RIA Customer Story

For Matt Mercer,
the answer was getting his tools to talk together

A conversation with Matt Mercer, Chief Operating Officer of The Planning Center, a fee-only RIA with offices from Alaska to New Orleans.

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Matt MercerChief Operating Officer, The Planning Center

Independent fee-only RIA
Offices from Alaska to New Orleans
Caddi customer since 2025

Read along with the video

Jason: In an industry built to serve money, The Planning Center serves the people. They are a fee-only financial planning firm with offices from Alaska to New Orleans, focused on one thing: giving families a safe place to discuss life and money. Today we're talking to Matt Mercer, COO of The Planning Center. Thank you so much for being here, Matt.

Matt Mercer: Thanks for the warm welcome, Jason. I don't think I could have articulated that about our company quite as well, so thank you very much.

Jason: We love The Planning Center, and we love supporting you and what you do. Before Caddi, what did operations look like? What did moving a client's information between tools look like?

Matt Mercer: The reality of The Planning Center is we have five offices in five different cities, so we live in this virtual, highly technical world. Some folks might have one office where you get the drive-by delegation: someone comes out of a meeting and hands a file or a Post-it to get something done. For us, we have to rely heavily on technology. Up until a couple years ago, I thought we had some really finely tuned, built-out business processes, and I think we do, but all of those processes pointed to a human to make a manual action somewhere. Part of the goal whenever I've gone to a conference or worked with another vendor is: where is there a vendor that can help tie our very large tech stack together, instead of here's the next new shiny object? I don't need another tool for my clients at this point. I need something that helps make our internal lives easier and the systems we have talk better together.

Matt Mercer: In our industry there can be a really tough spot: are you going to go all in on someone's tech stack? There are pros and cons. The pro might be efficiency. The con is you're at the behest of that company and wherever they lead. We're in this middle ground. We're not large enough to have our own developers on staff, but we're not small enough to feel like we need to be all in on one vendor. There's a big cost to moving and changing technology, and when the landscape changes so quickly, I'm not interested in changing my CRM, my custodian, or my document management system every few years. These take a lot of labor to do well. So the goal in my mind isn't here's the new vendor in the space. It's: how can we get the vendors to just work better together in service of our clients?

Jason: Were there any frustrations around this? Any time I worked with another vendor it was, hey, we can code something for you.

Matt Mercer: And then there's a cost to that that can be prohibitive. The second you get it done, something has changed, so you have to redo it. There's a constant cost that comes with it. With technology evolving as rapidly as it does, we didn't want to dive headfirst into that space and have tons of cost. We're trying to be mindful and see what's coming along that can help us over time. Luckily, I think we found Caddi at the right time for us to really start to make some of that happen.

Jason: Now you've found Caddi and implemented it. In a sentence, what would you tell a COO peer? What is Caddi?

Matt Mercer: I would say Caddi is a teachable technology that will help you do repeatable tasks. I chose the word teachable because Caddi watches you do it. You're recording yourself following a process, maybe explaining it a bit in a video, so Caddi can watch, understand, and really create the process for you. You don't have to speak the back-end language. It's an interpreter of sorts: it watches how you operate, understands, and says, here are the X's and O's of how to do it. It's using AI in a way that contains and helps, and it doesn't give free rein into your systems. Rather, it understands how to use them and then gives out a repeatable process afterward.

Jason: Take me back to your first loop. Was it a fast, easy process? How did that go?

Matt Mercer: One thing we wanted to do as an example: any time we have a meeting with a client, we run certain reports for them. Every morning I've got people on my team coming in saying, who's on the calendar today, let's run reports for them and save them into our document management system so our planners have them at their fingertips. For my ops staff to run that in the morning, it might take an hour to run all of them for the day, and they might be interrupted because it's the start of the day and a client walks in, or there's that drive-by delegation where I unintentionally walk by their desk and need something. These are very human things, but they interrupt the work of getting things done for clients in a timely manner.

Matt Mercer: We created a loop that can automatically do that every morning for us. Now I can run it by pressing a button, or set whatever schedule I want, and capture it for everything. So every morning I have it run for every client meeting we have that day, and I've saved my team an hour a day.

Jason: What's one that was really complex, where you thought maybe automation can't even do this?

