's automatic accreditation that you have acceptance into that community. So when I can turn to, you know, a board of any bank, and I can say.
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Joe McMann: between myself, Alec, and Frank Fitzgerald, who's our third co-founder, we've got over 100 years' worth of experience in banking. We understand your pain points. We understand where all the bodies are buried. Obviously, any enterprise has their own special sauce, right? Like, we're not trying to portray that we understand exactly how an enterprise runs itself, but we do understand the commonality of roles
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Joe McMann: across different sleeves and sectors of finance. As part of that, Frank also originally was part of a team that digitized HIPAA-compliant healthcare for United Health Group.
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Joe McMann: And our CFO, Cliff Garnett, actually worked as a CFO at a managed care company for the last 16 years, and prior to that, worked at Dell Technologies and EMC as part of a sales team that was selling enterprise solutions. So, we're trying to penetrate markets from an area of familiarity and from an area of
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Joe McMann: previous expertise, where we can say, yes, we understand what we are doing, we understand what you're going through, and we're speaking a common language to show up with solutions, not just talk about problems endlessly.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, you talk about the board, and being on the board of a bank, we get a lot of presentations from folks like you, and one of the things I liked about your commentary at dinner and on the way home, it was something that I could understand.
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Jack Hubbard: So, I'm a bank.
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Jack Hubbard: I'm a bank president, and I realize, in my billion-dollar bank, that I need to get on this train, because it's gonna start leaving me behind if I don't.
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Jack Hubbard: I call you. Walk us through the journey of this. How… where do you start?
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Jack Hubbard: who's involved at the bank? Just walk us through this journey of how you get started with an organization.
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Joe McMann: Yep, so I would say that we have had a thesis that we have had to prove or disprove multiple times, and then we've had to pivot towards what is actually true north.
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Joe McMann: So, what is happening today is that the board is looking at the competitive dynamic of the exercise which they are undertaking, and they're saying, here are the facts.
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Joe McMann: The facts are that JP Morgan, as an example today, has 2,000 internal developers working on 460 proof of concepts that are all internally built.
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Joe McMann: They're going to spend $30 billion over the next 3 years on genitive AI platforms. They partnered up with OpenAI two and a half years ago to build their own internal LLMs.
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Joe McMann: Now, when JP Morgan turned to us two, six-plus months ago and said, congratulations, you built what we built, we wish that we had met you two and a half years and $50 million ago, because we would have never taken… we would have never gone down this road. Now, the problem isn't building it, the $50 million that it takes to actually build your own internal LLM
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Joe McMann: isn't the problem. The problem is, after you build it, you're now fully pregnant, and the baby is outside the womb, and now you have to support it forever.
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Joe McMann: And on a competitive basis, yes, they're gonna spend $30 billion because they're a, you know, Fortune 20 company, and they have the capital available and the internal personnel to do so, but they're spending $30 billion because the largest 7 tech companies in the world
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Joe McMann: Are spending a trillion dollars And $30 billion is just a drop in the bucket to maintain pace.
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Joe McMann: So if you're a regional bank, or if you're a community bank, or if you're a credit union, or if you don't have 2,000 people managing 460 internal projects and $30 billion, what are you supposed to do?
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Joe McMann: So when we show up day one, and the board of directors in the C-suite is trying to solve for what sounds like the impossible, and we say, we can give you what the largest bulge bracket banks have in the world in 14 minutes for your entire bank delivered via an ARM script, and all your data never leaves
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Joe McMann: your internal sandbox, you could unplug it from the internet and air gap it if you wanted to. The answer is, okay, how do we do that?
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Joe McMann: But…
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Joe McMann: originally, we thought that this would be more of a bottoms-up approach, where we were talking to, you know, CISOs and CIOs, and people in risk, and people who run compliance, and people who needed to solve for this exercise, sort of as part of their job. But where it's coming from now is we have CEOs reaching out to us, board members reaching out to us, saying.
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Joe McMann: We know that the delta between those who have and those who don't is gap-widening every single day. By doing nothing, we're losing pace, because the technology's getting smarter every day. So those who have it are getting better, faster, more efficient. Those who don't are just falling farther behind.
