Read The Transcript Here:

Steven Jarvis, CPA (00:55.544)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast Financial Professionals Edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA, and I am excited for this week’s episode. I think we’re gonna cover a topic that we haven’t really talked about on the podcast before, which is always exciting for me. I love the opportunity I have to learn new things along the way and to learn from people doing great things in the area they are experts in. So joining me this week from Flourish is Ben Cruikshan, who is the president and chief commercial officer there, here to talk to us about Flourishes background some of the great things they’re doing and then how banking and taxes overlap. So, Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Cruikshan (01:31.234)
Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me, Steven.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:33.772)
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll I’ll be totally honest. And I’m gonna learn alongside my audience here. I was aware Flourish existed. I was not super familiar, but I was really intrigued when your team reached out and said, Hey, would there be an opportunity to talk about how taxes overlap with with banking and some of the things that Flourish is doing and like I said, I love learning new things and there’s so much intersection when we have these money conversations. That was excited to have you come on. But as we get started here, give us give us some background on you and why. What why your place of authority talking about these things and then a little bit about Flourish for people who aren’t familiar.

Ben Cruikshan (02:05.902)
I don’t know about place of authority. I’m I’m on a learning journey just like all of you. Real way deep background. I’ve always been a personal finance nerd. Have no idea why. My dad gave me a book on investing when I was eleven, and here we are. Graduated college, went into a marketing technology startup, got the startup bug, saw a company go from ten people to two hundred along the way, but it it wasn’t intellectually aligned with my background and interests.
I actually joined Betterman, the RoboAdvisor, as a founding member of their 401k team. So helping use the robo in more B2B settings. And then from there hopped over to Flourish about eight years ago, building technology and offering solutions to and through financial advisors. So quite a lot of time spent in the advisory community, took a lot of time spent thinking about financial advice and the intersection with fintech and the intersection of changing market demographics and consumer expectations. And that’s how I find my way onto your show.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (03:02.176)
Welcome. I certainly appreciate you being here to have this conversation. So we can go in a lot of different directions. Like I said, your team proactively reached out and said, Hey, you have Steven, you have this podcast talking to financial advisors about tax planning. There are some tax pieces to what we do. Not necessarily that you guys are directly doing tax preparation or detailed tax planning, but you’re at least acknowledging, like, hey, every money decision, all the things that we do with money has a tax ramification. So what does that mean for you guys that that taxes is at least on the radar of things you consider?

Ben Cruikshan (03:31.938)
Yeah, it’s a great question. Let me, let me start one level higher and then work my way down into tax. We at Flourish believe that advisors are on a journey to becoming or competing to become their client’s sole financial relationship. I don’t think we are wildly unique in that view. There’s generally a a race, whatever you call it. Michael Kitces once ran an article about wealth 3.0. It’s this idea of the consumer of the future wants a single financial relationship, not multiple financial relationships. And the advisors or the entities that are able to deliver that together through an integrated solution are well poised to win. What does that actually mean today? Advisors are very good at holistic financial planning. I think we all would agree on that. When it comes to implementation, they’re still largely limited to stocks and bonds, things that they can do through Fidelity or Schwab or their custodian. That’s still where advisors live and breathe and spend their days. However, I’d say, there’s been expansion in the last few years to cover more adjacent channels. Tax, trust, and estate are always the next three that come to mind of modern forward-thinking advisory firms growing their business, expanding their services, thinking about how do we integrate those into the advisory practice. Well, it’s interesting from our perspective, take a very Lingman approach. If you surveyed a thousand clients of financial advisors and you asked them, who are your most important financial relationships? With all respect to friends in estate and the wealth.coms, nobody is saying they’re a state attorney. They’re gonna say my advisor and my bank. My advisor is that core financial relationship of mine. And by the way, I opened an account at Wells Fargo when I was 14, and I’ve had it ever since. And it’s core to my cash flows, my budgeting, my finances. It’s just like the operational side of my life. And so, us again, this almost perspective, it’s interesting how much. Focus there is in the advisory channel first on investments, then on tax stress in the state and how little there is in banking, recognizing it is such a huge component of the modern consumers’ financial lives. And arguably one of the biggest components that needs to be truly integrated for that wealth 3.0 type of vision. And so in a nutshell, we see ourselves as building private banking-like experiences for financial advisors.

