Saving time is the floor, not the ceiling

Continuum started with a frustration its three founders all happened to share. Alex Dashefsky, Daniel Asper, and Matthew Tory had each been clients of their own financial advisors before they came together in Toronto to do something about it. “We were disgruntled clients,” as they put it.

The instinct was to blame the advisors. That changed once the founders looked closely at the work. “We could quickly see it was the tools that were the issue.” Data was being keyed into the CRM by hand; to-dos lived on sticky notes. The deliverables that represent the relationship took weeks to assemble, sometimes with a designer on staff building the presentation.

The advisors were good; the tooling around them was not. The founders started Continuum to close that gap — and to argue that giving advisors back their time was only the beginning of what better tooling could do.

The easiest story to tell

For two or three years, advisor AI was pitched as productivity. Continuum understands why. “It’s the easiest one. I want more time. Who doesn’t want more?” says co-founder Alex Dashefsky. The objection is that the industry stopped there. Keep asking why, and you land somewhere more useful: “so I can better serve my clients.”

Time savings is the floor, not the ceiling. “If AI is a giant bullet, you should aim it at making the client experience better.” Every model on the market will hand an advisor back some hours. Continuum’s view is that the back-office automation race — the routine plumbing like form filling and inbox triage — will eventually be won by the Copilots of the world. So the company pointed itself at the part that does not commoditize: the client experience.

On evaluating any tool making AI claims, past the obvious checks (is it compliant, is the company Canadian), Continuum looks for two answers. Is the AI native to the software or bolted on after the fact? And does it connect to the stack through an MCP server — the emerging standard for letting AI tools talk to one another — rather than just offering “we have APIs”? A no to either, and the company would not bet on it. “AI is changing so rapidly that interconnectivity becomes paramount,” Dashefsky says.

He reaches for history. When factories electrified in the late 1800s, owners dropped electric generators where steam shafts had been and ran the floor unchanged for thirty years. Productivity climbed only once someone rethought the building, putting a small motor at each station. The internet followed a similar three-decade arc; AI compresses that into roughly five years. “People who refuse to adopt it are going to be left behind.”

Earning the right to the meeting

Continuum starts with the client meeting, where the work originates. “That’s the kernel of everything,” Dashefsky says. “We now need to earn the right to turn that into something useful.”

Continuum’s answer is a feature called Pages: branded, interactive deliverables built from the conversation itself. Their value comes in three parts. First, a PDF that once took a week to build is generated quickly and reflects what was said in the room. Second, every Page carries a secure, client-side AI chat guardrailed to answer only what is on that Page. This matters because clients already feed that PDF into ChatGPT, where the models, in Continuum’s view, are built to please the user and find holes. Third, the advisor finally sees what happens after hitting send: whether the Page was opened or downloaded, which questions were asked, how long someone lingered.

An example shows what the analytics change. An advisor prospecting a roughly $10 million client across five meetings, all captured in Continuum, sent the proposal as a Page. The prospect asked the embedded chat seventeen questions, all about fees: whether the advisor took kickbacks from fund managers, how products were selected, why the MER was what it was. The advisor saw the activity, called, said he could tell fees were on the client’s mind, and closed him on that call.

“He told us he never would have known to ask if it weren’t for Pages,” Dashefsky recounts. “It’s not that the client was hiding it. They needed time and space to reflect.” Fees and commissions, along with “is this actually the best option for me,” are the questions clients are least willing to raise to an advisor’s face and most willing to raise to a machine.

From deliverable to relationship

Advisors use Pages in four main ways today: prospecting and proposals; financial plans, where a thirty-page document becomes an interactive summary with adjustable calculators; insurance comparisons; and quarterly statement reviews, the last touchier because some dealers restrict who can build statements. Some send a Page as the agenda: the client clears table-stakes questions with the AI beforehand and arrives ready for substance, and the advisor already knows what they studied.

The roadmap pushes further. An imminent new version moves from one Page per meeting to a single space holding every Page a client has received, so they can ask across the whole relationship. An agent drafts the Page after the meeting and the advisor just reviews it. If ninety percent of a form already surfaced in conversation, the client supplies the last ten percent in the Page and the content flows to the custodian. Continuum is averse to the phrase “client portal,” which makes people picture a net-worth dashboard. “I don’t look at my net worth day to day. I care about the planning,” Dashefsky says. A Page, by contrast, is a shared space, with the dashboard as one tile.

Asset management, the company contends, is largely commoditized; outside the ultra-high-net-worth tier, there is little reason to pay a percentage for placement in a mutual fund. The durable value is the advisor as “the quarterback of someone’s financial life,” the pivot connecting the accountant, estate planner, lawyer, and operating business.

The company likes a photography analogy: twenty-five years ago a good picture meant someone with an expensive camera; now everyone carries a capable camera, yet photographers still have careers, because people seek out a professional eye. Soon anyone can generate a financial plan from their phone in a minute, and the advisors who endure will weave seasoned judgment on top of it.

Does any of this feel mechanical? Continuum argues the reverse: a Page carries the client’s name, reflects the meeting that just happened, and can carry the advisor’s photo, where a generic PDF does not. Telling a client the advisor can see the chat becomes another point of contact, not surveillance. “Those who stand against technology are often proven quite wrong,” Dashefsky says, “and I don’t think this is an exception.”

For Richard S. Pyper, CEO of Monarch Wealth, the thinking aligns with how his firm sees the AI opportunity. Monarch recently made Continuum the exclusive AI solution in its advisor tech stack — a decision Pyper says reflects a belief that AI should help advisors deepen client relationships, not simply automate meeting notes. “It moves beyond mere transcription by translating client conversations into actionable insights and supporting high-value client engagement after the meeting.”

Continuum builds from the client’s side of the table. “We know what we want as clients,” Dashefsky says, “and that’s how we build everything.” It is the same instruction the Continuum founders give their own team, and the one they leave for advisors. Ask more of your note-taker.

This article was produced in partnership with Continuum