The AI Family Office: Financial Advice for High Earners — with Lord Munjal

SPEAKER_00: Most organizations are not behind on AI. They are behind on the thinking required to use it. I am Arnand Sapatnaik, ex-Microsoft.

SPEAKER_00: This is what comes next. The podcast where we talk about building the kind of organization that actually wins in an intelligence-driven economy. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00: The guest today is Lord Munjar. He is founder and CEO of Alpheva AI, where he is building the financial operating system for high earners. His mission is to democratize the kind of insight normally reserved for institutions and ultra-wealthy clients and to deliver it through intuitive human-centered technology powered by advanced AI. So, Lord, glad to have you on the show. You know, we are, you know, thank you for coming here.

SPEAKER_01: Hi, Arun. Thank you for having me over as well.

SPEAKER_00: I wrote a book about future proof your business. Okay. And it's based on this framework called Durable Advantage Cycle, where there are essentially five stages. Okay, you find your NIS, what you can do that others would find hard to replicate. Then you start building businesses around your core business to diversify, that strengthens your core. Then you build a platform where others can build on top of it that further adds security to your business. Then you build your team around that ownership mindset.

SPEAKER_00: So people work for their own benefit, but that further strengthens your business.

SPEAKER_00: But by doing that, you are always a step ahead of the market. You are the innovator, you are the creator, and uh you know it's better that you replace your own thing rather than your competitors doing it. So this podcast, I kind of take it through those stages for you know my guests, right? So you started this business of kind of automating financial advice, right? So obviously you found your nest. So walk me through like what you were doing, how at what point you got this idea, and how this idea of Alpha AI came together.

SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to do that, uh Aran. Excellent question. So the idea has been around for a very long time. Just that the technology needed was not there yet. So just to give you a background, I did a long stint in the financial services sector. Worked with Bank of America, Maryland Lynch, then worked with Citibank. Uh so I did investment banking, investment management, and then prior to that a couple of stints in management consulting as well as venture capital space. Throughout the course of my life, and academically too, I have a strong background in finance and technology.

SPEAKER_01: So I found this to be a common theme where high earners deal with a situation which is not fully optimized. So to put things in perspective, if you are a high earner with three to five million dollars of investable assets, you probably are paying a percent of that in AUM fee, assets under management fee, to a financial advisor who is primarily managing your stocks and bonds portfolio. The challenge there is one, you're paying 1%, so$30,000 to$50,000 on a three to five million dollar portfolio every year.

SPEAKER_01: Two, the scope of the advice is only limited to investable assets in stocks and bonds. So your financial advisor doesn't provide you advice on your other investments. You may have investment properties, you may have restricted stock units, you may have made some investments in venture capital space with other startups, you may have had some other alternative investments in REIT or some other businesses. Um, and financial advisor would not be in a position to advise on those elements which are big pieces of your financial landscape.

SPEAKER_01: The second problem that the high earners deal with is their CPA is brought into the picture just 30 to 60 days before the April 15th deadline. So a higher earner goes to a CPA, says, Hey, do my taxes, here are my statements. But by that time, the tax optimization ship had already sailed because you're reaching to a financial uh to reaching to a CPA after the completion of the financial year. Now, the double whammy is that most of the CPAs in the country are also compliance driven, not optimization driven.

SPEAKER_01: So they will do the best they can under the circumstances they have been dealt with. But a typical CPA that a fin that a high earner is accessing would never speak with a financial advisor, and vice versa. So just because financial advisor and the CPA do not talk to each other, a lot of optimization opportunities do not get realized for the high earner. So these are the two bigger problems. The third problem that the higher deal with is as follows. They all have different insurance products and different loan products, ranging from a car loan to a home loan to a business loan to a personal loan to you name it.

SPEAKER_01: Nobody is there to optimize those loan terms for them either. So, and then the other challenges around estate planning. Most of these people won't have an estate plan, and even if they do, it's obsolete. So, as a result of which, high earners end up losing tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars in between these silos, which might be optimized at individual level, but are not optimized at a holistic level. So that's where Al FIVA comes in, coordinates all the elements of your financial life to make sure all the money bleeding that is happening in your household stops with the power of AI and human experts.

SPEAKER_01: Um, in if you look at the trajectory of AI before AI came, what we are doing was only accessible to ultra-high net worth individuals like Bill Gates and family, or Mark Zuckerberg and family, or Elon Musk and family, they all would have family offices. But the high earners, the definition here is anyone making over$400,000, they won't have access to this because the cost of offering the service was way higher than the benefit that the offering company could get. But with the advancement in LLM models, with the training that we are doing on these LLM models, we are at a stage starting last year where the services could be now offered to the high earners too.

