[Music] [Ryan Bondy] Before we get into the material, just want to introduce ourselves. My name is Ryan Bondy. I am a VP in Account Life Cycle Management, which is within the advisor experience area at LPL Financial. I am responsible for the digital experiences that our customers use every day to help run their businesses, specifically focused on, surprisingly, opening, managing, and closing accounts.

And we're... I'm here to talk to you guys today with... Along with Betsy, about some of the experiences that we're having as we look to modernize and really bring our technology forward. Before we get into all of that, Betsy? [Betsy Coon] Yeah. So, thanks, Ryan. So I'm Betsy Coon. I am the eSignature and Forms Product Manager at LPL, and partner with Ryan to support our... Both our business, our home office business partners when it comes to forms and signing, and then also our financial advisors as well and then ultimately the end investors. I got my start at LPL in 2010 back in the Forms department, so creating and managing the forms.

Sadly, I've moved on or not sadly. But sadly, forms the way that we managed forms hadn't changed that much until about a year ago when we started this journey with AEM Forms. So what we're going to cover today is about a year ago, our journey of moving from our homegrown LPL solution to the cloud. And then also, we'll cover how we've replaced multiple point solutions to one single solution for our firm. So for LPL and that being AEM Forms. And then how we've definitely shortened our processes, our long-complicated processes when it comes to both the managing of forms, the creating, the authoring, and then the developmental process as well.

All right. So just a little bit about LPL Financial. Some of you in the room probably know about us as a company. Maybe you don't. We... You won't see our name, LPL Financial on any like stadium or we don't do marketing because when it comes to LPL, we have a pretty simple mission, and that's to support our advisors. And we put our financial advisors at the center of everything that we do. We've got 21,000 financial advisors throughout the country, and we're made up of those advisors are part of banks and credit unions. They're independent advisors, so you've got like the small offices. Some advisors are part of larger offices. And we've got 21,000 advisors, but I've got about 48,000 total users that are interacting with our forms each and every day.

If you think about all those advisors, they have staff, administrative staff, opening up those accounts managing the accounts, moving money, and working with our forms. So we try to keep it really simple when it comes to the employees at LPL. Everything that we do is for our advisors, and so we're very... We key in on the experience, and so we want to make sure that the experience for the advisors, and then ultimately the investors, is the best that it can be.

So one of the things that Betsy didn't get into on the prior slide, but that I really love was that note around Fortune 500. LPL Financial joined the Fortune 500 in 2022, and that was a massive milestone, not as much because of the market capital, that's kind of fun, but because it was a milestone on the road of some of the most rapid growth that the wealth management industry has seen in the past 20 years. And why that's exciting for us is we're adding users, we're adding advisors, we're adding new institutions at a rate that is relatively unprecedented in the independent broker dealer space.

And those users are coming to the table with a very specific set of needs, a very specific set of expectations. These are entrepreneurs, self-started businesspeople, folks that have really blazed their way in the business world, and we are there to give them best in class consumer grade digital experiences, and we get to work with that every day.

But that's not where we started. So Betsy talked about her experience in the forms department when she started at LPL, and the fact that we haven't really modernized since then, and that's been like 13 years. So where we started in this journey was in a place where we at Homegrown built for ourselves our forms technologies. LPL is not a forms company. We use a lot of forms, but that's not really the thing that we do best, and it showed in a cobbled together group of applications that sometimes work okay, other times represent a lot of issues. And we have over the years, we have built up an incredible amount of tech debt because under the pressure of time, under the pressure of regulation, under the pressure of getting ready for that next big deal, we'd done what we had to instead of what was strategic. And so it felt like an insurmountable amount of tech debt when we sat down in late 2021, really, and started talking about how do we modernize and how do we make forms easier for us to do. And the biggest thing on that is the impact. It's slow speed to market or slow speed to value. We had long development life cycles, we had really challenging management patterns, our business operations were not set up for success because the platform that we had provided to them was what it was. And so we knew we needed to change.