Ben Cruikshan (05:50.306)
So very much started with a product called Flourge Cash. Think of it as a savings solution, often used for the cash that’s sitting in savings accounts today. And we can talk about it. Balances are very, very surprising. There’s a lot more cash held away than most advisors would think. We expanded earlier this year into the first real mortgage and refi platform for independent advisors, more really from the ground up there. And it’s all under this banner of private banking-like experiences through advisors. So that one day the advisor of the future can actually go to their clients and say, Hey, you could you can actually fire your bank. We had capital wealth, we can do everything for you. Then to finally draw the line, banking and tax are inseparable, just like investments and tax are inseparable. When someone’s CPO always says you’ve got an upcoming tax liability, where where does the client actually hold that money? Checking account, savings account. That’s usually where that money is hold. When a client is trying to spread

they’ve got too much cash for the FDIC insurance limit for a bank. And so a CPA gets six different 1099 showing like a dollar ninety-nine at interest in six different places. Like, what is what does that mean? When you buy a house, when you sell a house, are there tax implications? Like, of course, banking and tax are inseparable from our perspective. So we don’t see ourselves as a tax solution in any way, shape, or form. And man, it often runs into the same people at advisory firms who are thinking about growth and holistic value and service and expansion bundling it together of really thinking about all the stuff beyond the portfolio that’s really important to modern consumers.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (07:21.644)
That’s really interesting. Because when I talk to advisors about the tax, you said a couple of things in there that make me think about things I’m saying all the time. One, you mentioned hell hellday assets, which not the core of our discussion here, but I just anytime I can remind advisors that you need to be getting tax returns for every single client every single year for so many reasons. But one of those reasons is I think you’re right, Ben, that for the average advisor, a lot of them won’t start with, let me make sure I really have access, visibility, transparency on every piece of a client’s life. And so that tax return can be a great way to see. Wait, how many different banks am I getting 1099s from? Let me look at that schedule B and see where all interest is coming from. So at least start with a picture of completely what the client has, and then we can move on to how we’re gonna help manage that. But one of the other things that made me think kind of one of the parallels here is that on the tax side, really reinforce their advisors that hey, action is what counts. And action includes seeing this through to execution, including how it gets reported on the tax return, that’s my area of expertise because I’m not the banker in the room, but that brings up an interesting question I don’t hear get discussed a lot of as we talk about all these different money movements and how things happen like the money has to move somewhere. Like there, there, there has to be a place for this, myself included to some extent of yep, I signed up with a bank however many years ago, I don’t even want to say decades at this point, because it’s a lot. And then you just don’t really think about why I would move, how would I move? Is there a point to it? Maybe talk a little bit more about that that piece of it of… For the average advisor working with the average client who’s got they’ve invested a few, they put a few million dollars in retirement accounts, maybe they’re getting close to retirement. Why not just stay with the Wells Fargo or the local credit union?

