Louis Green | Prestiq Wealth

Josh Hile: Welcome all. This is Josh Hile, CIO and CEO of Citizen Mint, and we are here with Lewis Green at Savvy Investments to talk to you about his role within the firm and also just how he got into wealth management overall. Thank you for joining us, Lewis.

Louis Green: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Josh Hile: Yeah. And so maybe you can just talk about your background and kind of your path into wealth management. and ultimately what led you to joining Savvy?

Louis Green: Sure, so actually my background started from my father. My father prepared taxes for friends and family, so he really inspired me to start in finance. What I— where I started was at a company called Bankers Trust. I started in the back office there. Bankers Trust was acquired by Deutsche Bank, so I eventually worked my way from the back office to what’s called a portfolio manager. Along the way, I pursued the Chartered Financial Analyst, the Certified Financial Planner designations, and became a financial planner and an investment advisor. From there, I joined PNC Bank for about 5 years, then I joined UBS for 3, and then finally really looking to go independent. So I joined Savvy in April of 2024. I wanted to become a fiduciary and really bring customized solutions to my clients. So I’m very excited to have joined Savvy and Things are working out great here.

Josh Hile: And so just what’s the difference between maybe a fiduciary and what you had experienced in the past and how you kind of like talked and sold to clients previously? Yeah, sure.

Louis Green: So a fiduciary is essentially the utmost trust that clients can have in us, right? We’re always looking to be in their best interest. And I was a fiduciary pretty much for the most part of my career, right? Except for some time when I was at UBS. But I’ve always worked as a fiduciary, even in my mind. And technically, I was required to work as a fiduciary with my time at PNC, my time at Deutsche Bank. It was only my time at UBS where if I was selling product or selling a structured product, for example, or something of that nature, you know, as a broker, that I wasn’t required to work as a fiduciary.

Josh Hile: And so what really drew you to Savvy? And maybe you can talk about the app business model and how they came about and kind of their thought process around the marketplace going forward?

Louis Green: Yeah, sure. So Savvy’s fantastic because it’s supported independence, right? So they allow me to, you know, bring my own brand, bring my own way of supporting clients, uh, to my clients. So it’s been fantastic. They provide all the support, all the technology, all the infrastructure, which really allows me to, to serve my clients in the way that I want to the most. But having a brand, you know, I couldn’t have a brand at UBS. I couldn’t have my own website. I had like an internal website. So Savvy supports all the marketing, all the technology, and they really let us do our own thing and brand ourselves the way we, we see it, we see fit. So it’s been fantastic.

Josh Hile: And so how do you think about branding yourself? Like, what, what is your differentiation for your clients and what are you trying to talk to them about from a differentiation standpoint? ‘Cause I mean, like, for the most part, wealth management can be commoditized in certain phases and factors. So how do you differentiate yourself?

Louis Green: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great question. So I wrote a book, I have a book out there called 5 Steps to Retirement Planning. And really that book is the way I think about it in my work with my clients, right? So it’s not just investments, it’s tax planning, estate planning, financial planning and lifestyle planning as well. So it’s really— I know this term is overused, but it’s a holistic approach to my clients or for my clients.

Josh Hile: And what does lifestyle planning mean just for the normal kind of listener here?

Louis Green: Yeah, so a lot of it, the way I think about lifestyle planning is really focused on post-retirement, but it could mean much more than that, right? Making sure that their income— and income could also be part of financial planning, but it’s really just making sure that they’re going to be able to live the way they want to live, right? You know, where are they going to live? Are they going to move? You know, we help with a lot of that type of analysis, you know, so big purchase analysis, Social Security, Medicare, but sometimes it’s even like life, like loneliness, right? Loneliness is a big problem for a lot of people here in America, especially older men, older women as well, don’t get me wrong. So it’s covering those types of areas, you know, meeting with clients as often as we can to just talk about anything, not just their investments. And sometimes it’s helping them in a divorce situation, right? Sometimes it’s helping them with parents. Maybe parents passed away or parents need help with investment and things of that nature. That’s what lifestyle planning is.

Josh Hile: Got it. And so what’s the typical type of client that you’re serving and what is it like? So just from a demographics point of view, do you serve younger lifestyle, older lifestyle? Is there any specific kind of like thought process around who you serve?