SPEAKER_01: If the technology advancement keeps on going the way it is going, very soon, we would also like to offer Al FIVA to moderate earners to low-income group too, because these are the ones who need financial advice the most, and yet they are the ones who don't get the financial advice at all, and that's the irony of life because their asset base is not big enough for the advisors to come in. But with AI, now Al FIVA, and its range of products could democratize the financial advice, have everyone save a large amount of money, which otherwise is going wasted.

SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, that's too risky. You know, ours is the only guaranteed thing, right? Then then you know you talk to um finance advisors, and you know, the they are you know very much in favor of IRAs and you know uh their own um you know uh ETF or uh whatever uh mutual fund bundle that they sell, right? And then you talk to CPA and they're more like, oh, why would you do IRA? You know, yeah if if you get sued, you know, um they can come after IRA. 401k is better because it's protected. So they are looking after the compliance aspect, like what you are saying.

SPEAKER_00: So everybody is kind of you know optimized in their own way, but you know, they are not working together, you know, on top of that. That that is like my own personal goal, right? That you know, I want to do things in a certain way, and I want all these things to work for me instead of them setting a guideline that I have to meet, right? Now, you know, you have what you have done is is is is very broad and it's very uh you know, everybody needs this, but like it's also like you know, it's an idea that's been out there, and you know, people would question, like, it just seems too good to be true.

SPEAKER_00: Like, like, is it really working, right? Because you know, people have been trying to like put uh you know insurance tax and investment all together, even before AI, just as a as an advisory firm, right? Uh, but that has never quite worked, right? So explain to me, like, you know, how does your uh you know operations work? Like you have built, you know, how how is your AI layer? How does it, you know, um, you know, how how does it optimize the individual tax, investment, and insurance and loan aspect of it, but also like how do they coordinate?

SPEAKER_00: What how much of work is actually done by AI? And on top of that, do you have humans who are like CPAs, you know, loan experts or investment experts and you know, insurance experts, and like how much of input they give. So, how is the AI coordination done? And how is the human coordination done among all these different uh financial assets? And how are you able to put it all together to make sure that you know it's all working together towards uh the person's benefit and how much of control does the customer actually have to decide which strategy they want to pick?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, happy to unpack that for you. So, as I was saying, in the past, ultra-high net worth individuals would have access to private family office because they could afford to pay a few million dollars to manage their hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars. Uh so it made sense for them to leverage service like this. Now, for those who don't have hundreds of millions of dollars, they would find it hard to make a family office work with them. With Alphiva AI to unpack the question that you asked, you basically subscribe to the program.

SPEAKER_01: It's an annual program, and the beauty of the program is that it comes with a money-back guarantee. So if throughout the course of the program we don't even save you as much as you're paying us for the subscription, first of all, shame on us because all our customers should save tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending upon how big is their asset base. The bigger the asset base, the more the savings. Okay. Uh so first of all, shame on us if we are not able to save you even as much as you are paying for subscription.

SPEAKER_01: Second, your money back happens immediately after within a week, where post completion of one year of service, if we if you don't see value add, every last penny that you paid for the subscription is reimbursed to you. Now, how does the program work? You sign up for the program, you get onboarded in less than five minutes, all your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, loan accounts get connected to Al Fiva. Whatever transactions you're doing, which are not on banking rails, for example, you lent$300,000 to your friend Peter at 10% coupon.

SPEAKER_01: Now banks don't have any information on it. You ended up buying a 5% stake in a startup run by the son of your friend. All these things are not on the banking rails, but you can manually key them in Al FIVA. Not just that in Al FIVA, you can also give your assessment of your risk propensity, your investment horizon, your short-term, mid-term, long-term goals because they're all different. So there is Arun 1 who wants to retire at 45, there is Arun 2 who wants to keep on working till 95. Okay, there is one person who has very high risk tolerance, and there is this other person who has zero risk tolerance.

SPEAKER_01: So Alphiva gets a flavor of the gamut of human emotions as well as your goals. You can also save your tax information, loan information, insurance information in a financial vault, which is encrypted. So Al FIVA has access to your financial vault too. So now when you pose the question to the AI, Alphiva gives you an answer which is very customized, very personalized to your unique situation, and not some generic advice that people could get from GPT or from Cloud. So because they don't have access to all this information, they don't understand your risk propensity, your short-term, mid-term, long-term goals, uh, your competing priorities, your family structure, whereas Alphiva does.