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Joe McMann: And the thing that I try and communicate to the boards of community banks more than anything is you are a fiduciary. Your responsibility is to look at this in terms of what is best in the long-term interest of investors and employees of this community bank.
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Joe McMann: You have a responsibility to the shareholders of this bank. Now, it is our opinion that those who have
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Joe McMann: Will be the acquirers, and those who do not will be those who are acquired.
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Joe McMann: So if you would like to be an aggregator of assets, you need to deploy this technology, and you need to deploy it now, because in 2 or 3 years, those who are not will be so far behind, their only solution will be to sell themselves to whoever is available to buy them at that point.
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Joe McMann: as an acquirer, the reason why it makes so much sense to deploy our platform is because it's an agnostic aggregator of artificial intelligence technology. It doesn't matter which LLM you use. It doesn't matter which core provider you use for your bank technology. It doesn't matter who your CRM is.
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Joe McMann: We connect to all of them.
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Joe McMann: So you're future-proofing your ability, you know, like, when I started working at Citigroup, it was way back in the days where people still ask the question, are you Solomon or are you Smith-Barney? Because we were working our way through the integration, and anybody who's ever worked at a bank knows the hardest thing to integrate is the tech stack. None of them speak together. They can literally
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Joe McMann: stop an acquisition from happening, because you just can't push this stuff together with band-aids and masking tape and paperclips.
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Joe McMann: What our AI platform does, because it's any large language model, your entire tech stack, all wrapped underneath the banner of ARGC, all deployed internally, is it allows you to go out, and in a year, two years, three years, it's all future-proofed, so that you can buy any company that's out there, and you will be able to integrate their tech stack into yours.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and it is moving so fast, and one of the things I'd love to know is… so, I'm a community bank, I buy your solution. Talk to me about the bankers on the other end, because…
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Jack Hubbard: you're really dealing with a couple of different constituencies here. Certainly, the board and executive management has to say grace over this. Then you start your process, and I'm sure you work with compliance and risk and IT, et cetera, et cetera. And you've talked about that.
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Jack Hubbard: What about the other end? How do we help our bankers understand How to use this system.
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Joe McMann: Yeah, so I'll answer the question slightly differently, Jack, and I'll get to, sort of, the exact question you've asked.
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Joe McMann: So, one of the things that we've done this year is we've actually joined 20 different state banking associations. So, as you know, we're traveling all over the country, so I really get a comparative window into what's happening regionally, what's happening in different sectors, who are the people who are most
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Joe McMann: sort of plugged in, who's leading, who's lagging, and who is it that we need to, sort of embrace and pull into our environment, because they may be moving a step function ahead of others. And originally, one of your first questions was, is how did we end up here? And, the simple answer is.
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Joe McMann: I'm traveling all over the country, and I'm choosing people that we want to pull into our ecosphere, who are, on their front foot, who are a leading indicator of what's happening, who are trying to push the environment forward. And frankly, I sat in the audience with you for 20 minutes, and I was like, that guy's smart, that guy knows what he's doing, he needs to be a part of this.
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Joe McMann: Right? So my approach, in one way, was super selfish, because I wanted to learn from you, but I also knew that you were in a position whereby you have influence, and you have a voice, and you have, bankers who follow the things that, you have been involved with, and trust and listen to you, because,
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Joe McMann: You say things which are incredibly smart and incredibly impactful, and have a real voice that matters.
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Joe McMann: So, what we've also had the benefit of doing is seeing different banks across the United States inside individual states, and being able to cherry-pick those that have common values with us.
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Joe McMann: And by that, I don't mean, are we all Democrats, are we all Republicans, right? I mean, do we see the world evolving and adapting in the same way? Because there is a group of people who just wants to stick their head in the sand and say, this isn't happening.
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Joe McMann: And one thing that we like to say to people is, you're never going to be replaced by AI.
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Joe McMann: you will be replaced by someone who is chosen to use AI when you have not.