Louis Green: It’s probably pre-retirees, right? So probably my, my core base is, you know, anyone from 50 on. Right? Um, people that are professionals trying to navigate either the end of their work career and also this pending or upcoming retirement. That’s who we, who we work best with. Don’t get me wrong, you know, some of our newer clients are younger professionals who are just getting started. We work well with them as well. But I’d say the core base is Brooklyn, New York, pre-retirees to post-retirees.

Josh Hile: And how do you think about just building portfolios for these clients, and what are you kind of like building those around, and what are they asking for from a portfolio perspective?

Louis Green: That’s a great question. So really what we do is we incorporate the investment planning with the, with the financial planning, right? So when we’re building a portfolio, we typically lead with beta, right? Low-cost ETFs, with portfolios that are managed by Savvy. And then we like to loop in alternative investments where they’re appropriate. Again, these are not recommendations, but the clients that we work with typically have a combination of maybe some private equity, some private credit, maybe some hedge funds, maybe structured products, maybe buffered ETFs. But the core portfolio is typically low-cost ETFs or single stocks, and everything is customized for them. You know, we look at what type of return that they need to earn to achieve their goals, what type of risk they’re comfortable taking from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. That’s how the portfolio process essentially starts.

Josh Hile: And so from an alternatives perspective, how are you kind of building out those alternatives, or what are you thinking about when, like, from a client perspective, is it evergreen structures, is it interval structures, is it drawdown funds?

Louis Green: Yeah, it’s typically been the evergreen structure. That’s been the more popular strategy recently, at least for our clients. You know, I think a lot of the clients are, you know, they want to have some type of liquidity, so it’s nice to be able to tap into that for the evergreen funds.

Josh Hile: Got it, got it. And what percentage of portfolios would be in those kind of like structures, like from an alternatives perspective?

Louis Green: Yeah, it varies. I mean, it could be anywhere from 0% up to, I’d say, about 20%. The maximum 20% might be a bit aggressive, but it all depends on the portfolio, the constraints. If we put together an IPS for them, you know, their age, where they’re at, a number of different factors, but I’d say 0 to 20%.

Josh Hile: And what do you think, maybe this is a little bit of a different question, but what do you think is the number one kind of value add of a financial advisor for these clients? I mean, most financial advisors say like, well, it’s financial planning or it’s investment management or it’s estate planning. What do you— what is kind of that biggest value add that they’re getting?

Louis Green: Yeah, that’s such a great question. It’s a great question. I think it depends on the financial advisor, right? Me, I’ve done so much. Like I’ve done trust work when I was at Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was a trust company. I’ve dabbled in the estate planning. So I, you know, I think if you have a good advisor who can do just so much more than investments, that, that’s the value add. But if I say one thing, it’s just being that, you know, that, that member of the family, right, that they can turn to for anything. And maybe I can’t get the answers, but maybe I can get to the firm or someone else here at Savvy or even someone in my network who can help. So that’s really what it is. The way I think about it is getting them access. to any questions that they have, whether I can answer it myself or the network that I have or the company that I work for.

Josh Hile: And so what about just the current questions you’re getting from clients right now, given that today’s market environment, you know, there’s some level of concentration risk at the S&P 500 level with like all these big companies, whether it’s— and SpaceX adding to that and Anthropic and OpenAI could possibly add to that. How are you thinking about today’s market environment for your clients? And like, how does Savvy play into that for your decisions on like how to position clients?

Louis Green: Yeah, so a lot of clients are asking questions, you know, about the tech space, about all these exciting new names, right? Should we be in them? How much should we buy? How much can we purchase? What’s the appropriate amount of risk? So that’s definitely one part of it. And the way Savvy helps is really by giving us access. Right, so diversification strategies, option strategies, long-short, direct indexing. So Savvy actually provides the platform, they get us access to these names, but also there are other advisors here who we can tap into and we can have conversations with other advisors through a Slack channel and we exchange ideas on a regular basis. So that’s been great.

Josh Hile: Got it, got it.

Louis Green: Yep.

Josh Hile: And what about just thinking about diversification for your clients? Like, how do you think about that? Like, is that just— and I guess, like, liquidity needs for your clients. Is there any specific rules you put into place for any individual clients? And I would assume that’s based on their goals and kind of financial management of those goals over time.

