Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#117 - Jump AI Is Automating the Busywork—Parker Ence on What That Means for Advisors
What if you could simplify financial administration with just a click? Parker Ence, CEO and founder of Jump, joins us to reveal how this AI-powered tool is transforming the lives of wealth managers and financial advisors. Backed by a recent $20 million Series A funding, Jump automates note-taking, compliance, and CRM updates—freeing up advisors to focus on what truly matters: building meaningful client relationships.
We explore Jump’s journey from early experimentation to securing partnerships with industry giants. With a founding team blending sales, product design, and engineering expertise, Jump delivers solutions that scale from solo advisors to large enterprises, offering seamless setups and tailored integrations.
Parker also shares his entrepreneurial insights, drawing inspiration from Elon Musk and reflecting on the role of AI in enhancing—not replacing—human expertise. Whether you're a small team or a large firm, Jump AI is designed to help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving financial technology landscape.
Jump's website:
https://jumpapp.com/
Social:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkerence/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/jump-app-ai/
How's it going everyone? Welcome back. This is the OnlyFeeOnly podcast and we appreciate you being here. In this episode, we talked to Parker Entz, who is the CEO and founder of Jump, which is an AI tool for wealth managers and financial advisors that automates note-taking. Tool for wealth managers and financial advisors that automates note-taking, compliance, crm updates and much more. A big congratulations to them, as they just announced yesterday that they closed a $20 million Series A round and that's huge, super cool. We got to meet these guys at XYP and Live and super down to earth. Really great product and a lot of intrigued advisors. So Parker's going to talk about himself better than I would. I'm going to let him get to it. Here is Parker Ence on the Only Fee Only Podcast.
Speaker 2:How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travelo. I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles, and today very excited to have Parker Ensign from Jump. Very excited to have him on. He's a leading technology in the financial services space, so, parker, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, Peter and Brock, thanks so much for having me Great to be here.
Speaker 2:Yes, you bet. I know we were able to connect at XYPN this year, but for those who don't know what Jump is, do you want to give a quick overview of what Jump is?
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. So Jump AI. We're a software company, so we create AI native software that's for financial advisors software that's for financial advisors. We're tackling the problem of. If you kind of look at the Kitsis research on how advisors spend their time, it's something like a third of time goes to administrative work that orbits around the meeting. So preparing for the meeting, doing all of the post-meeting work, updating the CRM, writing up the documentation work, updating the CRM, writing up the documentation, sending out an email to the client to let them know what's coming next, wrangling all the financial plan data, task lists, action items, workflows, all those kinds of things. So we're just using cutting edge AI to try to automate away as much of that as we can, but in a way that would make sense for advisors. So that's kind of the headline.
Speaker 1:I love it, man. So I mean a lot of people that we've talked to have heard about you guys know what you're doing. I think it's super cool. How did the idea kind of come about? Because I know there's a lot of people that play in the tech space. Sometimes it feels like kind of a flash in the pan. You're like what happened? But like you guys are, you guys are steady. We hear about you guys a lot. So where'd the idea kind of come from? And then how did you guys start to grow it and actually take it to market?
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. So I love answering this question because I think a lot of times when you ask founders, where did you know, where'd the idea come from? Like it's very tempting to give a retroactive answer that makes it sound like it was this lightning struck the brain and we have this brilliant side of it and all just was up and to the right, you know. But for all startups and really for all new companies, there's some wandering in the wilderness. So we had sort of two major ideas that we were working on before we landed on what jump is today. The first one was really really dumb. It was basically are you guys familiar with structured notes?
Speaker 1:I don't think so.
Speaker 3:So so it's like a derivatives product that you can get from big banks. So it's kind of like hedged. It's a way to invest in a hedged way. Where the market goes down, you're sort of protected from the downside but then you trade off some upside anyway. The fact that you guys haven't heard of it and uh is, is kind of like like that says a lot. Right, that this was so.
