Jack Sharry: Thanks for joining us on this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good to have you on board. I’ve been getting out from behind my Zoom microphone lately and have attended some conferences over the past few months. Each of these have provided great insights on innovation and organic growth and the challenges of making both happen. My friend, Amy Young, who is responsible for strategic partnerships in the financial services space at Microsoft, and a guest on our show, hosted an innovation summit recently at the New York CFA Society. Amy invited me to emcee and speak at the event where I met many who are doing some really interesting and innovative work. One of those is our guest on today’s episode of WealthTech on Deck. Her name is Christine Simone. Christine is the CEO and cofounder of Caribou. As she will share in a moment, Caribou sits in the intersection of healthcare and finance. No surprise here, but healthcare is the top financial concern for Americans. And with good reason as costs account for 15% of one’s assets during retirement. Christine and her team cultivate financial clarity and confidence through optimized health care planning. And we’re glad to have her on the show. Christine, welcome. Thanks for being on WealthTech on Deck.

Christine Simone: Thank you so much for having me here, Jack. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Jack Sharry: Me too. So Christine, I was quite taken with your presentation at the CFA Society innovation conference, you were on a group of panelists who are further out than some in terms of being innovative. And I really thought your idea was very creative. So I can’t wait for our audience to hear about it. One statistic stood out, your service saves clients of advisors on average of more than $6,000 per year. And I think it was a much higher number than that. But that’s what I recall. Let’s start with you providing your perspective on what you do at Caribou, who you do it for, the kind of results you produce for advisors and their clients.

Christine Simone: Yes. So we are essentially helping clients better optimize and choose their health insurance plans. And just like an investment strategy or a financial plan, you wouldn’t set it and forget it. And that’s where a lot of the cost savings do come into play. A lot of people pick their health plan and then for 5, 10 years, they don’t think about adjusting it. And so we do help clients with that, whether it’s Medicare, the individual marketplace, because you’ve retired early, or even if it’s your group benefits, it’s really important to realign your needs with the health plans that are offered in the market. Even if your needs haven’t changed, let’s say you haven’t gotten any new doctors or you haven’t gotten any new medications, it’s possible that the plan that you’re on changes every single year. So that’s where we do measure cost savings for our clients. It is on average, $6,600 a year that we save clients across premiums, drug costs, premium tax credits, and a couple other different areas. But really, a lot of advisors are actually engaging us not only during the open enrollment window, which is when those cost savings come in. But when their clients go through really big life events like retirement, Medicare eligibility, they lose a job, they’re moving, they are recently widowed, or maybe going through a divorce. These are all opportunities where advisors can engage us and our team to be able to expand the services that the wealth management firm offers to provide more comprehensive planning to clients, and really support them through those really, really critical and important moments in those clients’ lives.

Jack Sharry: So tell us a little bit about how you work with advisors, talk about that dynamic. And I’m also dying know how you got started with this whole thing, but we’ll get to that in a minute. But talk a little bit about how you work with advisors and how you’re able to help them out. And do they tend to sit in with you? Or do you do this independently and report back? How does that tend to work?

Christine Simone: So it’s really a partnership that we, we form with the firm. So when we work with the firm, we are one of the service offerings that they’re offering either to all of their clients or maybe to an exclusive group of their clients. And really our job is to act as an extension of that wealth management team. We’re not trying to be a siloed offering where clients are engaging with us independently, we really do want to be part of that financial planning team and the wealth management services that are offered at the firm. So more specifically, all an advisor needs to do is they add a client’s name and email into our platform, and they send that client an invitation. The client will then fill out a profile where where they will disclose their medications, their doctors, their income, other really important health information and preferences and priorities that they might have. For example, if a client has a second home in a different state, or wants access to an HSA, or wants a broad network of providers instead of a limited local network, these are all things that they’ll express to us via their profile. And when they submit that information. Then there’s an analysis that’s produced, there’s actually a deliverable that’s going to highlight the best health plans available in the market for this client. And then we will walk the client through the results of that analysis, explain everything to them, and have the advisor engaged in that conversation. And that’s the most critical pieces, that when we’re talking about HSAs with a client, the advisor is engaged, or premium tax credits, or the client’s income and how that’s going to influence their premiums, either through a premium tax credit or IRMAA adjustment on Medicare, the advisor needs to be involved in all those conversations. So we engage the advisor in those moments, but ensure that we’re the ones providing that health care expertise, so that the advisor doesn’t need to become the health care expert.