Louis Green: Yeah, these are great questions. So you don’t wanna diversify just for the sake of diversifying, right? You don’t wanna diversify, as some people call it. Yeah, I think you want returns that don’t match, so you want low correlations. So that’s where some of the other products, some of the alternative investments come into play. I think it’s very important. You mentioned earlier liquidity is a big function of the portfolio that we put together. So if we’re using alternative investments, we wanna be mindful of how liquid some of them are, but we’re always designating parts of the portfolio for their short-term liquidity needs, other parts for their medium-term goals, and then some of the more liquid stuff for their long-term goals. So we’re really looking at a comprehensive portfolio for them.

Josh Hile: Okay. And Maybe just to help our listeners, what should investors or advisors rethink today? Is there anything that they should be thinking about differently than they maybe had been traditionally thought about in the past? Maybe you can start with that.

Louis Green: Yeah, I think the biggest thing, I mean, there are a lot of things, right? One of the biggest things that I hear all the time is is it too late? The market has rallied this year and last year. Is it too late to get in? So I really look at that. And I also, I speak a lot about timing, how difficult it is to time the market, what you should do when markets are volatile. You should be comfortable with the amount of risk you’re taking at all time, but just be mindful of volatility and trying to predict. things based on other factors, right? So many clients say, look, I don’t like the political climate, you know, I don’t, I don’t like what’s going on in the world. And I say, look, it’s just very hard to time that, you know, be mindful of the risk, but don’t be afraid of investing, uh, at almost any market, right? As long as you’re comfortable with the risks you’re taking. That’s probably the biggest thing that I tell clients all the time.

Josh Hile: So on that question, so What would you say? Dollar cost average into the market for a new client or go in all at once? Yeah, that’s always the discussion to have.

Louis Green: It’s insane. And usually when you pick something, the opposite works best, right? You know, like I had a client who put some money in recently and we were trying to dollar cost average it and we essentially flipped course, which I didn’t want to do. But, you know, as we reevaluated things, we found out, hey, look, you’re comfortable with this risk. You know, we were very, we were very smart about the portfolio, uh, but, but I think you go all in, um, again, as long as you’re comfortable with the risk and you know what might happen, right? So we know, you know, if you’re all in, you know, you could be down 30 or 40%, right? Uh, how old are you?

Josh Hile: Mm-hmm.

Louis Green: There’s something called sequence risk, which is very important, and we tell clients, look, you know, that’s something you need to pay attention to, right? If you are just out of retirement, and the market drops 30% and you’re tapping that portfolio for income, that can be a big problem for you. So those are things you need to consider. But I think for me, for the most part, it’s just not dollar-cost averaging. But again, taking into consideration your comfort level with the risk you’re taking.

Josh Hile: Yeah. What’s one kind of planning or investment mistake that can be avoided with better advice from a financial advisor?

Louis Green: Yeah, it’s probably— I mean, there is a lot. I’m trying to figure out what’s probably the— you know, the, the— what we just talked about, the emotional investing. You know, there’s so many clients that I talk about not selling. Uh, you know, I remember during COVID I had a client, he was a business owner, um, and, you know, he said, look, I, I know what’s going on in China, um, sell everything. And I said, look, Does it make sense to sell Disney or does it make sense— again, not a recommendation of any stock, but he had some good quality names in there that I thought, hey, look, no matter what happens, it doesn’t make sense to sell these stocks. But to answer your question, I’d say the emotional investing, keeping them invested.

Josh Hile: Yeah, I think that is like keeping invested is the number one value-add an advisor can add because people are emotional and and they get to the point where they want to sell everything and advisor keeps them invested and then the market rebounds and then they’re like, usually they forget about that they wanted to sell everything. They’re like, oh yeah, it was— Exactly.

Louis Green: Yeah, you’re right. You’re 100% right.

Josh Hile: So what about wealth management in general? Where do you think the market’s headed for wealth managers over the next 3 to 5 years? How do you think AI plays into like how wealth management is done with clients over that time period?

Louis Green: Yeah, no, a lot of it’s been— so a lot of my time here at Savvy, you know, we’re definitely, you know, going head-on with AI. So I’ve been seeing some of the amazing things that we’ve been doing on the back end. You know, we’re able to work with our clients at scale because of the infrastructure that Savvy has put together. And AI plays a big role in that. The way we’re able to present financial planning recommendations has also sped up because of AI. But the way I see it going forward is data collection, right? Data collection is going to be easy to gather going forward. So we’ll be able to make decisions at a much quicker pace than we have in the past. I think to me that’s probably the big thing. What-if analysis, different tools that we have available that can provide different outcomes for clients or analyze different outcomes for clients, I should say. Yeah, but definitely encouraged by AI.

