By Simon Binney, Business Development Director, Wealth Wizards
For financial planning firms targeting new clients, often the problem is not attracting clients to their business, it’s attracting the right level of client that will be profitable for the firm now, while also engaging and retaining lower value clients who could be ideal clients of the future.
Effective marketing is bringing in a steady stream of prospects but only a fraction of those have the value of assets or complexity of situation that require holistic financial planning. The remainder are unprofitable for the firm and invariably are turned away – a negative experience for the individual and the business.
Professionals are an example. Experienced professionals will have the assets and the complexities around pensions savings, tax and investments which require holistic financial planning, the ideal client for specialist financial planning firms. Junior professionals, however, will not have acquired sufficient wealth to warrant full-on financial advice but they do have financial needs and they will become the firm’s target market as they progress in their careers and build their assets.
Firms who pull the latter into their marketing funnel only to reject them as clients, create a negative impression and most probably lose them as future clients too.
A consumer-led, human assisted (hybrid) advice service can enable the firm to serve both sets of clients, profitably, creating a current and future business stream.
Having brought the prospect into the firm’s marketing funnel, the consumer-led, human assisted service takes them on a digital journey, providing help and guidance on their savings and investments. Using the system’s tools they can see, for example, how playing with the payments into a pension can affect their retirement. They engage, play, and then act on the information given, to maximise contributions into a pension or ISA.
This can be provided by the financial planning firm as an entirely digital journey. The service makes financial guidance and advice more accessible and affordable for the end customer, while keeping costs low for the firm and helping retain the lower value client for the long term, profitably.
Clients who begin with the digital journey but whose financial situation clearly requires holistic financial planning, can be guided to speak with a financial planner via in-built triage.
Employing machine learning, the consumer-led, human assisted advice service enables the specialist financial planning business to serve its traditional HNW clients while also profitably serving those on their journey to building their wealth, who aspire to be their HNW clients of the future.
No matter which level they come into the advice funnel, clients receive an efficient and frictionless experience, while improving their financial wellbeing, which, after all, is the raison d’être of financial planning.
