By Simon Binney, head of business development for Turo, Wealth Wizards.
Until recently, conversations around automation tended to centre on dystopian views of the future in which robots have forced humans out of their jobs. When in fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth for those in financial advice. Why?
Firstly, it’s helpful to distinguish between automated and digital or robo-advice.
Automated advice is led by a set of algorithms, based on a firm’s advice policy, that can accurately direct the best advice route for an individual client’s needs.
Digital advice enables streamlined, simplified advice for areas like pension top-ups and ISA investing. It’s a highly cost-effective way of onboarding new clients, performing initial fact-finding, and encouraging people to improve their overall financial situation, particularly for retirement planning.
Far from replacing humans, a ‘hybrid’ advice model enables financial advisers to service more clients, offer more consistent advice and increase revenues.
Here are five ways that digital and automated advice can increase your client count and revenues.
1. Significantly reduce time spent on key processes
Repetitive administrative processes are perfectly suited for digital and automated advice. Automation can significantly increase productivity.
Take a recent case study, for example. The wealth advice business timed their average at-retirement process to take approx. 35 hours per case – from receiving the initial lead through to business submission.
Within that process, for example, Fact Finds were taking on average 280 minutes (4.6 hours) to complete and case writing was consuming around 580 minutes (9.6 hours), so there was a clear need to reduce the time spent on these key, but time-consuming areas of the process.
To take some of the ‘heavy lifting’ out of the process, a series of automated functions was implemented via the Turo automated advice platform, which included:
· Automated reviewing and validation of data
· Automated fund analysis
· Integration with relevant systems to retrieve data, quotations and graphs
· Automating production of a suitability report to the adviser
By automating these key processes, the customer reduced the overall at-retirement process from 35 hours per case to 22.75 hours.
2. Attract new clients with simple ‘digital’ onboarding
Traditionally professional financial advice has been delivered face-to-face, but the acceleration of ‘digital life’ during the pandemic has provided a welcome catalyst for digital and automation.
Advice firms can take advantage of this encouraging statistic by ‘digitally onboarding’ new clients.
Digitally onboarding takes the client through an automated financial ‘health check’ to understand their financial commitments and retirement income goals via an interactive chatbot.