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Joe McMann: So we tend to go through an exercise, which is, we look for two types of people. The first type of community banker is those who are truly leading the exercise. Those who are on their front foot. I'm not gonna say on the bleeding edge, because there aren't any community banks that are that aggressively pursuing, right? There's nobody who's trying to build their own LLMs or deploy
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Joe McMann: you know, proprietary technology that they've built internally. But there are certain people who have advantageously chosen to step into the darkness without a flashlight and say, you know what, we believe
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Joe McMann: That this is going to help the bank be better And we believe…
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Joe McMann: that we're going to, in two years, be in a space whereby we're going to be able to utilize the technology better than anybody else. So that's the one type of community banker that we gravitate towards. And then, as you also know, we produce a tremendous amount of
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Joe McMann: educational, informational content, you know, not sales propaganda. Literally, if you are a community bank, we've got a 37-page white paper that shows you exactly how you want to go about the process of deploying a large language model internally. It doesn't even mention the company. We've got 5, 6, 7 white papers, Alec has a top 1% podcast.
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Joe McMann: We do, you know, articles for state banking associations. We are on our front foot as it pertains to helping community banks, or any organization for that matter, perform their due diligence process and just learn more.
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Joe McMann: So as an example, Alec is presenting today at the Pennsylvania Community Bank's Executive Management Committee, and then tomorrow he's going to Pennsylvania Community Bank.
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Joe McMann: To present to their board, not to sell them our product or to talk about AI risk, but literally to help them perform due diligence.
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Joe McMann: So what we're doing more than anything as a second vertical that we are looking to engage with is, those who don't know what they… those who know what they don't know, and are trying very, very, very hard to educate themselves.
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Joe McMann: We have all the time to work with people who want to invest
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Joe McMann: in the lifeblood of the bank and learn more. Where we tend to lean away is,
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Joe McMann: Those who are just stuck in neutral.
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Joe McMann: That really are trying to pretend like this isn't happening, and they're not in full panic mode where they're trying to educate themselves, and they're not on their front foot trying to lean into the technology. They're just sort of in no man's land in technology purgatory, so to speak, and they're waiting to see what happens next.
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Joe McMann: The real problem here is that the delta is widening, I've said that before, between those who have and those who have not, and by choosing to do nothing, you're losing ground every single day.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, yeah. Pick at this 20 Bankers Association thing. I'm curious if you're seeing any part of the country, Northeast, South, Midwest, etc.
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Jack Hubbard: Where are you seeing the most interest in this, Joe, and where are you seeing banks say, you know, this too shall pass?
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Joe McMann: Yep. So, I would say that there are certain areas whereby you do have people similar to yourself
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Joe McMann: who have, decided that they are going to be an engine which is going to help community banks work through the product and the process. So, one of our partners is actually called Regulation Innovation.
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Joe McMann: And it's head up by Ridge Perez, who's part of the, third-party technology,
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Joe McMann: information due diligence. They currently work with Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and they are going out searching for third-party technologies that can just help banks work through the process.
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Joe McMann: and try and figure out what they're supposed to do next. But we are finding, more often than not, those are being head up by competent individuals.
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Joe McMann: who are then, seizing the power of a platform, right? Like, obviously, the Texas Bankers has a relatively large voice, and is able to aggregate information and use that power to sort of push forward. We're also entering into a 2026 partnership with Rob Nichols at the American Bankers Association and his team.
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Joe McMann: We're super excited about that. I think that's gonna give us more of a national presence. We have been going about this more bottoms-up, and it's…
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Joe McMann: It's actually sort of a great story. So, the first community bank that we started working with at the beginning of this year was, Bristol County Bank in Taunton, Massachusetts. And as part of that exercise, their executive chairman of the board turned to me and said, I just need you to understand, I have a dual mandate in this process.
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Joe McMann: And, you know, it's great that our bank is choosing to move forward with you, and we're super excited about this, but I'm a former bank president of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, and I need you to now go to the other 157 banks as a former president, and I need you to tell everybody else that, what you're doing, because it's great that we've chosen it, but I really want everybody else in Massachusetts to go and be a part of this journey.
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Joe McMann: journey with us.
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Joe McMann: So I was like, well, that's great, but I don't know how to do any of that. So he literally called up the team at the Massachusetts Bankers and said, you need to meet Joe, and this is what they're doing, and this is why it's important, and I want them to be a preeminent part of what we're doing in Massachusetts, going forward in…
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Joe McMann: 2025.