SPEAKER_01: And then we our models are also trained on this kind of information, whereas their models are trained on generic information. What they are striving to get is AGI, artificial general intelligence. What Al FIVA is striving to get at is AFI, artificial financial intelligence. So it's very unique, it's verticalized, not general.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's great. Now let's talk about, you know, like your product by itself is kind of diversified in the sense that even though you're offering financial advice, but it's also tax, it's also insurance, it's it's a different parts of tax and different financial product all built into one. So the product by itself is kind of diversified uh in that way. Uh have you thought about like you know, branching out into other fields like financial education, for example, or uh, you know, like using the financial portfolio as a way to enable social network among people of similar uh financial uh portfolio, right?

SPEAKER_00: Uh things like that. Have you thought about creating other services around it that kind of complement and uh kind of boost your core, but still are kind of in a you know tangentially or uh in a different uh business domain altogether?

SPEAKER_01: We have, and some of these are on the annual. We just want to make sure more and more people are aware of what we are doing for our high-earning customers, and then come the social aspect to it, and one has to be very savvy about doing the social aspect. Why? Because people don't want to disclose what they make to their family and friends many a times. Because guess what?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah. I think you know, uh, SoFi is one, and I think you know, X, you know, the original idea behind X.com, they kind of started with this idea of social commerce. So it's not like you are disclosing your uh total financial asset. It's kind of like, you know, uh like in SoFi, you are kind of networking with people who are buying the same stock or in the same ETF. So, you know, something along those lines, right? You're not necessarily disclosing everything, but maybe part of it, right?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And which is great. Um, we are not opposed to it, but our hands are already full in making sure our customers save you know as much money as possible right now. And then comes the social element. Let's make um you know sure that nobody is working for Uncle Sam, paying far more than they should in taxes, losing far more uh while while trying to invest to save more. Okay. So uh sticking with the financial discipline, making sure that you achieve your financial goals that you set for yourself, whether it is buying a second home or buying your private plane or a private boat, whatever might be on the anvil for you, uh, is what we are aiming for uh through Alpha AI.

SPEAKER_01: And then social element would come in second wave as well.

SPEAKER_00: Right. And what about the education aspect? Like the, you know, like in finances, you kind of like kind of like unless you are a finance expert itself, there are so many options out there. People don't really know that, you know, at this stage, maybe I have this option. Like I stumble across all, like, you know, I myself work in financial services, but I am on the tech side. So, you know, along the way I come across these products, you know, either somebody approaches me in some uh meeting or a social gathering, or I see, okay, uh the company that I'm working for, they're investing in this.

SPEAKER_00: I should look into it, right? Uh so that's how I kind of discovered all these financial products in a very ad hoc manner, right? Now, since you are kind of putting it all together, you have an opportunity to give people a targeted education that, okay, you are at this level, you are now entering at this level. You should start thinking about these things and you know what an estate is, at what point people would need it, right? Uh, what an insurance is, like, should you have life insurance? What are the different types of life insurance?

SPEAKER_00: And you know, what can fit into what goal? Like, you know, that is like, you know, knowing the option is one thing, how it will help you is one thing, but just figuring out the education behind it is what are these products, how do they work, when do I use? Like, your platform has a way to give people kind of just enough education at the right time that they understand what these products are, and then they can plan a strategy around how to incorporate those products into their portfolio.

SPEAKER_01: Right? Yep. Uh, excellent point. And we are already doing it. So, and that's where AI comes handy. So, most of the education gets disseminated through AI itself, where AI surfaces the opportunity, you ask follow-up questions, why this, why not that? Alphiva AI gives you the answer. Not just that, at the bottom of every answer, there is a button that you can press and you get connected with the expert in that realm. So, for example, if I'm saying, hey, listen, should I open traditional IRA or a Roth IRA?

SPEAKER_01: And why one over the other, AI answers that question, explains to me, and at the bottom there is a button that, hey, listen, you want to speak with Joe Smith, your CPA? And if I press the button, boom, I get connected to my CPA, and I can get additional comfort from another human being and not assume that, oh, you know, this is AI only giving me advice. So now Joe Smith could validate that too and address some of your other questions. Uh Being an expert, and now you, as a customer, get additional comfort that you know some specialists looked at the answer as well and confirmed or validated the approach that AI had identified for you.

SPEAKER_01: Not just that, even if you had not pressed that button to speak with the CPA Joe Smith, all the answers get reviewed by the specialist in that domain at Alphiva. So they make sure that the answers that Alphiva AI is offering to the customers are yet the best approach under the circumstances that the customer is finding himself or herself in.

