Ritholtz Wealth reduces admin time and uncovers key insights with Zoom Revenue Accelerator

Seeking the gold standard for secure client communication, Ritholtz Wealth found it in Zoom’s AI-powered tools and enjoys significant time savings and higher sales numbers as a result.

Company size:

51–200 employees

Industry:

Financial services

Challenges:

Optimizing advisor-client communications

Solutions:

Unified platform, AI note-taking & analytics and Salesforce integration

Products used

Zoom Revenue Accelerator improves every single facet of the company's efficiency and productivity. It's an all-listening, well-focusing, high-functioning associate that's on our meetings at all times, and that's pretty invaluable.

Alex Palumbo Senior advisor and partner, Ritholtz Wealth Management

Giving the right advice sits at the heart of Ritholtz Wealth, a registered investment advisory (RIA) firm focused on providing financial planning and wealth management services. Sometimes, delivering the best services requires the team to think outside the box.

“We have a unique voice in the industry,” said COO Nick Maggiulli. “We are always trying to be on the cutting edge of thought leadership and technology.”

That kind of ingenuity is partly why Ritholtz has more than $6 billion in assets under management. Nick is constantly on the lookout for new tech to support their growth trajectory and improve operations.

“That’s the goal of technology: to make our employees’ and clients’ lives better,” Nick said.

Existing tools limited communication preferences

The trouble was, Ritholtz’s communication tools weren't making anything better. Instead, their limitations meant their team of highly skilled financial advisors wasn’t as efficient as they could be.

Ritholtz previously used RingCentral digital phones for telephony, but experienced reliability and coverage issues. It was becoming clear that Ritholz needed a solution they could depend on.

Optimizing advisors’ time and effort

Advisors were using either Google Meet, embedded in the firm’s Google Workspace instance, or RingCentral, but neither was meeting their needs.

Before adopting Zoom’s AI capabilities, Senior Advisor and Partner Alex Palumbo recalls trying to take note of every important detail from a meeting while remaining present and engaged with the client or prospect. The struggle continued after the meeting.

“We'd spend 15–20 minutes cleaning up the meeting notes, transcribing them into our Salesforce, and then sending them to the right individuals to execute the tasks dictated by the meeting,” he explained.

For many advisors, this could take 30–40 minutes per call, demonstrating a poor use of financial advisors’ time.

Even after all that, management didn’t have a comprehensive overview of meeting activity. Even though the process was time-consuming, it wasn’t entirely effective. Management couldn’t easily identify the most important takeaways to pinpoint the most effective parts of the sales process or to help advisors improve their performance.

Choosing the gold standard in communication

It was time to stop working across multiple systems that were not delivering what the team needed. The team began searching for a single provider that could do everything well. The obvious choice was Zoom.

“Zoom was the gold standard,” Nick said. “It had the right reputation. It could obviously do video meetings, phone, and SMS, but now we could also do note-taking and behavioral analysis. It was all lining up.”

When an enterprise adopts Microsoft Teams, salespeople flip out because the customers prefer Zoom. Zoom is easier for everyone.

Josh Brown co-founder and CEO, Ritholtz Wealth

Ritholtz got Zoom Phone up and running quickly, and Nick said it was a “huge improvement” over the previous reliability and coverage issues.

Advisors can save time and maximize their sales conversations

One of Ritholtz’s big wins came from implementing Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA) for conversation intelligence and time efficiencies. ZRA introduced new capabilities, such as AI note-taking, conversation analytics, and automated CRM updates, via Zoom’s Salesforce integration. It was a night-and-day difference from the communication challenges of Google Meet.

“Zoom Revenue Accelerator works beautifully,” Josh said. “My advisors are hooked on it.”

One reason advisors are hooked is that it saves valuable time. Automated note-taking helps cut the post-meeting manual workload in half.

Saving 15 minutes per meeting doesn’t sound like much, but if I do four meetings a day, that’s an hour I get back. On the scale of an entire organization, it adds up materially.

Alex Palumbo senior advisor and partner, Ritholtz Wealth

Aside from time savings, advisors have more bandwidth to engage with current and future clients during individual meetings. And the ability to review and add details to AI-generated notes means advisors are more confident that nothing will be missed.

Meanwhile, the ZRA analytics offers valuable feedback for even the most experienced advisors. Working with their managers, they can drill down into various elements of a meeting and leverage features like:

Talk–listen ratio to learn how much they’re speaking and listening to the customer or prospect
Longest spiel to understand the longest amount of time they spoke
Patience to grasp how much time they gave a customer or prospect to answer
Sentiment and engagement scores to estimate how engaged a customer or prospect is throughout the conversation
AI scorecards to rate conversations
Indicators to capture critical moments in conversations

With these details, advisors can sharpen their skills and improve with every interaction.

“Some advisors who use it aren’t trying to close business,” Nick said. “They’re just trying to understand their clients better.”

Ritholtz initially introduced ZRA as a pilot project with five advisors onboarded. Five months later, 80% of Ritholtz advisors have adopted the solution in part because the analytics help them do their jobs better.

“It’s [ZRA] becoming so good and so important to my organization that I can’t imagine that is not the case for their [Zoom] other customers,” said co-founder and CEO Josh Brown. [source]

Gaining fresh insights for growth

The analytics within ZRA provide insights and clues that help the team improve performance. They have uncovered fresh coaching opportunities for newer advisors, something Ritholtz couldn’t do before.

From a manager’s perspective, it’s understanding the factors that increase the likelihood of a prospect becoming a client. Then we can train our advisors better, especially those just starting out.

Nick Maggiulli COO, Ritholtz Wealth

“A lot of the value comes from the advisors piece, but there’s value even if you’re not on an advisor team,” he said. “There’s a lot we haven’t unlocked yet. Figuring that out is going to be big for us.”

Using Zoom aligns perfectly with Ritholtz’s plans to enhance technology. Nick has a vision of what Ritholtz Wealth could achieve by combining data from Zoom, Salesforce, and other sources across the firm:

“Imagine if I could see client sentiment changing without having to ask advisors how clients are feeling,” he said. “I could just see it in the data. That’s my dream.”

Contact sales

Request a demo