Ben Cruikshan (08:54.614)
You also said a lot that sparked some interest here, but I’ll try to keep myself disciplined. So let me let me start here. When we started this business launched back in 2018, we’d ask a lot of advisors, how much cash do you think your clients hold? And the most common first answer we would get was one to two percent. Meaning one to two percent of the invested portfolio, the funds at Fidelity, the funds at Schwab, often sitting in a cash sweep vehicle of some kind, but it’s there for… Billing model purposes, for liquidity purposes, it’s the it’s the odds and ends. But that’s where advisors’ minds goes is the thing that I see and I touch every single day. And I’m not that’s very important cash, but it serves a very specific purpose. You then survey high net worth investors directly. And there’s a number of different surveys out there. How much cash do you hold? You’re an investor, I’m asking you. The numbers you get are usually between 20 and 30 percent of their wealth is sitting in cash, meaning. The advisor’s been thinking of, my million dollar client, meaning a million dollars at Fidelity. That person could they have a couple hundred grand sitting in the bank away from their financial advisor? Now, the next response you tell advisors at exact slot, they say, Well, that might be true of other people’s clients, not my clients. We minimize cash drag, we know where every dollar is, we do what’s right for our clients. I now had the satisfaction of eight years of data, 50, 60,000 affluent households, seven, eight thousand advisor on the platform to say. I can’t dispute what you do in your practice. I can definitively tell you what this looks like across the Flourish book for a representative data point for households who have a self-reported net worth of one to two million dollars. So pretty down the fairway advisory client, self-reported net worth one to two million dollars. We had average flourish household balances of $196,000. And we don’t have every penny of their cash. They still keep some amount of cash at Wells or B it A or C to live their lives, pay their bills. You were talking about a quarter million dollars on average. Held away from the financial advisor, sort of out of sight, out of mind. That is a very, very, very big pool of money that’s out there. To kind of unpack it a couple more steps to kind of drive, drive this home. So why is an advisor should you care? A bunch of different reasons. Number one is most advisors in this industry to do right by their clients and help them, you know, achieve that retirement of their dreams or or their financial goals. A lot of clients, still today, still in 2026, have that $200,000 in a bank earning zero. That is material, that six, seven, eight, nine thousand dollars of found interest income across the board. That could go a long way to someone’s vacation, someone’s retirement. That could go offset half of your advisory fees. Value add number one. Number two, though, is a little bit more at what’s in it for the advisor is expand share of wallet. So is your client? Actually, need to keep a quarter million dollars, or do they just do that because it helps them sleep well at night and they haven’t really thought about it? And like you, they set the account with their mom when they were 12. And like here, here they are. And what we actually see, which really fascinating, takes advisor a little bit of time to wrap their head around, the money that’s in Flourish, it’s not coming out of brokerage accounts. It’s coming out of banks. It’s not coming from brokerage, coming from banks. We are net have contributed over a billion dollars to brokerage. Now… Any given client, like you know on the CPA side, you’ve got an older client, they’re distributing. Of course, they’re winding down the portfolio, spending it. You had a younger client, they’re accumulating. But the central thesis is we’ve taken over a billion dollars from banks. Overall the program is about eight and a half billion dollars. So we’ve taken nine and a half billion dollars from banks, helped the client earn a great rate along the way, and then helped advisors generally have conversations like, How much cash is enough? Do you need to save this much? Can we put more of that to work? What are they there for a specific purpose? tax liability, a house purchase, a windfall. Can we get some more of that to work for you in the portfolio? And what you see is expanding share wallet, which good for advisors, good for their clients. And then the final piece of the puzzle I would say is around prospecting. A little bit of an unintuitive one. How many times do advisors talk to somebody and they say, You may I Steven, your services sound great as an advisor? War in the Middle East, gas prices, turmoil. Like I’m just not ready right now. And what I love about cash. And nothing and tax, honestly, it’s a great way to start adding value before an advisory agreement has been signed, before you’ve gone through the painful part of moving over assets. You can add a lot of value. And so, Jip, literally just today, we got an approved testimonial from an advisor who won a $20 million prospect by starting a conversation of how much cash do you have in the bank that’s earning a low rate. And the first one’s like, ” Wow, my advisor is talking to me about things that are really important in my financial life that my current advisor doesn’t really talk about. It’s kind of that that primacy of banking. So all of those reasons add value, expand share wallet, drive prospecting, all in the service of more holistic advice. And I love what you said. We term it as going from advice to implementation. That that’s ultimately the battle to help people actually achieve their financial goals and their retirement dreams.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (13:57.25)