SPEAKER_00: Okay, that that that's great. Uh now let's move to uh the platform aspect of it. Like you have a platform, but the way I understand it's kind of closed platform that you own all the pieces of it and you are kind of doing the integration uh yourself in the back end, right? Have you thought about opening it up so that you know other CPF firms can plug into your platform or other investment advisory can plug into the platform and people can kind of give their own advice and the platform can kind of rate them on the basis of what type of advice they are giving, and that people can have a you know choice of picking, okay, I want to be on your platform, but within your platform, I want to pick this CPA firm, you know, uh this you know uh trading firm and this insurance firm and this form for estates and things like that.

SPEAKER_01: Yes. Um and I'm very glad to share with you that Alphiva does that. So if you go to Alphiva.com, there is a home page and there is an advisors uh button too. So if you press advisors, we encourage all the CPAs, all the financial advisors, all the insurance advisors, loan brokers to come leverage Al FIVA for their respective customers. What it does is let's say you are a tax advisor, you do you're not a financial advisor, you're not a state attorney either. Now, as a tax advisor, you have 250 clients.

SPEAKER_01: To all your 250 clients, you you are now getting more superpowers through Al FIVA to give financial advice, estate planning advice, insurance and loan advice. What it does for you is it helps you to offer far more value to your customers, differentiate your offering from the other competitor CPA firms, increase your revenue stream multifold without increasing your workloads, and reduce your churn from your current customers by 40%. So typical CPA in the country manages around 250 clients, a typical financial advisor in the country manages 110, 120 clients.

SPEAKER_01: We and we encourage all of them, and through your podcast, if there are viewers, listeners who are running their own CPA firms or financial advisory firms, I strongly encourage them to check us out and see how we give you even more superpowers than you already have to deliver far more for your customers without increasing your workloads.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, that that's great that you you are doing that. Uh now let's talk about your uh org chart, right? The people who are uh there, right? So there are different advisory firms, like they might be partners, like you might have some of your core who are um you know uh the core team as part of the employee, right? So, how are you structured and how are you incentivizing your employees and your partners to ensure that their interests are aligned to the overall uh company growth? And how much freedom do people have within the company to create another product or to uh update uh a particular product and you know contribute to the roadmap of how the product shapes in the future?

SPEAKER_01: A lot of freedom. NetNet, we are a startup. We thrive on innovation and creativity that comes from bringing smart people into the room, have them brainstorm, and then post-brainstorming, execute upon the best thesis by developing a product feature or by developing a new product. Uh we have a program called BYOA, which stands for Build Your Own Alpha. So our customers, our partners, our employees, if they think that certain features, certain offerings, certain workflow could be improved or added, they can share those inputs with us using PYOA and they get financially rewarded as well if their feature or recommendation is incorporated into the Al FIVA product.

SPEAKER_01: Not just that, when we speak with the CPA firms or financial advisory firms, during several demo calls, our partners, these CPA firms, these financial advisory firms, tell us, hey, it would be nice for you to do this or not to do this. And many a times when the feedback is consistent and we take it to the drawing board and it makes sense, we are the first ones to incorporate such feedback into the product, and the product becomes stronger, more value additive, and the customers are happier by virtue of getting a stronger, more value additive product.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's that's great. Uh now, you know, let's talk about the final stage. Like, you know, you are a startup now. Let's say you grow into as big as the meryliths of the world, right? Um now, what would but there is still room for growth, right? So what are the things that, like, let's say you had unlimited resources, uh, funding to invent? What are some things, what are some things on your wish list that you think uh you would want to invest in building um you know new product or no or just research on uh agentic execution is big.

SPEAKER_01: So currently, let's say a client of ours after a year of hard work gets an annual bonus of$100,000. As soon as Alpiva AI sees that coming in, Alphiva surfaces a recommendation for the customer. Hey, we saw this$100,000 amount coming in, and we had also discussed the investment strategy. We are also aware of your goals, your risk propensity, and investment horizon. So here is the roadmap for you for these hundred thousand dollars. Maybe 30% of it could be invested in SP 500, 40% of it could be invested in Nasdaq, 10% of it could be used to retire your high APR loan through your American Express Platinum card.

SPEAKER_01: Remaining amount could be used for other things. Okay, so as soon as the customer says yay, money moves identically from customer's bank account to customer's brokerage account, to customer's loan account, to customer's other accounts where it was intended to go to, without customer individually going to those accounts and moving the money and then investing in this SP 500 and similarly investing in uh Nasdaq, right? So it's a multi-step process currently, but imagine doing it agentically where you just say yay, and your own financial agent executes upon all these transactions for you.

