Faster delivery of quality advice requires advisers, paraplanners and administrators working in tandem with the AI tools they use, say Rob Harradine, and Caroline Duff of ammonite AI.
“Think of humans as the master with AI their helpful student; making for a powerful combination,” says Harradine.
“There’s been much hype in the market about AI taking over financial advice, in particular after the announcements by Altruist and Anthropic.
“Caroline and I have been financial advisers so we know advice is complex and requires input from many different sources, including the nuances of human interaction and reading between the lines that AI cannot do. That’s why we do not see financial advice being fully automated by AI, except maybe in the most straightforward of cases.
“Financial advisers and paraplanners will determine what the individual advice should be. The value of AI tools is to assist and significantly speed up the process of delivering the service to clients; not actually to give the advice.”
Harradine and Duff developed their Planbot software to give advice firms the ability to turn their manually populated templates into AI-powered documents able to be completed in seconds, whilst handing control of the AI tool to the advice firm, so they can make ongoing template changes. The impact of which has been to significantly accelerate the turnaround of suitability reports and annual reviews and reduction of report writing backlogs.
“Planbot is a clear example of AI taking on a large part of the heavy lifting and making huge productivity gains but advisers and paraplanners staying firmly in charge of the report writing process,” Harradine says.
“By taking on a chunk of the heavy lifting, AI tools can free up advisers and paraplanners to have the thinking space to ensure they deliver the very best for clients,” Duff adds.
“Suitability report and annual review writing can take up a large proportion of a paraplanner’s day, squeezing the time they have to think about the case. But this time allocation should be the other way around. AI tools like Planbot can deal with a significant amount of the report drafting, giving advisers and paraplanners more space to consider the best options for clients.
“Financial advisers and paraplanners will always need oversight of the process, but by AI assisting paraplanners in their day to day tasks – Planbot for example, can remove elements of repetitive tasks, such as formatting, copy/paste and sifting through documents – advisers and paraplanners can dedicate more time to focus on using their technical knowledge, expertise and experience to ensure the best outcome for clients, which for most is the enjoyable part of the role.”
Harradine adds: “By delivering reports faster can also mean firms can take on more clients, scaling up to help more people. That is going to be good for the firm, the industry and the people who now need advice but currently fall outside of the market’s ability to service them.”