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Joe McMann: And then as part of that conversation, the team at Massachusetts said, this is great, we're so thankful you're here, and this is awesome, and, you know, we're gonna have you do all sorts of stuff with us for the rest of the year. But we now are part of a larger consortium of states that we work closely with, and we'd like to introduce you to these other people at these state banking associations.
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Joe McMann: And then everybody that they introduced us to wanted to introduce us to somebody else.
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Joe McMann: And now, all of a sudden, we're part of 20, and now, you know, the story with Rob Nichols is actually kind of great, because, you know, he sort of saw me first in, Cord… no, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and, I can't remember where in Georgia, and then in Boston, he saw me in 4 or 5 different places.
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Joe McMann: And he basically said, you know, the first time that we met, you told me that, you know, you were gonna travel all over the country and do all this stuff for all of our community banks, and I've now watched you do that for 6 months.
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Joe McMann: it's time for us to actually look at doing something together on the national level, because we have a footprint that you're trying to replicate, and if we partner up, we really could do this on a more, you know, national scale together, and have a lot… a larger impact. So that is a significant part of our plan going forward, and you know, we're super excited about that part
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Joe McMann: and the opportunity with the ABA.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and I think that AI is…
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Jack Hubbard: competitive agnostic. And what I mean by that is too often what happens is a community bank on one corner won't use the same sales training company as the competitor across the street. This is very different. AI is gonna happen.
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Jack Hubbard: And you can do it at sales training with whomever you want, but the key is, we need people like Joe's company to make this all happen. You mentioned partnerships, and I gotta ask you about a new product that you've just come out with, because we've been talking about
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Jack Hubbard: banking, I'll call it commercial banking, but you work in financial services, and you work with wealth management folks. You have a new product out called FIN, which is a partnership with Financial Inc.
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Jack Hubbard: You've also won some awards, Joe. Talk about all the partnership, this partnership in particular, and some of the awards you've won.
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Joe McMann: Yeah, I'll actually start in a slightly different place, which is why is this partnership important for community banks?
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Joe McMann: Obviously, inside of community banks, you have wealth management and trust divisions, right? And,
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Joe McMann: The widget to the platform is irrelevant.
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Joe McMann: Whether you're a financial advisor, whether you're an RIA, whether you're a CFP, whether you're a high net worth broker, whether you are a private banker, right, you're performing the same service. How you're trying to deliver that service to your clients is your differentiator as an individual.
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Joe McMann: You might use insurance products inside of an insurance company. You might talk about annuities versus talking about individual securities.
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Joe McMann: Inside of a bank, you might be talking to people not only about how they invest, but about tax and about, you know, other liabilities that they might have inside of their, you know, lending accounts, or their business accounts, and how are they linked to their personal, wealth accounts.
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Joe McMann: So, the reason why this is important to a community bank is because
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Joe McMann: If you look at where assets under management are today, there's $62 trillion that is… exists underneath the wealth management umbrella holistically.
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Joe McMann: $31 trillion of that exists inside of asset management, so the Fidelities of the world, right?
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Joe McMann: 50, I'm sorry, $20 trillion exists inside of the world of RIAs.
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Joe McMann: And the remainder, I'm sorry, I'm actually, I'm actually telling this story. It's actually percentages, so it's $62 trillion in total. It's 51% of assets exist inside of the world of asset management.
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Joe McMann: 30, 31% exists inside of the world of, RAAs, and the rest exists inside of the world of wealth management, i.e. community banks, which is about 15%.
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Joe McMann: That overall pie is gonna go from $62 trillion to $113 trillion by the year 2030, and you have the great wealth transfer, which is about to happen, which is baby boomers now handing this wealth down to, you know, next generation investors.
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Joe McMann: So there's an event which is about to happen, which is literally a jump ball.
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Joe McMann: the… only… Can jump ball between asset management, wealth management, and private bank management that's supposed to lose share
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Joe McMann: is community banks.
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Joe McMann: So if you think about that, you've got a beta environment whereby all boats rise.
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Joe McMann: And you're expected to lose alpha along that journey.
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Joe McMann: Everyone wins, but you lose.
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Joe McMann: So what can community banks do to compete?
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Joe McMann: They can deploy technology that will allow them to close the gap today between themselves and asset managers and RAs.
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Joe McMann: So what is that technology, and what have we built, and what are we doing with it?