Ben, the other the other thing I’ll add to like why it’s important that we have visibility and access, transparency, and all these things is that like the these words and this is not a knock on you for saying things like comprehensive and holistic. Like I think they’re well-intentioned words. I think I think at some point the marketers got a hold of them and everyone’s like, well, I’ll just say comprehensive. And so one of the things I find ironic about how how some advisors use those words is that they’ve used it for marketing and they haven’t taken the time to say, wait, do I? Do I really do like the dictionary definition of comprehensive, which in my mind is all encompassing? I think that’s a pretty fair description of what that comprehensive word should mean. But how can you do comprehensive planning if you don’t at a minimum have transparency into everything in a client’s financial life? And so these advisors who like they they start with just a portion of a client’s portfolio or they only like, well, I can I can see the IRA and that’s the part I’m gonna re give advice on. So I do comprehensive planning, but it’s like, no, no, no, you do it on this one little area, which goes back to why I’m such a big fan of getting a tax return and seeing where all these pieces are coming from. Because tax decisions, money decisions, investment decisions, these can’t happen in a silo. And so you aren’t truly doing your best work if you don’t have the full picture of what a client has in their financial life. Yeah. If you see one to two percent of their total portfolio in cash, and really they’ve got 10 to 20%, which is the data that you’re seeing. That materially changes our recommendations if we’re not seeing the full, the full picture. I do have to throw in here, you mentioned getting the data, and I love it when people get the real data because it reminds me of, and I’ll get the numbers wrong, but the point will be directionally correct. The the one that always stands out to me is the the number of advisors who think they do tax planning versus the number of clients who think they receive tax planning, which you mentioned Kitces, he had done a survey at one point. I want to say it like 80-20 or something like that. The 80% of advisors thought they gave it. And only 20% of clients thought they receive it. And then I always love the surveys where you ask how many people think they’re above average and like seventy or eighty percent of people say they’re above average, which can’t possibly be the case because that’s not how averages work. And so I love it anytime we can pull real data and not just go off of people’s opinions.

Ben Cruikshan (16:08.43)
So much you said resonates there. And I also holistic, comprehensive, they sometimes you sometimes have to do and they sometimes lose their their their meaning. I think a a hard thing for advisors to grapple with at times is their clients trust them with everything. And yet in our perspective, they’re like they’re like keeping some things on the side. And that’s very natural behavior. And there’s no one who embodies this more than my mother, who was a stereotypical advisory client, you know, stereotypical advisory client has an advisor. And literally refers to the money in the portfolio as Robin’s money, the name of her advisor, and the money in her bank account as my money. And I’m like, Mom, this is completely bonkers that you feel strapped because you’re trying to pay a capital gain that was coming out of the portfolio. Like it’s all your money. And there is a honestly a a a shame sometimes of asking her advisor for for for money. I’ve roadshow this with a thousand advisors and say, Yeah, like that, like advisors ask us, like they’re they’re asking for a raise, they’re asking for a favor. They don’t want to ask us for $15,000 to pay their credit card bill or buy the car or whatever it might mean. And so one thing I I think is really powerful about tax as a non-tax person, wind is powerful about what we do in in in more of the banking sleeve and cash management in particular here, is it is you’re delivering you you’re getting your clients to share everything. But in a very value add type of manner, right? If an advisor just opens the conversation, she says, Hey, here’s the space. You tell me where every one of your assets are held. Again, clients trust their advisors and they might be inclined to like keep a little on the side, or maybe not at that upfront meeting. But four months later, six months later, three years later, five years later, like when is the last time the advisor really went into that comprehensive audit and loaded into e-money or money guide pro or whatever it might be? It drifts all the time. That’s why we have advisors so surprised at the difference of cash holdings versus expectations. But if you get it around at a tax return, like, hey, I need I need all of those 1099s for good reason. Now we can have a conversation about it. For us, I am here to help you earn more on your held-away cash. Therefore, I need to know about your held-away cash. It’s not just for me, advisor, to benefit me and cross sell you on this Y X, Y, A, E, Z. It is to do that comprehensive, holistic thing that’s jargon. But the real version of it, like I’m here and deliver value for every aspect of your financial life. There might be an opportunity for you to earn a lot more on the cash that’s sitting in a bank account today. To do that, we should have a conversation. How much is there? How much do you need? What are rate is it earning? Like it comes from the value add that you gain the permission to have the truly more comprehensive conversation. So I really like that about both tax and cash in particular, and find they really hang together of the, you know, the CPA-oriented advisor who discovers the extra 1099s is kind of a natural lead-in. The cash conversation that uncovers the client has way more bank accounts than the advisor realized. And hey, does that have some implications? Again, just launch mortgage and refi. We’re having advisors discover in the higher network segments, like the client actually owned a second property and like it was a formally investment thing. It’s like, well, that might be material to the relationship. And so, like going more comprehensive through value. And again, I know those are both buzzwords, but but it’s the real meaning, I think, is is there’s a a lot of alignment there.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (19:28.116)
