Verde Capital Management Innovates Financial Education with Beautiful.ai

Verde Capital Management is an investment company that helps their clients reach their financial goals. They balance long term goals with risk tolerance, and sound financial strategy with a modern approach to help their clients reach success. Being nimble and innovative are among some of Verde’s core business values. As such, innovating their workflow is of the utmost importance for the team. 

Verde uses presentations in many different aspects of the business including employee recognition, compliance reports, financial education, employee handbooks, and client-facing meetings. It’s a crucial part of their workflow, so much so that Verde has nearly 100 presentations in their Beautiful.ai team library.

Delivering their message in a remote environment

When the speed of innovation at your organization is high, and you need to portray that, Beautiful.ai allows you to do so with it’s more advanced features. With things like embedded video, photos, and animations, Beautiful.ai makes delivering Verde’s message more impactful and less complicated than PowerPoint. Something that is especially critical in a remote environment. 

Businesses are at a disadvantage with remote meetings, but instead of simply talking on a video call, Verde illustrates their meeting topics with a Beautiful.ai presentation. As a follow up, they can send a link to the deck and it’s an easy asset for the clients to take with them and reference later on after the meeting is over. “It’s neat because there’s an unintended consequence of sharing a deck link,” Carl Szasz, Verde CEO, says. “If a client has a great meeting with their financial advisor they may be inclined to share their presentation with friends and family which generates more buzz for Verde.” 

Beautiful.ai has changed the way Verde delivers their message to clients. Verde’s COO and compliance Manager, Holly Kamm, adds, “It has helped to make financial education accessible and engaging for clients. It’s something that they want to watch and want to pay attention to.” 

Verde also leverages Beautiful.ai for marketing content. In fact, their team built out their content management system specifically to be compatible with Beautiful.ai so that they could embed their educational decks in the blog articles. It’s just another way that they’re able to make financial education more available and interesting in a remote world. 

Using Teams to control and centralize content

Beautiful.ai is so intuitive and easy to use that the team would create presentations quicker than the executives could regulate them. That’s something that influenced Carl and his colleagues to join the Team plan. The Team plan allows for more policing and content management so that every deck is on brand and up to company standards. As compliance Manager, Holly Kamm, is the Librarian (admin) and manages all client-approved material, shared themes, and decks. This allows her to review branding, track and comment in each presentation, and approve slides before they go out. She adds, “The comments feature is great because I can see what my concern was when they originally submitted the slide, and I can reference the comments and revisions to see if it was fixed.” The Team plan also allows her to save every iteration of the presentation for their internal records.

Managing the approved content, and keeping it all in one place, is an important part of Verde’s workflow. Carl says, “What Beautiful.ai does when used as it’s intended is it creates a knowledge library that captures the knowledge of the organization and keeps it in one place.” Every team has specialists in different areas, with varying expertise, and a shared library allows companies to centralize that content. Innovating the workflow means that you want to be able to do things once and not have to do them over again. Carl explains that in PowerPoint when an employee leaves the company and their machine gets wiped clean, you lose all of the knowledge and files that they had. With Beautiful.ai, that content and knowledge is saved to the cloud which saves loads of time down the road. 

Creating culture internally

At Verde company culture is extremely important. They like to recognize team members for their strengths and contributions, and they use Beautiful.ai to show that. They will use things like the image template and the word cloud template to display what the employee has accomplished since they were hired on. While it’s not something that’s always client-facing, company culture is something that inadvertently translates into their external business. 

Verde has been known to create a deck about their culture and values specifically to send to custodial partners, vendors, and clients. Carl adds, “You’re telling them, ‘this is what we value in people that we work with and these are some of the attributes that we want to be held accountable for.’” With Beautiful.ai they’re able to create a stunning deck and later send the link out to clients. Everytime they make a change, or update, to the deck that same link reflects the newest updates which makes sharing materials and sources a much more efficient process. 

They have fun with it, too. Holly will bury easter eggs in her compliance reports and whichever employee notices the out-of-place image or funny icon first wins a prize. It’s a way for her to make their internal meetings more interactive, and encourages employees to pay close attention to the presentation. 

Can’t-live-without features

There are many things that the Verde team loves about Beautiful.ai, but Carl’s ride-or-die features are elements, shared slides, and the calendar template.

Now that the team is more familiar with Beautiful.ai, they’ve started to play around with things that are a lot more complex like elements. “Elements are a great addition to the tool because it gives you best in class designs, and shows how a visual might be able to be added in where you thought it couldn’t.” Carl says, “You can create some really neat customizations.” Elements and animations bridge the gap between what you can do in PowerPoint and what you can do in Beautiful.ai, and adds a more emotional and engaging appeal to everything you’re doing. 

Beautiful.ai is one of Verde’s best kept secrets and sets them apart from the competition. Carl leaves us with, “When I think of Beautiful.ai the three words that come to mind are visual, stunning through animations, and innovative. I use it because I want to be innovative and it’s an innovative tool.”