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Joe McMann: The technology that we built is, 18 months ago, we met a company that is, named Financial, Financial Inc.
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Joe McMann: And, Tom Fields and Patrick Parker, who are their CEO and their CPO, not only have become professional colleagues, they become close confidence and friends. Because we spent those first 6 to 9 months
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Joe McMann: I talked earlier about commonality of values and how I'm walking around trying to find people who think about the world the same way, that we do, and Jack, I said, you know, earlier, you're one of those people that we're pulling into the mix of this.
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Joe McMann: bunch of dirty, rotten scondrels that we're putting together. You know, Patrick and Tom were on their front foot. They were humble enough to know what they didn't know. They asked a tremendous amount of questions, and they had also already built a tremendous business.
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Joe McMann: So what Financial built is they built Instagram for financial advisors.
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Joe McMann: So, in a world today where the average American spends 5-plus hours on social media, now that's cumulatively, that's not an individual application, and if you think about your own life, there's 20 minutes in the morning when you're catching up on LinkedIn, when you're shaving your face.
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Joe McMann: There's 15 minutes on the train where you're, you know, skimming through the ESPN app. There's, you know, 20 minutes over lunch when you're flipping through Facebook or Instagram or something else.
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Joe McMann: cumulatively now, the average American spends 5-plus hours swiping on their phone, looking at building a community with their friends and family.
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Joe McMann: So, financial at its core, the financial engine is a digital creation engine whereby financial advisors are pushing fully encrypted content to their investor clients all day long.
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Joe McMann: And things as simple as, hey, I'm at Future Proof in Huntington Beach, California right now with 6,000 other people. Look at how cool this is.
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Joe McMann: To things as complex as.
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Joe McMann: The U.S. bombed Iran last night, and we expect the market to gap down. However, we'd like to be additive to your positions in General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. You've got 100 grand sitting in cash right now that's liquid. We'd be a buyer of 50-50 on the open, right? So all you're doing is, in a world where the average financial advisor reaches out to their clients on a quarterly
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Joe McMann: basis.
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Joe McMann: For a check-in, you're building a community with your investors
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Joe McMann: all day long, letting them know you, who you are, your business. You can communicate individually via VM or post on each individual's.
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Joe McMann: homepage. You can post for groups, you can post for your entire firm. It is fully branded. It is an application, an individual application that exists for an individual RIA on their phone, so it's not the VIN app, it is whatever
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Joe McMann: community bank you work for, whatever RIA work you work for, it's branded in the name of your organization, so it's not the FIN app, it's your application. FIN is the agentic technology that sits behind it.
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Joe McMann: And what financial didn't have at the time that we met is they didn't have any AI tools.
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Joe McMann: So they came to us and they said, we've built this awesome engine, but we see the world adapting and evolving in this way over the next few years. And if we don't have a platform available similar to yours.
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Joe McMann: We don't want to get into a conversation about what percentage of zero we're going to split going forward.
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Joe McMann: We would rather pair up together, because you have bleeding edge technology, we have bleeding edge distribution, and together we can, put about a platform that will combine AI plus data plus distribution for an entire firm.
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Joe McMann: So the way that we're facing off against
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Joe McMann: RAAs today is, we're fortunate that Financial already has 57 existing RAAs on their platform, and they have an existing relationship with 15 of the top 50 RAAs in the world. So they have validation, they have
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Joe McMann: They've been fully vetted. They have commonality with the silo of wealth management already.
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Joe McMann: we show up with an Agentic AI platform that allows for any person who's using it to now, on their phone, whether you work for a private bank or whether you work for an RAA, to talk to your phone and say things like.
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Joe McMann: Scan all my clients and tell me, of my clients, who has over a million dollars in cash sitting liquid in their account today.
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Joe McMann: 2,000 people goes down to 20 people instantaneously. Of these clients, look through my calendar in the last 3 months and tell me, look through my CRM and tell me, who haven't I spoken to?
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Joe McMann: 20 goes to 10.
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Joe McMann: Of these 10 people, tell me, actually, scrap that. Look at the calendar of the country club for the next 2 weeks, and find me 5 available tee times.