SPEAKER_01: So you're not logging into your Bank of America checking account to move your money to your uh e-Trade or Charles Schwab brokerage account or to your American Express credit card account or to your high yield savings account. Okay. Now, in some other alternative universe, if you have other plans for this money, you say, No, don't do this. I want to travel the world, take a sabbatical for four months. In that case, Alpha will say, sure, how about we move this money in high yield savings account where you can make you know 3-4% in annual percent yield, then making nothing in your Bank of America checking account.

SPEAKER_01: And you say, Yeah, that makes sense. Move that money to high yield savings account, boom, and the money is moved there. Some people may say, Hey, I don't even have a high yield savings account. No worries. Alpha VYI will say, Listen, I have all the details, let me open a high yield savings account for you with your due consent. The customer says, Sure, boom. First, high yield savings account is opened, second, the money is moved there. So it makes life easier and more efficient for our customers with the agentic execution of these transactions.

SPEAKER_00: Now that's the same.

SPEAKER_01: And that's the world that we're moving in.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would love to see that happening. Now, now um one more question in that category. Uh, there have been a lot of hype around blockchain and coin offering. There have been lots of scandals, lots of upside down. It seems like that area is very uh volatile, but I'm starting to hear that it's maturing now and it's going to come back in a big way. Um, out of all the offerings that you said, uh, you did not mention coin offering. Like, is that something you think could be a mainstream now? Are you looking into it?

SPEAKER_00: Are you thinking of adding it into your portfolio or within your service category?

SPEAKER_01: So that's just an investment product. If some people want to invest in stable coins or Bitcoin, they can do that with their same brokerage. We didn't even talk about stock offering either, right? That's not Alpha AI's job that, hey, listen, you should invest in Nvidia or you should invest in PepsiCo or you should invest in this specific stock. So consider like these stable coin or cryptocurrency offerings similar to product categories. We didn't even talk about metals. Some people may want to invest in copper, some people may want to invest in gold.

SPEAKER_01: Totally their prerogative. Uh, the job of Lviva is to make sure that we surface those opportunities to you and let you decide.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that's that's great. Okay. Uh what about like the managing external environment? Like, you know, you are in a financial industry, right? So regulation is a big part of it. Uh, I think regulation and financial education, those are uh two big external environments that kind of impact you. Uh, what are you doing in terms of like lobbying for, you know, uh making sure the right regulations get made? And uh, you know, uh in terms of education like coming on this podcast, I don't know, get the word out, but uh in terms of educating people that uh there are options now that you can now manage your own money using AI, right?

SPEAKER_00: So what are you doing in these two categories?

SPEAKER_01: So we are doing roadshows, we are doing podcasts like yours to make more and more people aware of um Al FIVA AI and all the beautiful things it can do to your finances, all the holes that it can plug in your financial ship to make you save as much as possible. Uh a lot of blogs get published by Alphiva. We do different events where we encourage more and more people to participate. These events are listed on you know this uh event discovery platforms like Eventbrite or Luma. So you're more than welcome to check them out.

SPEAKER_01: They're also listed on Alpiva.com. So we are doing in our own small way whatever is possible to make more and more people aware of what power of AI and Al FIVA experts can do for them. And through you as well, I would uh strongly encourage you to let your viewers know as well to leverage. Um, and yes, my team has put together a special offer for you. I would let you speak to it when you get the opportunity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think we are getting to that. So we are heading towards the uh end of the show. Okay, so uh if this episode shifted how you think about AI in your organization, send it to one person who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to act, visit tipsora.com to get certified or reach me directly at arunanthupatnag.com. The intelligence economy is already here. The question is whether you are building for it. That's a wrap on today's episode of What Comes Next. If this conversation gave you a new way to think about AI strategy, share it with someone who needs it.

SPEAKER_00: You can find everything I'm building at tipsura.com, including AI certifications for you and your team. Connect with me on LinkedIn by looking up my name, Arnand Sipatnaik. You can find Lord on LinkedIn. Uh you can look up his name. We'll put all his links in our description. You can visit his company website, alpheva.com. If you sign up for an account, use the podcast code Arun100 to get a 10% discount. So, Lord, any final words?

SPEAKER_01: No, I want to thank you, Arun, for having me over and um loved our chat and the deep thinking questions that you posed on the forum to make um your viewers aware of Alpiva AI. Thank you everyone for giving us a listen. If you have any suggestions, recommendations on adding new products features to Alphiva, feel free to pipe them through the program that I talked about, which is Build Your Own Alpha. The details are on our website, alpiva.com. And thank you everyone for sticking with us uh through the end of this podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Thank you. I'll definitely be checking it out myself, and I encourage all our viewers to check it out. Until next time, build the architecture, the advertis follows.

SPEAKER_01: Exactly. Thank you.

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