Jack Sharry: We’re gonna get into this in a little bit. But my observation of having worked with advisors for a very long time, they’re uncomfortable talking about subjects they don’t know much about. They’re afraid of that question they might get that they just don’t know how to answer and don’t want to look bad. So I imagine you really not only make them feel comfortable, because it sounds like you know every answer to every question, but also can provide the guidance that turns into a $6,600 per year savings. Is that… do I have that right?

Christine Simone: Yeah, absolutely. And even when savings aren’t involved, like let’s say you’ve got a client, that newly diagnosed, new chronic condition. In those moments, you’re looking to provide best quality coverage possible, ensure that they can get access to the doctors they want to get access to. So all of the cost savings can be nice sometimes. Sometimes that’s not the priority, right? So having the advisor involved in that conversation and knowing that, hey, this client’s health care costs are about to increase significantly because of this illness or something that’s happening to them this year. That’s really important. To your earlier comment, it’s one of the top expenses that clients will incur in their retirement, it’s one of the top three.

Jack Sharry: Absolutely.

Christine Simone: So it’s really important for the advisor to be involved. Even if as an advisor, you aren’t confident in your health care knowledge, it’s worse to outsource it and not be involved at all than to work with a partner like us that can help bring that expertise in house through the firm.

Jack Sharry: You mentioned healthcare is one of the top three, what are the other two? I’m curious.

Christine Simone: Transportation and housing.

Jack Sharry: Okay. So, how did you get started? How did you come to be such an expert on such an important topic that no one seems to want to talk about?

Christine Simone: So my background is all in the healthcare field. I’ve never been an advisor, nor will I think I will ever be one in the future. I’ve had to learn everything about the financial services industry, just by learning from our existing customers or people, prospects that have turned us away, and then told us why. Like, that’s who I’ve learned everything about financial services from, which I’m really grateful for. But what I bring to the table is that healthcare financial knowledge, and understanding how critical that is. A lot of my past life was working for digital health, medical device companies, understanding the ins and outs of the health insurance landscape, the way that the incentives work, payment structures. And you know, ultimately, we truly believe that the financial advisor is best positioned from an incentive structure to really help clients understand their healthcare costs, and support them through making this decision. You know, if you outsource it to an insurance agent, you open potential risk of them putting their best interests ahead of your client’s. And so as a fiduciary, you really want to make sure that you are taking this into consideration with clients.

Jack Sharry: I’m learning stuff myself on all this stuff. And I am a client of health care providers, it’s called Medicare. Anyway, for another time, we’ll…

Christine Simone: Probably hard for you to understand Medicare and find resources.

Jack Sharry: No idea what they’re talking about.

Christine Simone: Yeah, exactly. So, if you had an, I don’t know if you have an advisor, but if you had an advisor, wouldn’t it be nice if they could help walk you through that, help you make sense of it all, and help you pick your health plan every year and make adjustments?

Jack Sharry: I think we’re gonna talk afterwards. So, Christine, tell me a little bit about what you’re especially excited about with the work you’re doing. It sounds like you’re, especially with all the boomers, you’ve probably heard the expression peak 65. More people turn 65 this year than at any point in history since or going forward. So a lot of people getting older and of course with that comes healthcare issues, concerns, costs, and all that sort of stuff. So tell me about what you’re excited about. What are you working on? What are the things that you’re… where you’re able to help advisors and their clients?