Yeah, when you’re intentionally delivering on those things, those words can absolutely have meaning. I just like to I kinda like to double click on those things and say, hey, like are we delivering the value or are we using the marketing side of it? Ben, I love the way you’re describing that. And to I of course I’m the tax guy, so I I go back to taxes all the time, but there’s so many of those examples you’re giving are are reasons I love advisors getting tax returns every single year. Because the other thing that I’ve found, and I’m sure this applies in the cash management banking space as well, is that… clients use words differently than we do. I mean, you gave the example of your mom talking about Robin’s money versus her money, but eat people with second properties, with rental properties, with different types of investments. I meet a lot of taxpayers who they’ll have their ways of referring to things. And so when a professional comes along and only refers to it in like the professional sense of it, of if I’m only talking about, hey, do you have passive income on a schedule E, like none of that means anything to a client. But if that’s the only way I talk about it. There are there are going to be things that get missed unless I get the real documents, unless I insist on, no, no, no, let’s look at your tax return. And now I can see, wait, where where did this 1099 come from? Or where is this schedule that where’s this bit of rental income coming from? And so that we can then have this conversation because the client never thought about it as a second property. It’s just, that that’s the lake place or whatever they call it. and so unless we unless we see the real documents or happen upon the right questions, we’re missing part of the picture. And I think you were talking towards this in what you were describing of at the end of the day, whether cash management, estate planning, tax planning, investments, whatever it is, this really all should be under the ultimate goal of helping clients accomplish whatever their most important goal is. So there’s never been a client where the most important thing in their life is the rate of interest they get on their cash, or that the most important thing in their life is the amount of tax that they pay, or the how beautiful their estate plan documents, or any of these other things that we do. These are all pieces. To help us helping them accomplish whatever is most important to them. And that might be retiring early or retiring to Europe or putting their kids through college or buying that lake place or whatever, whatever it is, supporting the charities they care about. Clients have goals for this money they’ve worked hard to earn. And we do all these different things that help with the execution and the management of all of this, but it has to be with whatever that most important thing is at the center, or or we’ve we’ve kind of missed the mark altogether.

Ben Cruikshan (21:47.906)
What I also really like about that is it and tax and cash in particular is it connects the short and the long term. Yeah. Because the way advisors are more structurally set up is to answer the question of are you on track to never run out of money or to have a 96% chance of not falling behind, you know, below XYZ income when you’re 96 years old, because that’s our our assessment. And that’s true. And that’s important. And then people have so many more shorter term goals and motivations. And every dollar has a purpose. Some advisors will, say, but how many of them actually connected? Well, you’re looking to take a vacation next year. That’s a little more expensive than you normally do. You’ve got kids going off to college in four years, and that’s gonna radically change your expense base. By the way, are you saving for an appropriate account type? But then four years after that, the expense base goes away and you want to buy a new home and r, you know, refinance your existing home, like connecting all of those things through. And so often when advisors, I think, don’t engage certainly in really the cash conversation, it’s too easy for those things to just… Abstract away, and it’s just about 96% chance, according to eMoney, that you’re not going to run out of money. And I mean that’s that’s important and it is part of the story. And here’s a like a tangible example. Last fall we rolled out a feature called buckets, was one of the most commonly requested features we’ve we’ve gotten, where within a flourished cash account, clients can earmark, I want 10% of this going to this goal, 10% to this, 20% to this, and then direct withdrawals and deposits accordingly. And this isn’t a a give clients the tool and see what comes back type of feature. I think we are finding advisors who are surprised and interested and wow, the client set up goals for their grandchildren. Huh? Maybe there’s something I should ask about and and think about there. By the way, very common goal type, tax liability. Like I know I’m my advisors told me, my CPA told me I’m probably gonna owe forty thousand dollars in April. Like, let me set that aside and earn a really competitive rate on it until I actually need to.. You know, pay it to the to the government. And without a sort of goal-based bucketing type of system, you sort of lose it. It abstracts away in a sense. We like I think the things that we both do make it a lot more real. Like it’s it’s a lot more real. Dollars have a purpose. Do you want to use buckets to segment your cash holdings? Or do you want to do that in your financial planning tool? Or do you want to do that in a spreadsheet? It’s all well and good, but connecting along to the to the short term, I think becomes critically important.

