Devin Salinas joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization in early 2020. As a wealth management advisor and managing director at Northwestern Mutual Santa Monica, he’s seen the need for financial planning grow during the pandemic. 

What is your advice during this time of uncertainty? 

Seek professional advice. Financial success is built on a foundation of discipline and consistency.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received—and that I consistently share with my clients—is that we should never make long-term decisions based on short-term emotions or circumstances, particularly when it comes to our finances.

A financial plan should never be set in stone, and especially in times of turbulence it’s important to have a relationship with a team that understands your goals and can help navigate the ups and downs.

What is your specialty?

Integrated comprehensive financial planning. It’s not about picking investments or buying insurance products; it’s about combining investments and insurance tools through a written financial plan that helps our clients achieve their goals as efficiently as possible.

How has your business changed during this time? 

We are growing! While much of the financial sector and global economy is contracting, we have more demand than ever to serve our clients in the local community. We’re committed to continuing to bring in top talent to help us serve our new and existing clients.

Should people continue to save for retirement during the pandemic? 

Absolutely! One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to time the market. It’s nearly impossible to pick the exact right day to get out of the market and certainly to try to time when to get back in.

History has shown that time spent in the market rather than timing the market has been a true driver to success.

What’s most rewarding about your work?

Seeing our clients actualize their vision. There is nothing more rewarding than helping our clients pay for college, transition into retirement with confidence or plan to transfer their hard-earned wealth to the people and causes they care about most.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog

The post Financial planning during a pandemic appeared first on THE BLOG.

Original Source: blog.eonetwork.org

Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (“EBITDA”) is a metric used to evaluate a company’s operating performance and how much profit they’re bringing to the bottom line. The economic volatility brought on by COVID-19 has impacted EBITDA across the Financial Services sector. Market leaders are adjusting their digital transformation strategies, focusing on reducing risk and operating costs through advanced data analysis – with the goal of improving bottom line performance. Key questions being addressed include:

What parts of the business represent the greatest opportunity to reclaim EBITDA – cybersecurity, default prediction, compliance penalty reduction?
Do you have the right data today to drive positive change in those areas?
Are the right processes and systems in place to support the business with Machine Learning and AI capabilities?
Are you prepared to support and scale these capabilities as they grow?

Since the pandemic, digital transformation in the relatively risk averse Financial Services industry has accelerated 10 years in the last seven months. Financial Services companies are getting tangible value faster from Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, and we’re seeing a distinct operating model shift & massive disruption, which isn’t following any organization’s timeline.

What are some of the leading practices when it comes to reducing time and cost with AI and Machine Learning capabilities?

Cisco ecosystem partner, Delta Bravo AI delivers value from data faster, bringing multiple sources of data together in a single pane of glass for secure advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI deployment. According to CEO Rick Oppedisano, “…Delta Bravo’s solution architecture enables our customers to deploy a secure and compliant data science environment quickly on the infrastructure that works best for them. Our technology significantly reduces the time required to prepare, analyze and model data, a significant advantage in this volatile COVID business climate…”

Predictive modeling and Anomaly Detection are two valuable areas in the Financial Services and Insurance verticals. Strategic considerations include:

What parts of the business have disjointed systems or processes that impact forecasting?
What forecasting models are stale?
Could these models benefit from additional data sources like weather or e-commerce?
What trends and transactions are outliers and represent risk? Could we have seen them coming in advance?

To communicate more effectively with customers, employees and to make decisions faster, Financial Services companies need to deliver real-time analytics and predictive modeling. To reduce time and cost with AI and machine learning capabilities, Delta Bravo AI provides the following:

Fully managed data science platform built for Cisco Hyperflex/Container
Use Kubernetes open source container orchestration to supercharge performance on the compute layer and optimize resource utilization
Ingest data quickly from any source, including databases, applications, and sensors
Faster testing, deployment, integration, and scaling of models
Brings capabilities of open source and third-party technologies under one roof and security model

For business continuity in the next normal, it is critically important now more than ever before for strong leadership and collaboration between IT and business teams, aligning capabilities with growth & cost strategies to drive digital transformation, and focus on specific use cases like detecting transaction anomalies, reducing regulatory risk, and fighting fraud to help customers solve problems right away. Please contact Don Gest to talk further.

To learn more about connecting your organizations and building a network you can trust check out our recent webinar, the FSI home page, or contact sales today.

And don’t forget to read the complete Connected Experiences series to fully understand all that Cisco’s Connected Experiences has to offer your financial institution.

The post Competitive Advantage in the Next Normal – Business Resiliency, Analytics & Predictive Modeling appeared first on Cisco Blogs.

Original Source: blogs.cisco.com