Ryan Nauman hosts Zephyr’s Adjusted for Risk podcast from Lake Tahoe and welcomes Zach Conway, CEO of Seeds, to discuss how evolving investor expectations are reshaping wealth management. Conway explains he founded Seeds after seeing a disconnect between advisors’ strong client discovery and the shallow, product-centered approach often used in investment management, alongside inefficient, fragmented portfolio operations. They discuss rising demands for personalization, transparency, values-based investing, and broader solution sets such as direct indexing and alternatives, plus the need to deliver these in unified, scalable UMAs. Conway argues the industry’s biggest threat is its own reputational and process failures more than AI, while noting technology must help advisors provide a better human-led experience. He outlines how Seeds supports deeper investor understanding, proposal creation, and automated implementation, trading, tax-loss harvesting, rebalancing, and cash management.

Learn more about Zephyr here.

Learn more about Seeds here.

00:00 Podcast Kickoff

01:09 Meet Zach Conway

01:40 What Seeds Does

03:18 Why Zach Started Seeds

08:21 Industry DNA Shift

10:55 SpaceX Expectations Example

13:51 Modern Investor Experience

18:13 Human Advisor vs Apps

20:53 Meeting Expectations Today

27:19 AI Balance and Risks

32:34 Scaling New Products

37:08 Biggest Threat Is Us

40:21 How Seeds Helps Advisors

42:45 Where to Learn More

43:02 Final Thanks and Outro

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