Diane Moca: Welcome to Talking Cities, I'm Diane Moca. Today we're talking about money, and I'm with Lisa and Mark Bova. They are financial advisors and co-founders of Lenity Financial. They are also fiduciaries. What is a fiduciary? Lisa Bova: It's a great question, Diane, and thanks for having us today. Kind of think of it this way. Let's say you are going into a store-front to buy fish. You need to buy fish but you've gone into a butcher shop. Well, the butcher is going to sell you meat because that's all they offer. Instead of telling you next door you can go buy fish, they're just going to sell you meat. Right? We as financial advisors, financial planners, must serve our clients for their best interest, not for ours. As fiduciary, no matter what, you come first. Diane Moca: I understand a lot of financial advisors make commissions on some of the funds that their clients invest in. Do you make commissions, does that affect recommendations like you're talking about? Mark Bova: Diane, it's a great question. At Lenity Financial, we don't receive commissions, we are what's known as fee only advisors. Our fee that we assess our client is on page one of their account statement. Diane Moca: It sounds like you're pretty transparent. Mark Bova: Very much so, and that was by intent. Lisa Bova: There's no additional something in it for us as the advisor and, oftentimes, it's called revenue sharing in a mutual fund or it is the cost or fee associated with insurance. We don't receive either of those. The only way we're compensated is directly from our client. Diane Moca: Can someone come to your office just for financial planning or just for investment management? Mark Bova: Sure. Lisa Bova: Absolutely, for either one. We have over 25 years of experience with investment management and financial planning. We love and enjoy both and working with people on both aspects. What we do is called goals- based investing so a needs based investing, and the only way to do that and really meet what the individual needs is to understand their financial life and their personal life, how it interacts with their financial life. Diane Moca: I wonder if you can share any specific example. Mark Bova: We've known these people, wonderful people, we've known them for nearly 20 years. One part of this couple had thought that each year that he was at risk of losing his job. Every single year this company was going through some type of reorg so every year this person thought that they were going to be reorged out. After some time, we got together to do a financial plan and the relief was almost ... You could almost see it ... Like, the physical change after having completed this financial plan and being able to go back to them and say, "Hey look, you guys are in really great shape." Lisa Bova: Yeah. Diane Moca: When you do a financial plan for someone, can you include things in that plan that maybe you don't even offer? Like you said, insurance or, I don't know, real estate, or does the financial plan really only include your offerings? Mark Bova: Trust in the States is another great example, but ... Lisa Bova: Yeah. Yeah, we include everything. I mean, that's the financial planning. It is absolutely not about any products or services, and that's real important for anyone out there looking to choose a financial planner, someone who has no conflict of interest. Diane Moca: I can tell you, a lot of expertise. I understand you're even considered a thought leader by one of the preeminent organizations in finance, Standard & Poor's. That's quite a recognition and I wonder what you do differently that helped you earn that? Mark Bova: One of the things I think struck Standard & Poor's is our goals-based investing. I think when they learned about how much value that we put on a client's experience with money, like how they grew up with money, what was that conversation like within their household? Before we jump off and get into the numbers and the data and stuff like that, we want to know who you are as a person particularly as it pertains to your finances. Lisa Bova: That's something that apparently we've learned is unique in our industry, and so I think that Standard & Poor's found out about that and decided they wanted to interview us and talk to us and share some of that insight that we have found over the years is so valuable with other advisors too. We also have been considered more futurists in the way we invest. Mark Bova: We think that the future is going to be a combination of machines and humans. We're going to continue to work very, very closely with technology, artificial intelligence and investing, we wanted to figure out how we can combine the two. Diane Moca: Do you offer a free consultation? Lisa Bova: We do. Absolutely. Diane Moca: Wow, that's fantastic. I thank you for joining us, sharing your expertise. If you are interested in learning more and discussing your financial future, you can go to lenityfinancial.com. You can contact Lisa and Mark at 630-948-3330 or you can email info@lenityfinancial.com.