Ben Cruikshan (24:09.536)
And then there’s the real execution. we had about a half a billion dollars go out in April alone. Gross. Hag taxes. On the one hand, you know, it’s not like the most fun two, three weeks of of our of our year. On the other hand, this is what people are saving for. It it was a half a billion dollars this year, and that’s money that earned a higher rate until it had to go out. And by the way, we saw then a lot of money come back because people got refunds and things like that. And it’s it’s connecting every step of the journey. And for that advisor, not only do you have a a tax liability, but where are we gonna hold it? Yeah. Can you earn a you know a a great rate? Should we do something with safe harbor thresholds? So actually, we’re gonna help you earn a lot more on it by paying a little less than estimated coal release throughout the year. Like it’s not rocket science, a lot of it, but it makes a real difference to people’s lives. And like you’re saying. The words that the advisor used might be totally different than the words the client uses, but it’s all I think can be very tangible wins for people.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (25:05.998)
Ben, I certainly appreciate you sharing that perspective and what Flourish is doing. I spend most of my time in this podcast talking about tax planning. I try to remind advisors, and this is for me, this is a more tangible example of I like I do get that there are other things in the world besides tax planning. And as a financial advisor listening to this podcast, I totally get it. And you need to be prepared to help your clients on all of these different pillars of financial planning. And so definitely really appreciate your perspective on all this, Ben. for for everyone listening. Even though it wasn’t the core of our discussion, please, and you’ve heard me say this so many times, but please take seriously that one of the best things you can do to consistently deliver value to your clients on tax planning and so many other topics is getting copies of their tax returns. There, there’s so much you can learn from that that applies to these other areas as well. Ben but before we wrap up, how can people learn more specifically about what Flourish is doing and get engaged with you guys?

Ben Cruikshan (25:58.006)
I’m gonna raise you one for the tax-minded advisors and and CPAs in the audience. When you identify an upcoming tax liability, ask your clients where are they actually planning to save for that? Whether that’s cool, the filings, whether that’s not next April, whether that’s October, great. We identified $23,000 liability. What what next? Is that in a brokerage account? It’s certainly not invested. Is that a position traded money market fund? Do you actually want to manage that? Is that in someone’s bank? Are they earning a good rate on that? You don’t need Flourish to to have that conversation, but go take the next 10 clients and ask them that question and you might start to connect the tax to kind of banking to checking and savings flow in your client’s mind and put the pieces together. so hopefully that having listened to a couple of the podcasts, giving some people some actual items is always hopefully helpful. You can find us on flourish.com. Flourish.com, we’re we’re around. You can email me at Ben@flourish com. We would love to chat and help connect the pieces for some of your audience.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (26:57.75)
Love it. Ben, thank you so much for everyone listening. Yeah, such great advice. I love Ben you making it tactical like that of hey, when we have a tax line, especially as an advisor, if you’re helping create the tax liability, which sometimes you are, you’re generating income. This is great news. Having a clear plan for how those taxes get paid, including how it earns interest along the way. Such great advice there. Ben, thanks for being here. To everyone listening, thanks for being here. And until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.