Expert Series

NovusNorth
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NovusNorth's Expert Series is an ongoing conversation on digital product, design, and AI strategy in financial services. Each episode pairs a NovusNorth leader with a guest expert, including product officers, CMOs, founders, and researchers from companies like Brown Brothers Harriman, AdvisorEngine, Hanover Research, and AuxoAI, for a candid, practical discussion of a single challenge such as replatforming a client portal, building an AI copilot, rebranding a financial services firm, rolling out voice or conversational AI, or rethinking product management for an AI-powered world.

  1. Jul 21

    Replatforming for Growth: How Hanover Research Built a Modern Client Portal

    Geoff Collins, Chief Product Officer at Hanover Research, joins Dave Cowing to walk through the 18-month project of replatforming Hanover's 15-year-old client portal into a modern, personalized 'one front door' for its research and insights services. Collins credits an early, dedicated phase of defining a five-year product vision for shaping both the user experience and the technology stack, and shares standout results including a nearly 70% increase in portal visits within six months of launch. He also details how AI is being woven into metadata generation, survey analysis, and internal operations, always with a human in the loop, and reflects on lessons around stakeholder alignment and the surprising difficulty of making something simple.

    Replatforming for Growth: How Hanover Research Built a Modern Client Portal

  2. Jul 21

    AI Search in Financial Services (Rerelease)

    David Bresnahan, co-founder and Managing Partner at marketing technology firm Chartis, joins Dave Cowing to explain how AI is upending search-driven customer acquisition in financial services. Bresnahan breaks down why traditional keyword-ranking SEO is being replaced by technical optimization, content strategy, user experience, and brand-signal work, and shares striking figures on 'zero-click' search and the shift of consumer research from Google toward tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. He wraps up with practical, low-risk ways financial brands can start experimenting: small pilots, better content structuring, and a sharper focus on where they can realistically win visibility.

    AI Search in Financial Services (Rerelease)

  3. Jul 21

    The Future of Product and Service Design (Rerelease)

    Experience strategist Erin Helcl, founder of New Helio Strategies, talks with Dave Cowing about why product and service design need to evolve for an AI-powered future without losing their human core. Helcl describes AI as an emerging design partner for synthesizing research and exploring ideas faster, outlines three possible organizational futures (converged roles, an 'agent economy,' and a human-centered renaissance), and makes the case that trust has to be designed into a system from the start, not bolted on afterward. She closes with a candid warning against letting AI-generated research replace real conversations with real people, since empathy and context still come from direct human contact.

    The Future of Product and Service Design (Rerelease)

  4. Jul 21

    The New Role of AI in Product Management (Rerelease)

    Veteran product manager Eddie Chin joins Dave Cowing to describe a near-future where AI acts less like an automated decision-maker and more like a persona-aware coach for product managers, designers, and engineers alike. Chin argues for unifying the data that different disciplines draw from, so that product, design, and engineering evangelize the same insights instead of working from separate silos, and predicts that soft skills like team rallying and communication will matter even more as AI absorbs routine analysis. It's a thoughtful take on how the product manager's job changes, without disappearing, as AI tools mature.

    The New Role of AI in Product Management (Rerelease)

  5. Jul 21

    The Role that Brand Plays in Client Experience: A CMO’s Perspective (Rerelease)

    Marketing and branding veteran Marie Chinnici-Everitt, founder of MCE Strategic Consulting and a former CMO across several financial services organizations, joins Michelle Palomera to open NovusNorth's 2025 Expert Series season. Chinnici-Everitt explains what actually drives companies to rebrand, why segmentation-driven client research has to come before any visual refresh, and how to find genuine competitive white space rather than following the pack. She closes with a reminder that brand is ultimately the external expression of a company's strategy, and that employees, not just marketing campaigns, are its most consistent ambassadors.

    The Role that Brand Plays in Client Experience: A CMO’s Perspective (Rerelease)

  6. Jul 21

    Navigating the Future: How AI Copilots Transform Customer and Employee Experiences (Rerelease)

    Amaresh Tripathy, co-founder and Managing Partner at AuxoAI, talks with Dave Cowing about why he believes the next wave of enterprise AI value will come from persona-based AI companions for roles like a nurse, an actuary, or a salesperson, rather than from scattered point-solution use cases. Tripathy reflects on the OpenAI leadership turmoil of late 2023, the challenge of building a technology stack flexible enough to swap underlying models as they evolve, and specific opportunities in financial services around unstructured data, ESG signal detection, and one-to-one personalization. He closes with pragmatic advice for any enterprise starting its AI journey: begin with internal-facing use cases, keep a human in the loop, and expect the changes to compound quietly rather than arrive as one dramatic shift.

    Navigating the Future: How AI Copilots Transform Customer and Employee Experiences (Rerelease)

  7. Jul 21

    RIA Growth: The New Experience Infrastructure (Rerelease)

    Rich Cancro, Founder and CEO of AdvisorEngine, joins Michelle Palomera to unpack the wealth management platform's guiding ethos of Personal, Scientific, and Beautiful. Cancro explains how connecting advisor, business-operations, and client experiences (AX, BX, CX) around one shared data set enables consistent, scalable service, and how newly launched BI dashboards, built from interviews with over 400 client firms, turn raw data into actionable, role-based insight. The conversation closes with Cancro's early, candid take on where generative AI is headed in the RIA and wealth-tech space, from compliance guardrails to more personalized advisor-client engagement.

    RIA Growth: The New Experience Infrastructure (Rerelease)

  8. Jul 21

    Design Matters: How Design Drives Better Outcomes in Financial Services (Rerelease)

    Bob Troyer, founder of RT 322 and former digital product leader at U.S. Bank and SmartBiz Loans, joins Michelle Palomera to make the case for design as a strategic partner rather than a downstream execution function. Troyer recounts how an eight-to-twelve week research initiative underpinned a portal redesign that grew market share by 40%, and explains how reusable design systems saved one client over $15 million in a single year. The conversation covers scaling design through modular components, defining durable design principles, and fostering the kind of creative friction that keeps a design culture genuinely innovative instead of complacent.

    Design Matters: How Design Drives Better Outcomes in Financial Services (Rerelease)
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About

NovusNorth's Expert Series is an ongoing conversation on digital product, design, and AI strategy in financial services. Each episode pairs a NovusNorth leader with a guest expert, including product officers, CMOs, founders, and researchers from companies like Brown Brothers Harriman, AdvisorEngine, Hanover Research, and AuxoAI, for a candid, practical discussion of a single challenge such as replatforming a client portal, building an AI copilot, rebranding a financial services firm, rolling out voice or conversational AI, or rethinking product management for an AI-powered world.

Information

  • Creator
    NovusNorth
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © NovusNorth
  • Show Website
    Expert Series