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Joe McMann: Look at the 10 people who, fit into the profile that I've defined, and send each one of them a DM that says, here's the times that I'm available to play golf over the next 2 weeks.
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Joe McMann: book on my calendar and set up a time that works for you, right? You're performing an entire agentic workflow without actually having to do any of those things in seconds.
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Joe McMann: So what might have taken you hours previously to formulate structurally and go through, call the country club, search for all of the information, figure out who you haven't met with, now takes you seconds to actually perform. And all of that exists on your phone, you're pushing all of that data all day long.
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Joe McMann: to your clients, so today.
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Joe McMann: Financial has an 80-plus percent adoption rate, so if they go into an RAA and they say, hey, we have this tool, would you like it? 80% of the people who see it check the box.
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Joe McMann: And then they have a 90% plus open rate, right? 90% of the people who get one of these communications during the day open it.
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Joe McMann: So in a world where nobody answers their phone, nobody answers their email, everything is spam, we're all getting too much information, they're getting through to their clients 90% of the time.
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Joe McMann: So why that's important is the organic growth that you're able to produce in a competitive environment where people have multiple brokers that they're working with, and…
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Joe McMann: I hear from that guy once a quarter, I hear from this guy literally every day. And I tell this story all the time. I have aunts and uncles who haven't seen my children in 10 years.
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Joe McMann: But because they're part of the community that I allow them to see online, they're watching my kids grow up. They believe that they have a relationship with my children on a daily basis, because they follow me, they follow my kids, they're following my journey.
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Joe McMann: Financial advisors are now pushing their journey, and they're building an individual brand with all of their clients on a daily basis that's focused around content, education, information, making people smarter about the markets and their wealth.
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Joe McMann: If you're a community bank and RIAs are rolling out this technology, And you're already losing share.
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Joe McMann: What happens next?
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Joe McMann: So that's why, it doesn't matter what the widget is, we are literally, as a platform between ourself and Financial, because we already have access to the community banks. Financial already has access to the RIAs.
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Joe McMann: when we go into, you know, as an example, in Pennsylvania, in the first week in October, we're speaking at the Pennsylvania Bakers Association Wealth and Trust event. And then after that, literally the next day, we're going to Michigan, and we're working with the Midwest Wealth and Trust Conference.
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Joe McMann: So we're picking up the platform out of the land of RIA, and we're taking it to the land of community bank, and we're going to work with community bankers on, this is how you can maintain pace
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Joe McMann: And then, to be very, very selfish as part of the exercise, the way that this really works is fin and air combined are the AI and content distribution engine that goes to clients. Where it really matters, and it really is differentiated, is
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Joe McMann: I'll just use round numbers. If you're a $15 billion RIA, you've got 250 people that work there. On average, about 100 of those people will be financial advisors.
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Joe McMann: The other 150 work in their admins, they're in ops and technology, they're IR, they're marketing, they're the C-suite, they're everybody who supports
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Joe McMann: the exercise of aggregating, investable assets. But there's 150 people there that also need help.
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Joe McMann: We walk in with a full Agentic platform that exists on your desktop, and we deliver Agentic tools inside of your organization for every single other employee.
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Joe McMann: So if you're an executive assistant, and part of your job is to book travel for the entire C-suite for the rest of the year, you will have your travel agent. And you'll be able to say to that travel agent.
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Joe McMann: our CEO, Joe McMann, is traveling to Southeast Asia. He needs to be in these cities on these dates.
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Joe McMann: I need you to book his flights, I need you to book his hotels, I need you to book his meals, I need you to book all of his meetings, and I need an itinerary for all of his travel for the next, you know, 2 weeks.
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Joe McMann: and literally in seconds, that executive assistant, because that executive assistant has access to that agent, will be able to do their job more effectively and more efficiently. However, if you're the macro strategist that's sitting inside of the bank.
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Joe McMann: You don't need that agent. You have the agent, which is the Knowledge Center agent, and it has every single piece of, report, every single piece of information that you've written about your strategy from… for the last 10 years.
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Joe McMann: And you're able to literally, in a moment's notice, say, tell me how my opinions on the Ukraine war have changed over the last 3 years. Have I become more positive or more negative over the last 3 years?