Christine Simone: Yeah, so clients, I think, well, not just clients, any American on average, almost 12,000 people I think last I checked, turn 65 every day. That’s just part of what we do. We work a lot with early retirees or contractors, small business owners, students, we work with a lot of different segments of the market as well that need this support just like a retiree or somebody who’s 65+ would need. Now that being said, somebody who’s 65+ probably has more healthcare needs, probably thinks about this a lot more, it’s taking up more of their finances. So it’s definitely a higher concern. But we do work with a lot of different types of clients, the average age of our client on our platform is actually 61. So usually, we’re meeting the client as they’re thinking about retirement, planning that retirement, maybe they actually do retire before Medicare eligibility, and then we work with them again once they’re Medicare eligible. So things like the aging population definitely work in our favor. Unfortunately, things like more and more chronic disease do work in our favor. That’s not necessarily what I’m most excited about. I actually wish that wasn’t the case. I think what most excites me is that we’re seeing a transformation in wealth management and financial services towards more comprehensive holistic service offerings. We’ve seen tax planning grow from roughly low 20% to over 40% market adoption, we’ve seen estate planning grow from 5% to nearly 30% market adoption all across the last three years alone.

Jack Sharry: So tell me about that. When you cite those numbers, why don’t just you translate those, if you would.

Christine Simone: Meaning that more and more advisors are offering estate and tax planning. And so, the reason why that excites me is because there are technologies available that enable the advisor to do it. They’re leveraging technology to do it. It’s not because they became attorneys, or they became CPAs and had to learn all of these things. It’s because there’s technology that’s been introduced, there’s a number of different vendors that address these specific problems. And so the same will be true of healthcare. We really strongly believe that. We are on definitely the cutting edge leading that charge in terms of developing an offering for healthcare planning that is unbiased and objective. There are some tech enabled brokers, for example, where that’s not necessarily the case. So we believe that advisors will continue to grow their adoption and acceptance of tools like ours, which is really, really exciting because we are where estate planning was three years ago with a 5% market adoption in the market today.

Jack Sharry: So it seems to me that advisors can’t provide comprehensive advice without considering health care. Yet advisors, like all of us, are creatures of habit. We typically don’t understand the ins and outs of health care. I know I don’t. And behavior change is hard. I’m sure this is all stuff you have to deal with. So how do you help advisors break the habit of avoiding topics where they’re less knowledgeable or more uncomfortable?

Christine Simone: So we help advisors proactively identify different life events where this is relevant. And I named a number of them already throughout this episode, retirement, Medicare eligibility, moving, losing a job, your COBRA expiring, your kid turning 26 and aging off your policy. Those are all opportunities for advisors, we call them life events, that they can engage their clients. So that’s step one, it’s helping educate the advisor on the opportunity and the life event to engage their client proactively instead of sitting back in their seat, and hoping that their clients don’t come to them with healthcare questions. We actually encourage advisors to be the ones to approach their clients. Because if they’re not getting that advice from you, it means that they’re getting it from somebody else. So that’s step one. Then when it comes to actually leveraging the platform that we provide to advisors, really, we take all the heavy lifting off their plate, we’re the ones providing the healthcare expertise. We’re walking clients through the analysis, answering their questions about specific benefit nuance, but the advisor is involved along the way. And we encourage them to be involved part of that conversation so that if more complex financial topics come up, or if we’re talking about the client’s income in retirement, and the advisor says, “Well, wait, what about that Roth conversion we had planned?” That’s going to impact the client’s premiums. So I think the way that we do it is intentionally by design, whereby we provide all the healthcare knowledge but allow the advisor to be included, because we understand they don’t want to be the expert. But if we can help them proactively identify the opportunity, and then handhold them along the way, we believe that’s the winning approach.

Jack Sharry: So what I’m observing across the wealth management industry is that it really needs to be far more comprehensive than it’s been historically. Before, it was much more about a product and a performance and a beat a benchmark and all that kind of stuff. That clearly has changed a whole lot and has a lot more to go. But in the case of what you’re doing, I’m interested in the dynamic of you sit down as the adviser the client and you sort of talking about the health care piece. I got to believe that’s an important part of what becomes the financial plan because that’s such a critical part from a cost standpoint and just overall impact standpoint. So talk us through that a little bit. What does that look like? What’s the role you play? What happens with advisors when they get that aha about where their, what their situation is around healthcare? And then how that plays out in their plan, financial plan?