So our first use case so we're constantly acquiring advisors. Advisors are coming and joining LPL, whether that's an independent advisor joining small offices, large offices, large RIAs, banks, and credit unions joining LPL, and like, when you move, you have to get set up with everything, right? Like you have to get your cable set up. And so our advisors are spending a lot of time interacting with our outdated forms when it comes to just simply getting set up with their technology, their computer. We have a lot of really great services at LPL that we provide our advisors, and to simply get set up with that is a long... Was a long, tedious process requiring forms. Imagine whether it's printing out a form and filling it out, our advisors were actually typing into the PDF forms themselves. And so super painful is their first experience, right? So they were all excited to join LPL and they have to fill out all these subscription forms. And a lot of times, they only need one of the services that is on those subscription forms. So they're reading through these long forms, filling out one field, one radio button, and so very timely, very time consuming, and didn't leave the best taste in their mouth when it came to their first interaction with our technology.

Nothing like having bad technology to sign up to get technology services, right? So our second... Our second primary use case that we knew we needed to solve is related to doc generation. So wealth management, very much like banking or buying a car, right, we are a still a very paper based or paper mentality industry. Every action that we take on behalf of an investor needs to be supported by a document of record pursuant to our regulators. And so whether you're moving money, opening a new account, adding a dependent, everything requires a signature. You have to have that final document of record to be able to store it to prove that we're doing what the investor requested. And so, we have multiple digital workflows, multiple sets of tools that empower and enable our clients to work through all of those activities. And at the end of those workflows, we need to produce that PDF that we can get out for e signature or sometimes even wet sign. And so, right now, the way that our systems work, each one of those applications has its own independent mapping logic, has its own eccentricities when it comes to its data model, produces those PDFs, in a different way or in a different paradigm, and really creates a very challenging experience for both our developers and our business owners to be able to work through change and ongoing management.

So timeline. So I support our business partners that are updating forms, creating new forms. We like to joke that we need a form for everything, which we don't. With AEM, we're going to cut down on the number of forms that we have, but we've got a lot of forms. And when it comes to... When I work with my partners that are creating the forms, authoring them, it takes a long time for them to simply just create a new form. So three to four days and that's creating one form, maybe a couple versions of that form. A lot of times we have one form that has multiple versions, and that's a three to four-day process, and that doesn't include all the reviews. So financial services, we've got our regulatory, fast changing requirements that are coming, and so sometimes those three to four days are multiplied by five because they go through five reviews. And so by the time my business partners are all done, and they have the form ready to go, they want to get it in the system, they want to get it in front of the adviser. I have to hand it off to my partners over on the development side. And I say it's going to take about a month. And you know, that's not a month of duration. That's a month of work where our developers are taking in those requirements. They're locating the form templates. They're trying to figure out how they map to the data model. They're adding fields to the UI. Sometimes those updates are actually going into multiple systems because the same form can be produced from a couple of different places, and each one of them has their own unique discrete mapping logic or even scripting that merges that application data onto the form. So at the end of the day, she's got three or four days. I've got about a month. The total duration of that process can be up to can be up to... Can be up to six months. And in a fast-moving environment like what we're in today, that clearly is a disadvantage when it comes to speed to value. Yeah So that process, three to six months, I would have to tell them, okay, if you want a new form today, you'd have to start planning it like last year. So long, very long process. Very hard to support my business partners that are wanting to get new services added with such lengthy timelines.

And then I said we or Ryan said we're not a forms company, but we sure look like one. We've got a lot of forms. This is actually one form. This is our account application form. So if you have a financial advisor at LPL, you're filling out something like this. And we've got, there's a lot of the same disclosures, a lot of the same fields, obviously, that are repeatable. And it's a lot of work to manage these forms the way that we were managing them.

-If you look at that and you squint really hard, you can actually see some language from 1983 on it.

So why we went to market to get a new solution is pretty obvious at this point. But here are the things that we were looking for. This is our shopping list when we started trying to figure out how are we going to modernize our forms experience. And so the first was end to end solution to enhance efficiencies. And what I mean there is we have this kludgy cobbled together ecosystem, a bunch of different apps, a bunch of different ways of doing things. We wanted to bring best in class forms technology to the forefront to solve a lot of the problems that we had discussed. We wanted to decrease the total cost of ownership. And, yeah, you think I'm going out and I'm buying a new SaaS product off the shelf. There's a subscription cost associated with it.

There's the acquisition and integration costs associated with it. But when you think about things in the long run, when you're managing on-prem software, when you're dealing with networking and connectivity, when you're dealing with the run cost of making those changes in an ongoing and inefficient way, that really starts to build up over time. And then the last thing was, and really this should have been first, right, we wanted to improve our customer experience. Those 2,000 forms, there are times when our advisors get so frustrated with the way that our system is working for them, they will go and print that form out and fill it out by hand.

