Wallis Wilkinson Tsai Founder & CEO
Wallis Tsai developed a passion for quantitative analysis (and let’s be honest, Excel spreadsheets) during her 10 year career at Goldman Sachs, first as an investment banker and then as an investor for an elite hedge fund group. At Goldman Sachs, Wallis was a member of a four-person team managing the multi-billion dollar Americas and European financials portfolio. She developed the fund’s perspective on financial regulation, US housing market, banking and capital markets.
As an expert in the insurance industry’s inner workings, Wallis often found herself advising friends and colleagues on personal finance matters. She was repeatedly appalled by how often they got terrible advice from the industries that she knew so well and decided to follow her dream to offer financial services the right way.
Wallis delights in making wonky financial topics engaging and accessible (like our “truth vs. BS” scale to rate insurance sales lines) and has taught classes on how to avoid insurance rip-offs at Harvard Business School.
Wallis enjoys taking in the wonders of New York City with her husband, two kids, and rescue dog.
Episode Highlights Here:
Brett
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward scale to billions and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. Welcome to the build it to billions podcast where we got successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth and life starts every single day with a mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goal is to help you scale and compound your wealth and life, so you can give more all the way to help MVPs. My name is Brett Swartz. In every episode, we’re joined by some of the world’s top millionaires, billionaires and entrepreneurs, where they share their secrets with us so we can scale, build and leave even a better legacy. So I’m excited about our next guest. She’s out of the state of New York, and she’s on a mission to help turn the finance and inside our world kind of upside down with the insurance industry, she brings a dynamic and quantitative approach to insurance based wealth planning and risk management. She’s a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and hedge fund investor. She’s a part of the elite team managing a multi billion dollar portfolio, developing expertise in capital markets to capital markets, tax efficient investing and financial regulation and so much more. Please. Welcome to the show with me. Wallace. Sy. Wallace, how we
Wallis
doing great. Thanks so much for having me excited to be here. Yeah, grateful
Brett
to have you as well, and for our listeners, getting to know for the first time, maybe just get a little bit more about your story and your
Wallis
current focus. Sure thing. So I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and I took a year off after college to teach English on China on a fellowship. And then I came back to New York City, which was obviously a big cultural adjustment, both coming from Ohio and having spent the year in China, and I started working at Goldman Sachs, which is a big New York City Investment Bank. And I was working long hours, developed my love of Excel spreadsheets there, and started learning the ins and outs of the financial services business. And I had a focus on banks, insurance companies, asset managers. So as I and insurance companies and so I started learning how these companies work, how they make money, how the industries function. And I was working hard at my job and doing well at Goldman, but the thing I was really excited about was actually a side project that I would do sort of here and there, when I had snippets of time, which was reviewing personal financial choices for friends and colleagues who had been given these pitches about stuff they should invest their money in. And I was blown away by how often the advice they were getting was just really not great. You know, it was either pretty bad or just not optimal. You know, it was maybe not a terrible idea, but could have been better if you were really thinking about what is the best thing available for this person in the market? And I started doing that on the side, and that really grew into my passion. And so I decided to make that my full time focus when I started above board, and I co founded above board with Nancy, who’s a software developer, she has brought the tech expertise, and I’m the finance person. And so together, we’ve built this company that seeks to take a tech forward analysis and really the truth focused approach to insurance. And we picked insurance because I feel like it’s one of the areas of financial services where it can do so much good when it’s used correctly, and yet at the same time, I mean, who among us hasn’t sat through an absolutely miserable insurance meeting? I think that’s a very like, popular, lived human experience, like, Oh my God. Like this, this feels terrible. And you may or may not know why exactly it feels terrible, but it just kind of does. And I had sat through a few of those meetings myself, and I was just like, man, there’s like, this could be so much better. Because, you know, the products themselves, used correctly can do a ton of good, but so often suboptimal outcomes end up reigning supreme. So how do we fix this problem?
Brett
Absolutely, that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. If you want to connect with Wallace right now, you go to, you can go to above board financial Comm, forward slash billions. Above board financial com, forward slash billions. And, yeah, that’s really interesting, right? So you’ve had a chance to be Goldman Sachs and a chance to see, you know, poor, poor financial pitches, maybe, you know, really good ones, right? And it’s probably trained by the best of the best at Goldman Sachs. And so what’s the number one secret, I guess, to cutting out, you know, you call it the no BS insurance kind of, kind of, either mindset or framework. Let’s start with that, and we’ll work our way through
Wallis
Yeah, sure thing. So the way that we approach insurance, in some ways, incorporates some of the skills that I learned at Goldman Sachs and in particular, thinking about risk and working in the hedge fund right where.
Brett
So if you like this little short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview and. Please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody. You.
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About Wallis Tsai
Wallis Tsai is a finance insider turned industry disruptor, bringing a quantitative, no-BS approach to insurance-based wealth planning and risk management. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker and hedge fund investor, she was part of an elite team managing a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, developing expertise in capital markets, tax-efficient investing, and financial regulation. Shocked by the misinformation in the insurance industry, she founded Above Board to provide transparent, analytically driven insurance solutions for affluent professionals, high-net-worth families, and fiduciary advisors. Wallis has offered expert witness testimony in a federal class-action lawsuit and is a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, teaching Harvard MBA students how to avoid bad insurance advice. With a reputation for cutting through industry jargon, she helps clients integrate insurance into sophisticated estate, tax, and investment strategies. A sought-after speaker and podcast guest, Wallis is the go to expert for those seeking trustworthy, mathematically sound financial protection strategies.
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