Christine Simone: Yes. Such a good question, because I’ve not talked about this yet. Status quo, if I could first address what advisors are doing today, is they’re using their financial planning platform, or some type of cost calculator, based on, you know, maybe a few inputs, location, age, plan type, meaning Medicare. But as I’m sure you learned, you can configure your Medicare coverage in a lot of different ways. And so that can really drastically influence your actual costs. And also, depending on your medications and your health needs, you might pay a different amount of money out of pocket because Medicare doesn’t cover everything, I won’t get into it. But your drug costs alone, for example, are uncapped. So the estimates that are produced by the financial planning platforms, or any online calculator, or if you just use an industry average or actuarial data, it’s often inaccurate, it’s not enough for the client. And so the beauty of supporting your client through helping them make a health plan decision is that we provide you with an actual health care cost estimation. And that’s based off of the actual health plan that the client selected. So I actually was speaking to an advisor that we work with this morning. And she said, one of my clients very suddenly had some type of catastrophic event, we didn’t get into what it was, but I’m assuming she broke something or she went to the hospital. And the client asked her, you know, “What does this mean for my health care expenses this year?” And the advisor was able to log into Caribou, go to the analysis, look at the specific health plan that we had kind of put there for her to enroll in which she had, look at the deductible, look at the out of pocket maximum and say, “Look, you’re gonna reach this out of pocket maximum. This is your total expenses this year. We don’t have to worry about anything above that.” And she had said that was so meaningful for the client, because in that moment of chaos and crisis, right, she was in the hospital, the advisor was able to provide some clarity around what she was expected to spend.

Jack Sharry: So tell our audience, tell me, about the peace of mind you tend to generate. It seems just so well set up to really create peace of mind, both for the client, for sure, and then the advisor, because they’ve got it handled. And that’s something they probably don’t know a whole heck of a lot about.

Christine Simone: Absolutely. I mean, you, you mentioned our mission statement, to provide that financial clarity to individuals. And that’s really what we’re doing. That’s what clients tell us, “I was confused, I found this to be very complex. And then you came along, and you made it all simple and easy to understand.” And that’s really what advisors are doing with financial topics, right? It’s the same value proposition that we’re extending to healthcare. And as clients age, their healthcare costs will increase, their need, their health care needs will also increase. So if you can simplify that for them, it’s so valuable. And that’s really most of the feedback that we get, the positive feedback is all around, thank you for helping me make sense of something that made no sense to me before. And again, they… we want them to attribute that to their advisor, not to us, we’re in partnership with you, the advisor. And so we want them to tell you that, not us that. We’re your partner in this, but we want you to get all that credit.

Jack Sharry: So two questions. How do you get paid? Well, we’ll just start with that. Tell us about the business model. The other question is, for those who are in our listening audience who run firms and might be interested in including this, do you work at the enterprise level, individual advisor level? Talk about both, if you would.

Christine Simone: Yeah, so when we work with a firm, we’re working with the entire firm, typically speaking, unless they’re a large national firm, then the arrangement might be slightly different at the advisor level. But in most cases, like RIAs, for example, we’re working with the whole firm. We partner based off of anticipated household use, so we won’t charge you for your whole ADV and all the accounts that you have, it’s basically an estimation of what you think your use will be over the upcoming year. You can take it slow, or if you know you’re gonna get a lot of uptake and adoption, you can get preferred pricing to buy in higher volume. And so we generate no revenue, no money from insurance companies. We don’t make any commissions, we don’t sell any products, we don’t sell your client data, or anything like that. That’s the only fee that we charge. It’s a per household fee is the way that you can think of it. So at the individual client level, there’s a fee that’s charged per household that goes through the process with us.

Jack Sharry: Gotcha. And if we did have some folks listening in who said just… “This sounds like a good deal for my firm.” How do they reach you, how do they find you?