Not the experience that we want to be supporting.

So, why did we choose Adobe? Seems to check all the boxes. Speed to market and this is something I've said multiple times, and I'm going to say it a couple more times today. Simplifying the authoring process is a big piece of it, but helping the development, when required, move quickly means that we can pivot on a dime.

I'm remembering a situation a couple years ago where we added a new... A new feature to one of our account types, and the business had identified an immediate opportunity in the market. They wanted to introduce this new... This new capability within our advisory platform, but because we couldn't capture on a form, we were six months late to market. And that's not hyperbole. It took us six months from when they identified a fact that they could go out and make more revenue to when we could actually enable them to do it because the form wasn't there.

Better user experience, I've hit on this before. We're kind of about our advisor experience.

Prefilling, right? With AEM, we're going to actually have the ability to hook up to our data our data sources via API. And on an adaptive form, it knows who the advisor is and brings their information in on the fly. That's going to be a massive enabler. Additionally, we have the ability to streamline with e-signature. We're already using Acrobat Sign and have been for a while, but now, we actually have the ability to take advantage of a built in connector where you can navigate to an adaptive form, fill it out, and send it from e-signature all within the same Angular screen, and that's something that we're really going to be really excited about. Ease of implementation. We've got a fantastic implementation partner, that we're working with, and the Adobe team has been incredible as well. And so we've been able to come up with a very high speed to market implementation plan where we're going to be putting AEM forms in our users' hands within four months of build and within six months of signing the purchase order, which is really, really exciting for us. And then going back to that one platform...

Getting to a place where we have a best in industry forms authoring experience is super critical. Form creation and signing experience is really critical because that's the thing that drives our customers' business. And once again, we're talking about that five solution that that five... That five, application, ecosystem. Five to one. I've said it a couple times. I'm going to say it a couple times more. There's a really good anecdote that I can share that really drives home how kludgy this whole thing ended up being.

There was a situation where one of our regulators came in and mandated a change to a form, and they didn't say, hey, you've got six months to do this. They said, you have one. They were closing a gap that they felt like was a disadvantage to the investors, and they said, all right, broker dealers, you got to get it done.

So the requirements came across after the three to four-day process. They said, you need to change this form. We said, okay. But we can't find it. We have no idea where it lives. We don't know what content management layer it's in. We don't know what applications create it.

So, we had to go and tear everything down. We look at scripting, looking at code, digging through CMS. We found it. Then we had to figure out where can it be created. It can be created in all three of these different workflow locations. Okay, we have to go and update all of those mappings, and update all of that doc gen process. We did finally get to market five months late.

Five places to deal with something that we didn't do well to one place...

Where we're not responsible for figuring out how to do it, that's going to be a game changer.

We're already starting to see value here.

We talked about cloud a little bit, we talked about self-managed a little bit. Like, I really want to double down on, we need to be better at scaling. As a company, we plan to grow. We're not slowing down. Right? We've just announced two massive deals within the last, call it, three months that's going to add 15% to our user base in a seven-month window. We've got to be out ahead of scale, and one of the ways that we can do it is auto scaling architecture on a SaaS platform. Let's get out of the business of building servers. Let's get out of the business of trying to figure out how we're going to fit more RAM and compute onto the... Onto an aging platform. We're going with SaaS. Enhanced security and efficiency. I mean, that kind of speaks for itself, but cybersecurity is a really important thing, and having a partner like Adobe that has the highest certifications in cybersecurity in the industry, that is totally a value prop that we that we're really looking forward to taking advantage of.

Forms and documents in one place.

Think I already told that story? Five to one. And the expedited content process. One of the really cool things that I was excited about when we selected AEM forms is the dynamic, templates and fragments that are enabled through the singular authoring process. Once you have your data dictionary solved and you understand what are the attributes that I'm working with, going in and being able to create a new template or modify an existing template and apply it to everywhere that it needs to is a snap. Having that ability is really going to change the way that we're able to operate in support of a changing industry.

We're going with a business... We're going with a user-friendly solution, doesn't always require development, and it actually has a really pretty good-looking UI instead of the standard gray boxes that you get in most enterprise software.