Speaker 3:So what we were doing is we're basically trying to create this secondary market, um, for structured notes for advising clients that were in these structured notes but needed to get out of them early. And it turns out there's like no demand for this particular thing. So we kind of worked on that for a little while and then, uh, so then we were kind of sitting there saying, well, there's not really a lot of demand for that. So let's solve a problem that we have, which is, I think, pretty standard business advice is kind of solve your own problem. So one thing that my co-founder, tim, and I really hated because we've done other startups in the past, we've always hated typing data into our CRM we created this thing that would take the data from a meeting and it would look at your CRM and it would figure out hey, these are all the different fields that you have in your CRM and the different things that you might want to update after a meeting is done, and it would pull out all that data and it would organize it for you and then you could quickly review it and then it would save into the CRM.
Speaker 3:And so we were initially testing this out with some sales teams. They're obviously spending a lot of. You know, sales teams spend a lot of time in their CRM, and then we just also happen to have a number of different financial advisors in our personal networks. So my brother has been a financial advisor for 12 years, my brother-in-law is an advisor. I have a good friend and neighbor who was a breakaway RIA, and so we were telling them about this thing that we were making, and at one point or another they all basically said I hate typing things into CRM, I hate doing notes.
Speaker 3:I got into the business to have relationships and because I love investing and kind of personal finance. I did not get into this business to wake up in the morning and do data entry into Wealthbox or Redtail or Salesforce, and so that got us really, really curious, and so you know, that was sort of the spark that led to what Jump is today, where we only work with advisors, and it's not just CRM updates, but it's also, you know, all the other things that you do around preparing for a meeting and processing the meeting afterward. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:What time is this like? What time frame did it start?
Speaker 3:yeah, so, uh, you know, kind of late 2022 is when we were starting to explore some of those early ideas, and then we had actually built out a bunch of tech um for that crm updater kind of the first half of 2023, and then by the middle of 2023 we had completely turned our focus to working with advisors and our very first user, kind of design partner, was my neighbor, and then actually the second and third user were both XYPN members, and so we always love running into other XYPN folks because I think without those conversations conversations who knows what we'd be doing now.
Speaker 1:They actually made a really big difference yeah, they're, they're awesome, I mean, I know, over the years, man, they've helped us a ton and we love being able to work with them, and a lot of times it's like young, super energetic people that are like wanting to grow their businesses right, just like we are. So it's a very relatable thing to talk to people that are in XYPN as well, which I've always thought was really neat, as you know from being at the conference. Right, we had booths right across from each other. That's how we met you guys, and so, as you guys have built this thing, man, like, obviously there are other AI softwares out there that people know about, but I think you guys bring some unique value adds to what advisors are doing, specific to advisors. So would you mind touching on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah for sure. So if you sort of think about all the different types of, if you just think about kind of AI tools for meetings, we think of this in a you know kind of a two by two matrix, right. So if you imagine, go back to kind of like junior high math, imagine like the y axis of this two by two matrix. So at the top end you have sort of your premium kind of full solution type products, and then on the bottom end you've got sort of cheap, low cost type products. So that's kind of the vertical axis. And then on the horizontal axis you've got things that are made for everybody, so they could really be for any professional in any industry. Or on the other side you've got things that are made specifically for advisors. So the spot that we're trying to play in is we're trying to say we're trying to build a full solution that's specifically made for advisors.
Speaker 1:So that would be kind of that upper right corner of the quadrant upper right hand corner of my brain is what I'm doing with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, and you always have to put it in the upper right. That's's always where, whatever you're doing, you have to put it in the upper right. That's the place it goes. So, but yeah, so if you look, if you think about kind of the bottom left, that would be lower cost tools that are made for everybody and there's some really great products that you know. There's probably 500 startups that have some kind of note taker thing. Zoom has their own note taker, teams has their own note taker.