Matt Mercer: For years I've worked on processes, and oftentimes it's black and white: the information has to be in this cell to be gathered and pulled over. As Caddi has grown, you've been able to integrate into systems in a way where the information doesn't have to be in this exact field every time. It can be a longer text field, and Caddi extracts the appropriate information out of it. That's where it starts to feel less like technology helping and more like actually having an assistant. If I hired someone to do the work, I'd teach them: it's in this text field, look through the paragraph and pull out the right information. I don't have to give it to them on a platter. So it was really cool to see Caddi evolve to look at a paragraph, look at more text, and understand what it needs to pull out of it.

Matt Mercer: That made a world of difference: we didn't have to hunt for perfect when creating a process. Before, you'd create a process, get 80% of the way done, and it fails. With Caddi it's never felt like that. It's not this perfection, black-and-white thing. Caddi can operate in the gray. It's an automation, but it's intelligent, with some of its own decision-making power to deal in the ambiguity. A big piece of this is unstructured data, which is what a lot of small companies have a hard time with, because with technology you often get garbage in, garbage out, and garbage in often looks like inconsistency. So Caddi's ability to sift through unstructured data in a way that's beneficial for everybody is a win. When it looks at our CRM, an account number might be nested in a paragraph of comments our planners sent to ops. Caddi's ability to sift through and get what it needs, without someone copying and pasting those digits, is a big help.

Matt Mercer: Oftentimes a vendor gives you a great solution, it looks good in a demo, and then they leave and you pick up the pieces. There's a big difference between what something can do and what it will do, and what I call vaporware. It's not real until it's actually in production. I don't know how many people on my team have access at this point, but it's probably close to half of the company. It means I don't have to do it and I don't have to micromanage it. I check in, they record how they do it and pass that off to Caddi, and it lets the scale work for us. It's not one person processing a recording, it's a system. So as many recordings as we can pass it, we can have it start doing the work.

Jason: I want to finish on one question. If you were chatting with a financial planning firm COO who's on the fence about Caddi, what's something you might say to them?

Matt Mercer: There are two thoughts. The direct thing is: if not Caddi, what? Right now it's a huge value add to us. I'll also say there are very few vendors I work with where I get the level of service, attention, and follow-through that I do with Caddi. I can message any time and I'm going to get a response. It's incredibly helpful in making things go right, and that's part of the ethos of what we think about as The Planning Center too. Our job is to help make things go right, for each other and for our clients. It's how we operate, but it's not always what I get from vendors. So it's great to work with folks who care about the product and seeing it through, instead of just checking the box. You care about my outcomes too, and I've always appreciated that.

Who they are

A fee-only firm where the relationship is the product.

The Planning Center is an independent, fee-only RIA. No commissions, no products to push, just advice in the client's interest. The firm runs from five offices spread across the country, from Alaska to New Orleans, with advisors, planners, CPAs, and an operations team serving hundreds of households who come to them to talk through life and money.

In a fee-only model, the firm is paid to guide, not to sell, so advisor time spent with clients is the entire value proposition. Every hour lost to back-office busywork is an hour taken away from it. That is the lens COO Matt Mercer brought to Caddi, and it became Caddi's longest-tenured customer in early 2025.

The challenge

Finely tuned processes that all pointed back to a human.

With offices in different cities, The Planning Center lives in a highly technical, virtual world. There is no walking a file to the next desk. The work runs on a deep stack: Salesforce as the system of record, Orion for portfolio reporting, MoneyGuidePro for planning, DocuSign for signatures, Laserfiche for documents, ShareFile and CCH for tax, all on Office 365. The processes were good, but every one of them ended in a person re-keying data, and none of these tools had native bridges between them.

With no in-house IT team or developers on staff, the only answer vendors offered was a custom build: prohibitively expensive, brittle, and obsolete the moment something in the stack changed. Too small to staff engineers, too cautious to go all in on one vendor's ecosystem, the firm was stuck in the middle ground, gluing its tools together by hand.

“I don't need another tool for my clients. I need something that helps make our internal lives easier and the systems we have talk better together.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

Getting started

Record it once. Caddi builds the rest.