So, I'm not going to go all the way into the architecture here. I'm not even the right person to do it if I wanted to, but when you look at the... when you look at the slide here, the important thing that I want you guys to take away is AEM is coming into a complex, and integrated architecture, and it's playing in a space with a lot of other enterprise technologies. You see Adobe Sign on the right-hand side. You also see BPMS up there. We're in the process of automating most of our business processes for straight through processing, so we're going to be a huge enabler of that is the way that we're handling forms with AEM.

It's a customer centric model, and so you see your investor there who's interacting with the forms ecosystem. You see your advisor on the left-hand side, and you see your author. Home office is as much of a customer for us as those other two. They pay us a little bit less money, but...

So building something that really rallied around those three personas and gave them a more empowered user experience is something that we're really excited about. And then extensibility, right? Everything has to be flexible in this day and age. One of the things that's really cool about this is we're actually able to work in a semi headless fashion. One of our upcoming integrations, we're actually going to be working with an institutional partner, and we're hooking this directly up to their CRM.

So they can actually start their business from their platform and still get to the value of what we've got on the screen here.

Alright. So theme forums, with all the awesomeness that Ryan just covered, definitely shortened my lengthy timeline. So when a new form is needed or an existing form needs to be updated with all of the improved hierarchy, the way that we manage forms just from a governance standpoint, so much better. Ease of implementation, he was talking about. Definitely, you saw how complex or how lengthy our one form was. So having a migration partner is very important.

But shortening that time frame from four days to that one to two days, sometimes even less for my operational partners, is huge.

It allows them to do more impactful things for our advisors. And then sometimes there's no handoff to my development, which is awesome. And taking that monthly process to... Down to hours, days...

Getting stuff out in front of our advisors, no longer being late to the market. That feels good. Definitely a much better experience for our home office, our advisors, and then our investors who are signing.

It's three to six months down to... Down to one week. It's a pretty big deal. So, the immediate value proposition, it's all about impact, right, especially in the enterprise game. So we talked about scale. We expect to do 1.5 million adaptive, web forms this year. That's unique impressions, and over 10 million doc documents of record to be generated. That's in 2024.

We expect that to go up next year.

Increased efficiencies. We've kind of beaten that one to death already. But expediting speed to value and reducing the effort to enact change, like, cannot understate how much... How empowering that's going to be for our advisors... For our investors as they grow their business. And then cutting costs at the end of the day when you're... When The Street looks at your balance sheet, they want to see two things. They want to see increased revenue, and they want to see decreased cost. And so getting to a place where we're being a better steward of those dollars is a really great outcome.

All right. So...

Just reiterating some of the numbers. So we're going to continue to see more advisors, which means more documents coming through our system. Hopefully, we can decrease some of those documents. The efficiencies, like, we're being able to calculate the number of hours that we can save per form, per document for our operations partners that are creating and authoring and managing those. And then obviously, the five weeks' reduction in duration, and then a pretty big cost savings as well.

When it comes to the future, going back to how we put our advisors at the center of everything we do, we want them spending less time interacting with our forms, being in our systems, so that they can spend time with their clients and building those relationships. And so we're looking at different opportunities around investor directed forms. So a lot of times advisors are having conversations with their clients, obtaining information, and then putting them onto the... Into our systems that populate the forms. Whereas with AEM forms, there's a lot that we haven't even unlocked when it comes to the investor themselves being able to instead of having a conversation or talking to the advisor and giving them very simple information, whether it's, they're updating their ACH information for their bank for a move money transaction. So allowing the advisors to have that flexibility to provide their investors with self-directed forms. And then, Ryan mentioned the Acrobat Sign. So, we use Acrobat Sign.

Adobe plays nice with Acrobat Sign, running their PDFs, and then also looking at native electronic signatures for end users. So being able to fill out the form and not have to leave that web form to actually sign it. And then, there's so many possibilities.

We have our advisors, they're our clients, but then also there's so many business use cases. LPL is a big company. A lot of business use cases out there that in the past, our business partners would come to us and be like, we don't have a solution for you. But now with AEM, there's so many possibilities when it comes to us solving their business needs.

So we showed you, our scale. We talked a lot about scale. We're continuing to grow. We've got advisors coming on board every day. And then also the big driving efficiency, right? So we're seeing a lot of efficiency with AEM forms and we're continuing to see that more and more each and every day. And then cutting those high costs.

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