Speaker 3:So there's a bunch of these options, and so what we'll hear from advisors is the first time I use a tool like that. It feels like magic because it gives me a summary, it gives me some action items in a bullet point list, and it's really cool. But then maybe by the 10th or 15th time they use one of those generic tools, they're starting to think you know, these notes that I'm getting back, they're not really advisor quality. They're not. They don't contain the financial planning data that I actually need. They're not really kind of getting what I need out of that conversation, and so therefore, I have to go back and do a lot of editing and kind of a lot of rewriting. It doesn't feel like something I would write and it's not really integrated with the rest of my advisor-specific tech stack and so I'm having to do a lot of copying and pasting or it's just not very efficient. So the first thing that we did when we launched Jump is we started to say, well, how do we have really really good integrations with things like Redtail, wealthbox, the way that advisors use Salesforce, how do we have a really good integration with the calendar, with the email? And then you'll see, from Jump, more and more of those specific integrations coming out. And then we said advisors don't want to sound like a generic AI robot. How do we make it so that they can customize the outputs and make it sound like themselves? And so all these different ways that they can change the note format or the recap email that we generate, or the pre-meeting preparation content and make it so it is hopefully getting closer and closer to something that they would write. So I think those are the two main things.
Speaker 3:And then the third thing is you know we're in a highly regulated space, right? We're having conversations that are they're relationship building between advisor and client. It's the engine. Every one of those conversations is the engine of the business, but those conversations are regulated and so there are some different considerations that an advisor would really have to think through compared to like everybody else in the world of software users. So, for example, how do we record meetings Like, are we doing that in a legal, ethical way where the client has really good disclosure? Do we want audio files or video files, because there might be some books and records considerations? Maybe we do, maybe we don't. Are we going to save this data forever? Are we going to have it temperate? So we have all these different options for how to handle some of those compliance considerations that you wouldn't really see in some of the more generic products. So I think those are kind of the main things and there's more, but those are probably the three things that come up the most.
Speaker 2:Absolutely love it. Let's talk a little bit about the company structure. I mean, you're one of the co founders. What does the rest of the business look like and how has that evolved over time to what did it look like in the beginning compared to now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was really fortunate to partner with my two co founders. So my co founder, tim Chavez he and I have both done multiple startups in the past he, previous to Jump, had actually started a fintech company that eventually was acquired by Billcom. My most recent company before Jump was a big data company, so we actually would aggregate large data sets and then make those available to data scientists at hedge funds and other places. And then our third co-founder scientists, hedge funds and other places and then our third co-founder, adam. He is a pure engineer. He's probably one of the fastest engineers I've ever met in terms of just being able to generate a massive amount of good code in a short amount of time.
Speaker 3:And so I think it was kind of the dream when you start a company is you want to be able to cover the bases with the founding team, and so in the early days I was handling mostly kind of sales, go to market and some product work.
Speaker 3:Tim was doing product with me. He's a very talented product designer. He's also a full stack engineer. And then Adam was kind of the pure, you know, back end and all the other pieces of architecture and building it out, and so we were actually able to get really far with just the three of us, which was really awesome. So that was kind of the beginning and then since that time, the team is now around 25 or 28 folks and that's pretty evenly split between product and engineering and then go to market folks. So that's kind of how things have evolved and we're always looking to bring on top-tier talent both on the go-to-market side as well as on the product side. So if any listeners know of folks that are looking to stay in the industry but work on a tech company, we always love chatting with people that appreciate our mission of bringing AI to advisors and kind of helping them thrive in the age of AI.
Speaker 1:Love that man. No, that's fantastic and really cool that you guys have the background of having already built some other companies. And that's what I find is like a lot of times, people that are wired like I would imagine you guys are, it's like the wheels are always turning right. Then you've got Adam. He goes in a room for a couple hours, comes out, he's done amazing things with the code and all of a sudden you guys have something that you can work on. So I love the dynamic of the founders and how you guys all specialize in different stuff. I think that's really cool.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about the right size firms, right, and maybe that's everybody can use Jump AI, maybe that's we kind of like to work in a specific space. But what we've found is when we're talking to like vendors or solutions that come on the podcast, sometimes we're like they're like we're really good in this space or we're really good in this space. Is there a specific size firm? I mean, is it solopreneurs, is it boutiques? Do you guys have an enterprise offering for massive RAs that have billions under management?
