Chairman's Corner: 2020 Will be a Great Year for Chalice Members

By Keith Gregg, Chairman and CEO of Chalice Financial Network

I’m excited to wish all my friends and colleagues in the Chalice Financial Network a Happy New Year this month. All the more because we’re laying the groundwork for some major breakouts for our members in 2020.

We’ve been focusing a lot of time and attention on building out the Chalice Community, an initiative to connect the 50,000-plus members of Chalice. Together, we’re already part of something truly unique and absolutely different at Chalice. The Community we’rerolling out shortly will make that crystal clear. It will enable you and your peers to connect with, and support, each other as fellow small and midsize business owners.

A number of analogies come to mind for the Chalice Community. For some, Facebook comes to mind. For others, it’s LinkedIn. In fact, there are parallels between the Community, which we hope to launch this quarter, and these well-known social-mediaservices. Like the Community, they also exist to help establish and maintain life-changing connections between users.

Facebook, with 2.5 billion users, and business-oriented LinkedIn, with well over half a billion users, are certainly among the giants of social-media connectivity — along, of course, with platforms like Twitter and Instagram. But there’s another social-media service called Together We Served that connects about 2 million US military veterans and family members. Because of its clear mission, and the commonality among its members, Together We Served reminds me of the Chalice Community we’re getting ready to launch.

Another major business initiative for Chalice in 2020 is focused on providing training and education around financial technology. The Chalice Fintech Institute (CFI) will help members embrace and truly understand fintech at a time when knowledge of things like robo advisors, digital planning, artificial intelligence and so-called crypto currencies are aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re must-haves — at least in terms of comprehending them. We are working to have CFI launched in the second half of the year.

In the Loop

I’ll put it bluntly. Next-generation clients aren’t going to sit around and listen to an advisor pontificate about how great he or she is, and then sort through reams of paper to see how their portfolios are doing. They want to take out their phones and tap on an app to know the value of their accounts, and they want to know you’re there for them.

At Chalice, we believe the future of financial advice is predicated on the advisor being technology enabled and being able to function as a guide to their clients concerning fintech innovations.

We’re building Chalice FinTech Institute and getting ready to certify financial advisors asfintech experts because the market of ideas is crying out for it. I frequently get calls fromFAs who don’t know what to tell clients who want to understand bitcoin, or blockchain trading, or crowd funding as it’s allowed under the JOBS act of 2012.

In 2020, we’re going to start equipping our members to be experts on fintech, just as IMCA — now the Investments and Wealth Institute — started certifying fee-based investment consultants in the 1980s, which laid the groundwork for the investment-consulting industry and changed the face of financial service.

We have a big year ahead of us, with a lot of positive changes — and just maybe a few initiatives besides the Community and the Fintech Institute that we’ll announce in coming months.

Stay tuned, my friends.