Christine Simone: So, you can find us in a variety of different ways. Our website, caribouwealth.com, is probably the best place. You can book a call direct and we’d be happy to show you the platform, walk you through a demo, and better understand your firm and how we could help deliver value to your clients. I’m on LinkedIn, you can find me by my name, you could shoot me a message there as well. Always happy to meet new faces and learn more about potential customers in the future. So you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. One last question… actually, three more questions. What’s your crystal ball predict around how to incorporate healthcare into the financial planning process? My experience so far is it’s not as integrated as as what you’ve described. But it seems like change is a comin’. So talk to me a little bit about what, what does your crystal ball hold in terms of where we’re headed?

Christine Simone: Yeah. So I think the way that most people look at it right now is that financial planning for healthcare is getting some type of a number into the financial plan. And I think that’s not enough. So the mindset really needs to be, how can I help my clients make smarter decisions about their health care costs? How can I help them in these life events that are core to their financial plan, like retirement? You’re working with these clients towards their retirement for tens and dozens of years, right? So how could you possibly omit one of this, like this very, very critical part of their retirement or turning 65 and engage clients past their retirement. So we believe that as an advisor, it’s your role to really help them make smarter decisions, reevaluate their costs, optimize their costs, help them save money in the opportunities where they can, and help them make smarter financial decisions related to their health care, just like you help them do with their investments. It’s not about getting some crystal ball number and including that number into your financial plan. It’s more about supporting their decision making is the way that we really believe it’s going.

Jack Sharry: Very cool. Very cool. So we’ve… as we look to wrap up, what are some key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience, something they should know and be ready to take action on as they proceed in their business.

Christine Simone: So what I would encourage every advisor to do, if you have access to your CRM, whether you use Salesforce, Redtail, or a variety of others, go and look at how many of your clients are turning 65 within the next year and a half. Similarly, try to think, because you probably don’t track this in your CRM, but try to think of how many clients you have that are retiring within the next year and a half. You could think about how many clients are moving, you could think about how many of your clients are turning 26, that you could look in your CRM, maybe you want to engage that next generation, your clients’ children, which we all want to because of that generational transfer of wealth. So you could do this exercise, I could give you a longer list of homework, but maybe let’s just keep it at those four types of life events. So retiring, turning 65, turning 26, and I think I said moving. Those are four life events that you could actually probably go into your CRM and pull a shortlist of, and then admit to yourself that it’s more than you thought, like this comes up more often than you think it comes up, I can almost guarantee it. So if you have clients on that list that you want to engage in more comprehensive financial planning, whether it’s me or someone else, please reach out, just try it, just try and see what it could look like to support these clients through actually helping them make a decision related to their health insurance in those moments.

Jack Sharry: Probably they should only do it if they want to save, on average, $6,600 per year for each client. But I’ll leave our audience with that thought. So, Christine, this has been terrific. I really have enjoyed the conversation. I had the opportunity to watch Christine on a panel, and I said, “Wow, what a great idea.” That’s what I love about going back to conferences. It was a while there for… where I didn’t, but it’s wonderful to be back and wonderful to have you on the show. So one last question. My… always my favorite. What do you do outside of work that you are excited or passionate about that people might find interesting or surprising?

Christine Simone: Yeah, so I live in San Francisco. So I feel like the easy thing to do would be to say that I love to ski, I love to hike, I love to be by the water. I think that’s 90% of people here would tell you so I thought a little bit harder about the question. And I’m, in a lot of senses I spent a lot of my time watching sports, actually. And I’m a tortured. Dallas Cowboys fan. I’m a tortured Toronto Maple Leafs fan, which is a hockey team. And I, luckily not all three of my teams absolutely stink, but I’m a Manchester City fan. I have been following them for 15 years before they got good. So I deserve that they’ve been on a great winning streak lately. Like for example this weekend, I’ll be watching the Champions League final. Man City is not in it. But regardless, that’s how I do spend all my minimal free time, actually. A lot of it is spent watching sports.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, I’m sure you watched Brexit, right?

Christine Simone: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Jack Sharry: So this has been great, Christine. Really appreciate it. So, for our audience, if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we do here at WealthTech on Duck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again, Christine. It’s been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

Christine Simone: Yeah, this was a lot of fun, Jack. Thanks so much for having me.