What is the Advisor Effect and what does the future of advice look like? In this episode, Ned speaks to Josh Book and dives into the changing landscape of financial advisory. Josh began his robo-advisory journey in 2014, when there were few use cases and barely any information on the robo-advice field. Josh and his team of data scientists built a research program to study consumer experience in the context of saving and investing, an area that was untapped especially in the increasingly digital age. This, and the desire to provide executives with a lower cost yet innovative system to evaluate data, led to the start of a cool, boutique strategy consultancy centered around consumer data. Through his research, Josh noticed that people who were already consumers of wealth management services, primarily through an advisor, were much more aware of the category of digital advice and more likely to use such services. Furthermore, users of digital advice were also much more satisfied with the digital experience as compared to those who engage traditional advisors. This means that clients were experimenting with digital advice and liking the tools. Josh terms this gap between users of traditional advisors and users of traditional as well as digital advisors as the Advisor Effect. Josh and his team look at the attitudes of consumers, more specifically utilizing psychographics, in order to segment the consumers. For example, they assess the comfort level of clients consuming information through digital formats and human interactions. Josh believes that the future of financial advice would essentially consist of digital experiences that affect consumers behaviorally, much like how social media works today.