Hardy Michel spent six months studying advice firms before building anything. What he found still shapes how he talks to advisers today.
I sat down with Hardy Michel, founder of Marloo, to talk about the AI tool he’s built specifically for financial advisers, and about halfway through our conversation I realised he was spending as much time warning advisers away from long-term commitments as he was talking up his own product. Before Marloo, Hardy helped build two of the more recognisable retail investing platforms in recent years, and what he learned from years of fielding customer questions directly shaped almost everything about how Marloo works, and how he talks to advisers about buying AI tools at all.
Why Do People Panic and Sell at the Worst Possible Moment?
Hardy’s route into financial technology started a long way from advice itself. He co-built “Shares” in New Zealand, a retail investing platform often compared to Revolut for the scale it reached, growing over five years from a handful of people in a room to more than 20% of the country’s population as users and 250 employees, and later helped launch Lightyear, a retail brokerage rolled out across 22 European countries. Along the way, in customer support and compliance roles, he found himself fielding an extraordinary number of questions directly from ordinary investors.
“I’ve probably been asked tens of thousands of times, what should I do with my money? Should I buy or should I sell? Am I doing the right thing?”
What struck him wasn’t that people were making bad decisions on purpose. It was that they genuinely wanted to build wealth and were engaged enough to try, but during moments like the pandemic or sudden tariff shocks, the honest advice, stay the course, was the hardest thing to actually get through to them, and the data behind the scenes told the same story again and again: people buying high and selling low at exactly the wrong moment.
Why Didn’t Hardy Build Another Investing App Instead?
Given his background, the obvious move would have been another consumer platform, or a robo-adviser layered on top of one, especially with investors at the time rewarding exactly that kind of scalable, tech-first approach. Hardy chose neither, and the reasoning behind that decision turned out to matter more than the decision itself. Robo-advice, in his view, is very good at following logic, at putting someone into the right portfolio based on their risk appetite, but it never solves for psychology, and psychology is where nearly all the real damage happens. The unmet need he kept coming back to wasn’t another way for people to buy and sell on their own, but rather giving the advisers who actually sit with people through those difficult moments enough time back to do that job properly.
“We would all be using robo advice if it had solved the human psychology aspect of investing.”
So instead of building for the end client, he and his co-founder Shaquille spent six months embedded directly inside advice firms across the UK and Australia, following managing directors, compliance heads, practice managers, advisers, and paraplanners through their actual working days, long before a single line of the product was written.
Why Does a One-Hour Client Meeting Create Ten Hours of Extra Work?
What that research surfaced was a specific, recurring problem that Hardy is now blunt about, one that he says is quietly reshaping the profession rather than simply inconveniencing it.
“You can walk into a one hour review meeting with the client and you can walk out with ten hours worth of work, which is crazy, right? And by the time you see four or five clients over the course of a week, you have a two week backlog or you need to outsource or hire support staff.”
That imbalance, in Hardy’s telling, is what pushes some advisers to close their books off entirely or become highly selective about who they take on, not because they want fewer clients, but because the economics simply no longer support taking on more. Marloo’s answer, built from that same six months of observation, is designed around removing friction almost entirely, letting an adviser try the whole thing before ever being asked to commit to it.
Why Does This AI Founder Warn Advisers Against Long-Term Contracts?
The part of the conversation that stayed with me most, though, wasn’t about Marloo’s product at all. It was Hardy’s answer when I asked how advisers should actually approach buying an AI tool in a market this crowded and this noisy.
“My advice to advisors, even if it’s against my own personal commercial interests, is don’t lock in. Why would you lock in?”
He’s watched competitors sign advisers into long contracts, only for adoption to stall or the product to fall behind what the firm actually needed, and Marloo itself only offers monthly contracts, by design.
Hardy’s story is a reminder that the most useful advice sometimes runs directly against the interests of the person giving it, and that’s worth noticing whenever you hear it. Whether or not Marloo turns out to be the right fit for your firm, the questions Hardy raises about admin, psychology, and long-term contracts are worth sitting with regardless of which AI tool you eventually choose.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Hardy Michel
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