Speaker 3:Where do you guys feel like you really plug in? Well, yeah, it's a great question. So in the very early days our customers were mostly very, very small, independent RIAs, solo advisors, maybe a few advisors at a time. We've quickly expanded to work with some of the largest logos in the industry. So, for example, last month we announced a partnership with LPL. So that was a pretty rigorous enterprise process to go through their vetting process and security and risk management, and they really were excited about bringing AI tools to their advisors. They actually kind of announced a big strategic push to bring multiple different AI tools to advisors and Jump was part of that announcement. So that really has helped us to expand our enterprise offering.
Speaker 3:So I think at this point we've got kind of two different kinds of customers. We have a ton of small RIAs and kind of small advisor teams, which is awesome, and then we also are adding more and more enterprise and so for a small team or an individual advisor, they can sign up and get up and running within probably five minutes. They just log in, they connect their CRM, they connect their email and calendar and things and then they're kind of off to the races. The next time they have a meeting, they start getting the AI summaries and other outputs and they can do that For larger teams or scaled enterprise. They're going to have a whole bunch of opinions about how do we want to do disclosure, like all these different compliance things.
Speaker 3:How do we want to do disclosure? How do we want to do disclosure, like all these different compliance things? How do we want to do disclosure? How do we want to capture the data? How do we want to retain the data? And so we've got this entire orchestration layer where they can go in and basically configure what they want, and then that's going to extend to all of the users that roll up under that enterprise umbrella. So we've got both options and so we really see both. So it's kind of the small teams and then it's also the scaled enterprise.
Speaker 2:No-transcript very nice. So I mean, where's you know what's the future look like? What are some goals? Um, you know what are advisors asking for that you guys are looking to accomplish?
Speaker 3:yeah. So I think we have really awesome advisor customers that are a constant source of of ideas for how jump can get better. We actually have, within the product, a place where our users can actually submit ideas for how the product could be better, and then other users can read those and actually upload those. So we have a pretty you know pretty long list of things that they're looking at. One thing that the users are always very interested in is just adding more integrations, and so that's something that we're always working on just making making the AI assistant more and more connected right. If you hired a human assistant, you would expect them to be able to work on kind of any of your software tools and move back and forth across different software packages seamlessly. We want the AI assistant to be the same, and so adding more integrations is a really big focus for us. Making it easier to do customizations is a big focus for us.
Speaker 3:We're also starting to think about you know, there's all this data that is being collected that no one really had before. It's all of these individual conversations between advisors and clients, and so how can we actually kind of gather up that data for a firm and then actually give them insight into what's going well, what's not going well. So, for example, we have this feature that's around scorecards. So imagine that you're a firm and you have maybe a bunch of new advisors that are sort of new to the business. You have all these best practices and you have advice for how to run these meetings to make them very effective.
Speaker 3:If you wanted to, you could sit through every meeting that that junior advisor has and give them coaching after every single time. That'd be really awesome. You probably don't have time to do that, and so what you can do is you can set up a scorecard and then the AI assistant will actually go through kind of a grading rubric and then at the end of the call say hey, you know, we're trying to ask everybody for referrals. During our meetings you did ask for a referral. Great job, that's like a 10 out of 10 on that one. We're also trying to do a good job of asking a lot of questions in the beginning of the meeting so we really understand their situation. We didn't really do that. We kind of launched into our spiel. So maybe next time let's spend a little bit more time asking questions so you can imagine over time how that could build up and really give you some good insight into what's going well. What could be better in terms of delivering a great client experience?