Instead of a months-long implementation, the team recorded itself doing its real workflows, talked through them the way it would train a new hire, and let Caddi turn each one into a repeatable loop. No back-end language to learn, and no free rein into the firm's systems. As Matt puts it, Caddi is an interpreter: it watches how you operate, then produces the X's and O's of how to do it.

The team recorded its processes first and then picked which to automate, an approach that quickly won over a staff that was wary of automation. The first loops went live fast. Their entire opening plan was three loops, all three shipped, and the firm has been adding more ever since.

“Caddi is a teachable technology that will help you do repeatable tasks. It watches you do it, then creates the process for you.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

What they automated

Loops that run across tools that were never built to talk.

The firm now runs a growing library of loops, each one moving work between systems that have no native integration, on a schedule, with no one in the loop.

Morning meeting prep, OrionBefore 6am, Caddi checks Salesforce for every household with a review that day, generates the Orion report, and routes it to the advisor, so prep is done before anyone logs in.
Model Selection Forms, daily batchPulls the day's form tasks from Salesforce by type and owner, fills each one, drafts and sends it, and files the result to Laserfiche.
MoneyGuidePro reports to LaserficheTakes finished plan reports dropped in OneDrive and files them into the right Laserfiche location with the firm's naming conventions. MoneyGuidePro has no open API, so a screen-driven loop is the only way to automate it.
Investment Policy StatementsGenerates the IPS, extracts the values, and keeps Salesforce and Laserfiche in sync, then routes it through DocuSign for signature.
Service agreementsAssembles and routes service agreements for signature, then files the signed copy back, so onboarding and renewals stop waiting on manual paperwork.
Client meeting invitationsComposes the invite and creates the matching follow-up task in Salesforce, so client communication stays consistent across planners.

The marquee example is the morning meeting prep. What used to take the ops team close to an hour every morning, constantly interrupted by walk-ins and drive-by requests, now runs automatically before the day starts.

“Every morning I have it run for every client meeting we have that day, and I've saved my team an hour a day.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

Beyond the easy wins

An automation that can operate in the gray.

For years, process meant black and white: the data had to sit in this exact cell to be pulled. The hard part of The Planning Center's work is the opposite. An account number might be buried in a paragraph of comments a planner left for the ops team. An asset allocation is described in prose, not a field. Caddi reads the longer text, understands what it needs, and extracts it, the way you would teach a sharp assistant to.

That is the difference between a demo that looks good and something that survives in production. The team no longer has to hunt for perfect inputs before automating a process, and because Caddi owns each loop, it runs the same way every time.

“It's an automation, but it's intelligent. Caddi can operate in the gray.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

What it adds up to.

250+hours a yearGiven back to the team, and that is the morning meeting-prep loop alone.
~50%of the firmNow record their own processes and hand them to Caddi to run.
0new hiresAdded to the back office as the firm took on more work.

How it spread

From one COO to roughly half the firm.

What started with Matt is now owned across the firm. Team members record their own processes and hand them to Caddi, and because the work runs as a system rather than one person processing recordings, it scales with every new recording the team adds. Matt does not have to micromanage any of it.

He treats Caddi as proof of the firm's AI strategy, the centerpiece of an internal AI vision he shares with his team and shows to peer firms. The framing is deliberate: not a threat to anyone's job, but leverage that lets a lean firm take on more without adding headcount.

“Caddi is creating leverage for The Planning Center.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

Why they stay

“If not Caddi, what?”

It did not all work on day one. Two of the systems the firm leans on most, Orion and MoneyGuidePro, were not supported out of the box, and MoneyGuidePro has no open API to build against. Rather than call it out of scope, Caddi built the support, a screen-driven loop in MoneyGuidePro's case, and today both run automatically.

That is the kind of work that does not show up in a demo, and it is why the partnership keeps widening rather than stalling after launch. Asked what he would tell a fellow COO on the fence, Matt answers with a question of his own: if not Caddi, what? And then with the part that keeps him there, what it is actually like to be the customer.

“Your service and engagement is the best of any tech vendor we have ever worked with.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

It is the same standard the firm holds for itself. As Matt puts it, their job is to help make things go right, for their clients and for each other. It is not always what he gets from the vendors he works with.

“You care about my outcomes too, and I've always appreciated that.”
Matt Mercer, COO, The Planning Center

For Matt Mercer,the answer was getting his tools to talk together