Josh Hile: And do you think it changes how many advisors are out there either positively or negatively?

Louis Green: Yeah, I think AI is going to be positive for the advisors, you know, to me. And I think it’s going to expand the number of advisors because a lot of advisors previously, like if you were on your own, you probably couldn’t, you know, AI is going to just make it that much easier for you to be successful. And I think, you know, I think there’s enough clients who need advisors where, you know, we’re not really going to be hurt. hurt by it, by AI. It’s just the way I see it, the way I see it right now. But I think AI will be a plus for the industry.

Josh Hile: And where do you think, like, just from a savvy perspective, how are they going after the market in general to just, you know, differentiate themselves from what else is out there? I know you mentioned technology is one place where they’re trying to do that. Investments may be one place they’re they’re trying to do that. But anything else that we should be mentioning?

Louis Green: Yeah, I think what I love about Savvy and what they’re doing is they’re giving us, they’re giving our clients this boutique approach, right? They’re making, they’re empowering the advisors and that allows us to spend more time with our clients and really spend less time with the things that just don’t have any value for them, right? The account opening process, all those other things that take our time away from the great work we do with our clients. So I think that’s what Savvy’s allowing us to do. And to me, that’s the most important thing. I don’t think there’s anything more important than that client relationship and that face-to-face with that client. And Savvy, with all the things that they’re doing, is just making that much easier for us and we’re bringing that value to the clients.

Josh Hile: Yeah. What about the advisor-client relationship? How do you think that evolves over the next decade? Because there’s There’s certain clients after COVID who are like, hey, I don’t want to meet with you, I just want to do it on Zoom and I don’t meet with you as often. And so, or, you know, newer clients are like, hey, just send me a text or a video and that’s how they want to interact. How does that change over time?

Louis Green: It’s funny, one of the advisors who works here, I think he put something on a Slack channel where he was— it was something in reference to clients and how often they want to meet and how they want to meet. And I think he was surprised that so many of them want to meet virtually. And I was, I was a bit surprised by that as well. But I think a lot of clients now are very comfortable. I think they have to know you, they have to know who you are, you have to have a relationship with them in some way, some way, some form. But I think a lot of clients are just like us, right? You know, do I need to get in my car and drive an hour, or do I need to get on the train? If I trust you, know, just like you and I are having this conversation, there’s nothing wrong with doing it over Zoom. You know, we should meet in person maybe once a year or maybe once every 2 years, but, um, yeah, I think it makes things a lot easier for clients. To your point, clients can text me. We have a compliance, uh, phone, right? My compliance— my business phone is monitored by compliance. They can text me and they like that as well. It gets some very quick response times. So I think this is making it great for everyone.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Okay, switching gears a little bit because I like to ask this question. So what’s one thing that most people don’t know about you or a hobby that you have?

Louis Green: That’s a good question. Let’s see, I played high school baseball against some people who went pro like Manny Ramirez and some of these big guys. And so that’s probably one hobby I think, uh, uh, that people don’t know about me unless you know me pretty well. I bragged about it, you know, being destroyed by a bunch of like future major leaguers in baseball, like, you know, 25 to 2 or something like that. Um, and I think I had this one catch where it was like an over-the-shoulder catch, which in my mind, like, I think I went blind, I went blank. And a scout came up to me and said that was the greatest catch that I’ve ever, um, seen. And, you know, it was just complete luck, to be honest with you.

Josh Hile: you.

Louis Green: So that’s a fun story.

Josh Hile: Yeah, that’s great. So anything else you want to leave us with before we end this right here?

Louis Green: Yeah, I think, you know, first of all, thank you for your time. You know, I appreciate it. It’s been great just knowing you and being on this call. And, you know, I think if it’s from a client perspective, you know, don’t be afraid to, you know, reach out and have a relationship with advisors, or, you know, of course Savvy or myself. You know, I think when it comes to having a financial advisor, you know, don’t be afraid to, you know, be in that relationship, right? Like, I have— I still pay for my taxes, for example. I meet with someone and, you know, I enjoy working with her.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Louis Green: So, you know, clients shouldn’t— you know, they shouldn’t be discouraged by that. There’s a lot of what I read, you know, a lot of fraud out there, right, which still surprises me. Yeah, I know that’s where we’re going, but people still need to be protected, I think.

Josh Hile: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, we appreciate the time, and thank you so much for joining us today, and we’ll end it there.

Louis Green: Great, thank you, Josh.