The best consumer fintech products share a common trait: they make the complex feel effortless. Square turned payment processing into a tap. Cash App made sending money as easy as texting. Wealthfront turned investing into something a 22-year-old could set up in minutes.

Advisory firms, by contrast, still rely heavily on telling. Here's our investment philosophy. Here's your 40-page financial plan. Here's why you should fund that trust. The information is sound, but the delivery asks a lot of the client.

Nicole McMullin, SVP of Product at Wealth.com, spent six years building product at Square and Cash App before returning to wealth management. She sees a massive opportunity for firms willing to adopt a core consumer fintech principle: show, don't tell.

"I think advisors tend to come to meetings well prepared, and a lot of the times you want to have that show-don't-tell moment, but the conversation veers completely off base and you need to take a totally different direction," McMullin said. "It's emotional, it's generational. And the ability that platforms like Wealth have, especially utilizing AI right now — we are able to almost instantaneously take that emotional conversation and translate it and show how this emotional conversation may change their plan, their investment strategy, their tax strategy."

What consumer fintech gets right about the client experience

At Square in 2015, the product team lived by a set of principles: start small, show don't tell, break the rules, give it soul. McMullin still carries those principles into her work today — and they apply directly to advisory technology.

The concept of a "magic moment" is central to consumer product design. It's the instant a user goes from curious to convinced. In fintech, that might be seeing your first investment return in Wealthfront or watching a payment clear in real time on Cash App. In wealth management, that moment is harder to manufacture — but not impossible.

"What Wealth was able to do is give that aha moment first within the document creation of these complex trust and estate plans, and then also pull in people who already had these plans and show and visualize the complexities of these plans," McMullin said. "And that was a major unlock that allowed financial advisors to have that deeper conversation or get to know generations beyond just the first generation."

The parallel to Riskalyze (now Nitrogen) is instructive. That company took Sharpe ratios, beta, and standard deviation — layers of math that most clients would never engage with — and packaged them into a single number. The underlying complexity didn't disappear. It just became accessible. That's the pattern.

For firms looking to create these moments at scale, the key is consolidating client data into a single platform so advisors can pull up the full picture in real time — not after hours of back-office prep.

How to bring show-don't-tell into your advisory practice

For advisory firm leaders evaluating technology or rethinking client meetings, the show-don't-tell principle translates into a few practical questions:

Can your tools keep up with the conversation? Clients don't follow the agenda. They arrive worried about a tax bill, then pivot to whether they should buy a second home, then ask about their daughter's trust. If your technology requires going back to the office to model those scenarios, you've lost the emotional thread. A unified console experience that surfaces relevant data instantly makes real-time responsiveness possible.

Are you leading with visuals or documents? A 50-page financial plan is comprehensive. A visual map of how a client's estate flows across generations is comprehensible. Both have value, but one creates the aha moment. Modern business intelligence and data visualization tools can transform raw portfolio data into the kind of visual clarity that drives deeper client conversations.

Where is your "magic moment"? Every firm should be able to identify the point in the client relationship where complexity becomes clarity. If that moment requires hours of back-office prep, it's worth asking whether better tooling could make it happen in real time.

Are you building for the associate or the advisor? McMullin's early career was spent copying portfolio performance data into Excel, screenshotting it, and assembling client books by hand. If your associates are still doing versions of that work, your technology should be empowering advisors, not replacing them — and that starts with eliminating the manual assembly line.

The bottom line

Consumer fintech companies didn't win by having better financial products. They won by making the experience of using financial products feel intuitive and immediate. Advisory firms that can bring that same sensibility to client interactions — showing rather than telling, creating clarity from complexity in real time — will have a meaningful edge in retaining and deepening client relationships.

The tools to do this are maturing rapidly. The question is whether firms are willing to adopt the mindset that built them.

This article is adapted from a conversation on Next Mile, Milemarker's podcast. Watch the full episode.