Expanding the (Note-Taking) Feature Set

​Originally published in Bob Veres' Inside Information on May 27, 2025. Read full article here.

Synopsis: Here’s a note-taker that allows you to query your entire tech stack (including emails) and auto-populates many client forms.

Takeaways: Will clients be more comfortable with a note-taker that doesn’t produce a recording of the meeting?

I had honestly never heard of the Zocks note-taking solution until there was a deafening buzz about it at the T3 tech conference, which was actually louder than the Zephyr-related buzz, even though Zephyr was presenting twice and making its case directly to the audience. There is going to be a sorting out of the competition at some point among so many AI-powered note-taking products coming to market, but if I had to guess at this moment, Jump, GReminders and Zocks will emerge from the pack.

Why Zocks?

The program does all of the usual things that you get from the AI-powered note-takers, which can be transformative in leveraging an advisor’s time. A dashboard links to a calendar function so the advisor can see upcoming meetings, when was the last meeting, and a quick summary of the household. Zocks creates transcripts of in-person and remote meetings, and automatically creates detailed summaries of each meeting, formatted to the advisor’s specifications. Different types of meetings (prospect vs. annual client meeting, for instance) can be pre-formatted differently.

Like other automated note-takers, the summary can be ported, through integrations, into the client’s CRM record after review. With the touch of an "explain" button, the advisor can select any part of the summary and be taken back to the part of the transcript that it refers to, as a quick and easy way to check for accuracy. Tasks and workflows can be triggered from the summary, generally through the CRM, and Zocks will create a templated email to send to clients, with the meeting summary, which can be sent through Zocks, but will come to the client from the advisor’s email address. If a future meeting was discussed, Zocks will book that future meeting in advance on the advisor’s calendar.

And, again in common with the standard (ever-evolving) note-taking feature set, Zocks pulls information from previous meetings to prepare an agenda and cheat sheet before the meeting, which not only saves time, but also results in more productive (and often more personal) conversations about planning issues and client goals.

Zocks will keep track of upcoming meetings and provide meeting agendas based on past client conversations.

“We’re typically saving upwards of an hour a meeting, which translates to five to seven hours a week,” says Zocks co-founder Mark Gilbert. “We have firms that literally refer to before Zocks and after Zocks, just in the way they operate. We have CEOs and founders of large RIAs who tell us they want to be a financial advisor again, because we’ve taken away the work they didn’t like to do.”

Wider Data Scope

So what’s different about Zocks compared with the other AI-powered note-takers? For one thing, Zocks doesn’t produce a recording of the meeting, which, Gilbert says, can reduce some of the awkwardness both of having clients feel self-conscious during the meeting, and the challenges of storing all of those large video or audio recording files.

“What we do is listen to the discussion, whether it’s in-person, on the phone or virtually, and we are transcribing the conversation in real time,” Gilbert explains. “And then looking at that information to build up the summary, fact tables, financial information and personal information.”

Because Zocks integrates with email and the portfolio management data, its querying function is unusually robust.

Instead of telling clients that the conversation will be recorded (legally required in many states), the Zocks user might say: ‘I’m using a system that allows me to follow up with you more quickly, and helps me focus on you during the discussion without having to take notes. There’s no audio or video recording of you, and I fully control the data.’ “A lot more clients and prospects are comfortable with that than they are with recordings,” says Gilbert.

Another unique feature is designed to help paraplanners who might be working with the summary after the meeting, particularly if they did not attend the meeting itself. “Zocks will create a more detailed outline for paraplanners as they’re starting to put data into the financial planning tool,” Gilbert explains. “And we find that the explain function helps them get more of the context from any specific part of the conversation.”

Zocks also integrates with a wider tech stack. It can read custodial data (client holdings and performance), pull from emails, and display sources for every data point. This makes it highly auditable and flexible for firms needing reliable data verification.

Form-Filling and Family Tree Features

Zocks converts unstructured data from conversations and emails into structured formats that can be used for:

• Building family trees from meeting mentions.
• Recognizing and tracking life events.
• Filling out forms like account openings or beneficiary changes automatically.

“You can fill out a lot of forms just from the meeting,” says Gilbert. “And if, during the meeting, the advisor says, hey, we should open up a 529 for you or your children, the system will bring up that list of fields and show you how much of it we can fill out with what you have, and what else is needed.”

This can also be done before the meeting—Zocks will flag missing data points so advisors can prioritize collecting them during the meeting.

Compliance and Security

Security and compliance features include:

• Encryption
• SOC 2 certification
• Automatic transcript deletion
• No audio/video storage
• Archiving options in Smarsh, ProofPoint, Global Relay

Structured data allows compliance teams to track advisor behavior, like whether they:

• Use two-factor authentication
• Obtain consent for transcripts
• Disclose fees at least once per year

This structured, queryable format reduces manual compliance overhead significantly.

Final Thoughts

Mark Gilbert sums it up:

“Our view is that using AI to take notes for you is very, very valuable. Replacing the analog way of doing things with a computer opens up a whole bunch of scenarios that are not possible in the analog human note-taking, without a huge amount of human labor.”

The result: more and better data, and better access to it.

Zocks is just scratching the surface—but it has already earned the buzz it generated at T3.

‍

​Originally published in Bob Veres' Inside Information on May 27, 2025 with permission from Inside Information. Read full article here.

www.bobveres.com