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Joe McMann: Compare what's happening, in the Israel conflict right now to what happened in 1979 on a global basis. What's the same and what's different, right? The agents that sit for each individual employee inside of the bank will be proprietary, accessible only to them, and customized for their job.
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Joe McMann: So, it's financial with the digital creation content distribution engine. It's Finn creating all of the agentic pulling out of the wealth tech stack and allowing financial advisors to be more effective and more efficient, and then it's AIR on the back end, allowing every single employee to do their job more efficient and more effectively.
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Joe McMann: That, functionally, does not exist anywhere else in the world today.
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Joe McMann: That's why community banks, particularly in wealth management, but holistically, should care and should be on their front foot, leaning in.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, you gotta speak, and I probably could have you on for another hour, and I will, you and Alec.
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Jack Hubbard: But you mentioned a couple of things, and I'd love people to know some of the value that you bring to the table, and some of the resources that you bring to the table. You have a program called Friday Facts. You mentioned the white paper. You mentioned Alex's podcast.
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Jack Hubbard: Talk about some of the information you can get to people and how you help them.
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Joe McMann: Yeah, so… so as an example, we are… we literally just launched this morning as part of our initiative here at Future Proof.
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Joe McMann: We launched our latest white paper, which is entitled, GEO to SEO. And for those who are unfamiliar, basically what is happening is there is a significant transformation of search which is happening, whereby 40% of people who used to go to Google and ask it questions, and the experience with Google was it would deliver a whole bunch of links.
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Joe McMann: and you'd have to click on each one of those links, and you have to figure out what's important and what isn't, and you might get led down the appropriate path, or you might get led down a path which is just a complete waste of time, are now using ChatGPT or another LLM to ask the exact same questions and conversationally get to the appropriate answer almost immediately.
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Joe McMann: And I'm actually gonna change the way, the direction we're going in slightly, Jack, because this is my favorite AI story right now. So, I have 3 kids, they're with me.
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Joe McMann: 18 nights a month. I'm super fortunate, we've got a great thing going on, but there's 17, 14, and 11, and my 11-year-old, who has 2 older sisters, is 11, going on 27, and is just phenomenal. So,
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Joe McMann: the first day of them getting out of school this year, I had literally 6 straight hours of,
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Joe McMann: calls and webcasts and all the things that we spend doing all day now that we don't go into an office, and we're available 24-7. So at 12.30 in the afternoon, I walked out and I turned to my kids, and I'm like, did you eat?
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Joe McMann: And my two older children looked at me, and my middle one turned around, and she had an egg sandwich in her mouth, so I was like, yeah, you're good. And my older one was like, yeah, I had eggs, Dad. And I'm like, did Rebecca eat? She's the baby. And the older one said, well, yeah, she had waffles. And I turned to them, and I said, well.
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Joe McMann: we don't have any waffles. How did she have waffles? And they're like, we don't know, Dad, she had waffles, because I'm the dumbest guy in the room, right?
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Joe McMann: So, now I walk into Rebecca's bedroom, and I'm like, baby, did you eat? And she said, yeah. I said, what did you eat? And she said, waffles. And now I'm getting frustrated, because I'm like, Rebecca, we don't have any waffles. Where did you get waffles from? Because I assume, like, she left to get waffles, she had waffles delivered by DoorDash, like, some sort of malfeasance was involved.
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Joe McMann: So, long story short, what actually happened is, is she looked at me like I was the dumbest person in the room, and she picked up her phone, and she said, Dad, I opened the cupboard, and I said, hey, ChatGPT, this is what's in my cupboard right now. How do I make waffles?
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Joe McMann: And so, I took all the ingredients that ChatGBT told me to use, and I made waffles. And I'm like… I literally looked at her, and I gave her a high five.
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Joe McMann: And this is the world that our children are growing up in, is they don't need to know how to do it. They have every answer to every question in the palm of their hand.
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Joe McMann: So I guess the important thing is, is that we're trying to deliver the same sort of thing.
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Joe McMann: Right? Because SEO is looking backwards, GEO is actually the future whereby search is being conducted in a manner whereby you actually need to change your digital approach to your business.
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Joe McMann: So we've delivered a 30-page white page, and we've also delivered a agent that will allow any community bank to actually use the AI agent to scan its entire digital platform and optimize its SEO footprint.