Speaker 1:I love it, man. I mean, you guys are thinking about everything. Which I really like and that's one of the things we've always talked about is like what is a better way to grow your business than to listen to the people that work with you and work with clients every single day and understand what it is that they're looking for, Right? So I think I think that's absolutely huge. So I want to jump off the jump AI train for just a second and ask Parker a question about Parker. Since you started multiple companies, man, you seem like you have an absolutely brilliant mind. You've got a lot of good ideas. You're well-spoken. What do you think have been the driving factors to your success for the fellow entrepreneurs out there listening, and what has helped you kind of get to where you are today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's like a kind of funny Elon Musk quote where someone asked him or he basically said. Elon Musk quote where someone asked him or he basically said people ask me if it's fun to be an entrepreneur, excuse me, and he said it's not really fun. It's kind of like you know, chewing glass and learning to like the taste of your own blood. This was kind of his quote.
Speaker 3:And obviously you know a guy like that. He's taking on very ambitious things right, sending people to Mars and building, and so you know that's it's pretty, pretty wild. But I do think there is kind of this irrational drive that entrepreneurs have that they want to do something, they want to kind of change some corner of the world, they want to build something new. And I think I think that's frankly something that either people have that desire or they don't, and for whatever reason, I've always kind of had that and I think even in high school my parents were very encouraging of entrepreneurial activities. I was like mowing lawns for the neighborhood, hey ditto, man Ditto.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like the best first job ever is doing, you know doing that, and and so I think just I just love the idea of creating something new, making something that is valuable for people. But I think, you know, being able to learn very quickly, I think is is critical, right. So the world is moving so quickly, technology is moving so quickly. All of the magic that is in Jump, that makes it work, didn't exist really two years ago. I mean, it existed, but it wasn't really at a point where it could be widely adopted and used by software companies.
Speaker 3:And so I think, being able to very, very quickly learn and I've been able to do that in, I think, a few different industries and so just getting comfortable with admitting that there's a lot you don't know, learning as fast as you can, I think is probably the main thing. And then, just I think I've been in companies where I had really good partners and I've been in companies where I didn't have very good partners, and I think it's just 10 times I didn't have very good partners, and I think it's just 10 times, infinity times, better when you have great co-founders that are in it with you and you can kind of learn together and navigate together. So I don't know. Those are some of the things that come to mind.
Speaker 1:Good answers, man Good answers.
Speaker 2:Love it Any other golden nuggets or something else you want to throw out there for the listeners, or something you were thinking before coming on the podcast.
Speaker 3:You know, I think there's still a lot of fear around AI and I think people don't a lot of people still don't really know is it going to be Terminator, is it going to be WALL-E, is it something else? Right? Right, and I think that you know that AI will be one of the most, if not the most, transformative technology that we ever experienced as the human race, and so it is a little intimidating. But I think for right now, advisors can feel good about the fact that there's kind of safe, practical AI tools that are ready kind of off the shelf. You don't have to be good at AI to use them. You don't have to worry about them taking your job, because these tools are actually built to help.
Speaker 3:They're more of an Iron man suit for the advisor as opposed to trying to replace the advisor, and there are a lot of these really cool tools coming out, and because they're focused on advisors, they have compliance and privacy and security in mind, and so they don't have to really worry so much about that. So I think I would just encourage whoever's listening to give it a try, like dip your toe in. I think that it's important to kind of try experiments with these things early. You don't want to wake up five years from now and you know be, you know kind of be like email man who needs it, you know, but it's like everybody uses it right.
Speaker 3:So that's how AI is going to be. It's going to be part of everything. So I would just encourage folks to just, you know, dip their toe and try it out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely man. So for people that want to learn more about Jump AI, maybe follow along with you, man.
Speaker 3:What are the best ways to do that? Yeah, so you can always go to our website. So our website is jumpappcom. We have some information on the website. I think the best way to learn about Jump is just to schedule some time with someone on our team, which you can do through the website. We've got a great team. They're not like high pressure salespeople or anything, they're just happy to kind of do some show and tell, and so I think that's probably the best way, and you can always also shoot us an email at hello at jump appcom.
Speaker 2:Perfect Parker. Thank you so much for your time today. Yeah, no, thank you.