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Joe McMann: and then allow you to digitize a GEO footprint, because what's happening, I'll just describe the technology. When ChatGPT goes to a website, it's scraping whatever it wants out of the website.
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Joe McMann: So we talk often about hallucinations, and why it's kicking back bad information.
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Joe McMann: Well, why it's kicking back bad information about your company is because you're allowing it to do what it's been programmed to do.
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Joe McMann: GEO is actually pushing content appropriately at the agent, so it's learning the message that you want to deliver.
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Joe McMann: That isn't going to happen by allowing it to just learn. You have to digitize your content and push it into large language models in the way that you want it delivered to your clients.
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Joe McMann: So we have a white paper that's available today, and it walks
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Joe McMann: all of our clients through exactly how to do so, and then we also now on our platform, among the hundreds of agents that we have, we have an agent, which is the GEO agent that will examine your entire digital footprint, and it will show you, it will literally build out your marketing campaign for both SEO and GEO, and make sure that it's maximized in the way that you want to maximize
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Joe McMann: Your penetration into your potential customer base.
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Joe McMann: So those are the types of things that we're doing which are truly differentiated and allowing our clients to just become smarter on a daily basis. So whether it's the podcast, whether it's all the speaking that we're doing, whether it's going to visit with boards, most of it is not even about the company, right? This isn't about… like, we're an AI company. We don't do GEO to SEO, but we know an awful
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Joe McMann: a lot about how it could be applicable and how it could be more efficient and more effective if delivered via an agent, and that's what we're trying to help our companies do. Be more efficient, be more effective.
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Joe McMann: integrate high-risk AI inside your enterprise safely and securely.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, I'm smarter because we had this time together. I'm smarter because of our dinner, and I feel better that I get to know you and all the great things you're doing for banking and for other industries.
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Jack Hubbard: how do… and by the way, I'm hoping in 2026, you and I and Alec get a chance to make some joint presentations
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Jack Hubbard: on sales and AI at some of the conferences that you speak at. How do people connect you, connect to you, Joe, and get more information about your company?
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Joe McMann: Yep, I mean, said most simply, they can either go to the website, or they can reach out to me directly. It's joemcman at AICRisk.com, or, you know.
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Joe McMann: arguably the most effective way and the fastest way, like we were talking about how effective social media is, is just reach out to me on LinkedIn, you know, constantly engaged and evolved with the community that we're building on LinkedIn.
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Jack Hubbard: Awesome.
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Jack Hubbard: Joe, thank you so much for your time today. All the best, and I really look forward to continuing to work with you guys. You do some amazing things in banking. Thanks for being with me today.
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Joe McMann: Our pleasure, Jack, and thanks for being a friend and a confidant.
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Jack Hubbard: All right, Joe, thank you so much, I appreciate it, and I will do some editing on this, and I think it's gonna be on the 29th of October, but I'm serious, I'd love to do some work with you guys in 2026.
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Jack Hubbard: I think some of the things that we're doing with AI Navigator and what you're doing in other areas, I think could really be a benefit to the community banks.
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Joe McMann: Yep. Have you spent any time with Eric Cook from WSI?
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Jack Hubbard: Oh, God, I know Eric for a thousand years. He's one of my best friends in the industry.
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Joe McMann: Okay, so Eric is now part of us. We are working directly with Eric and WSI and his team. They are helping us with distribution. He is fully on board with the team, so anything that
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Joe McMann: the three of us could do together, or you can do with us directly. When I said I'm traveling around finding the smartest people and engaging with them and pulling them in, like, that is a real, genuine thing. The people who know what they're doing and know what they're talking about right now are few and far between, so when I find smart people like you and Jack, like you and Eric, I'm making sure that they know each other, and I'm making sure that we're doing things together.
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Joe McMann: Because that's how, we believe that we're going to help the world be a better place in the next 2 to 3 years.
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Jack Hubbard: No doubt.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, give my best to Alex, Joe, Alec, Joe, and thank you so much for, for spending time with me today. I appreciate it very much.
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Joe McMann: Awesome. Thanks very much, my friend. I'll talk to you soon.
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Jack Hubbard: Good to see you. Bye now.
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Joe McMann: to it.
