A decade ago, when large screen TVs were expensive and the internet was slow, financial planners provided a client experience that was largely personality-based. To be one of the 25,000 practising planners required an office with nice décor, financial knowledge, an ability to complete a paper-based fact find and a whiteboard to help explain strategies.
In just 10 years, post the Royal Commission and COVID, the financial planning landscape has changed incredibly. Of the remaining 15,000 practising financial planners, there are some who never physically meet their clients. Conducting all meetings virtually, their businesses are paperless, paraplanning and admin staff are outsourced overseas, and they don’t have an office, let alone a whiteboard.
While these modern advisers are in the minority, and there are still plenty who haven’t progressed past a paper-based fact find and whiteboard, the reality is that most advisers have started their technology journey, and the momentum of this change will only increase.
The reason is that financial planning clients have become more technologically sophisticated and are expecting the same level of innovation from their financial planners as they see in other areas of their life. Consider how Uber and Airbnb transformed their respective industries, how quickly it happened and how devastating it was for those that didn’t evolve.
The same is happening in our own industry. The enablers of this evolution are the financial technology disruptors that emerged to take advantage of faster internet and cloud-based servers to fill a gap that focussed on improving the client experience through technology-assisted advice.
In this new digital world, a client portal is the equivalent of your office foyer, not having one is unthinkable and having a low budget scrappy portal, like a low budget scrappy foyer, sends the wrong message to your existing clients and prospects.
The challenge around building a world best practice portal is balancing the needs of the adviser, who wants an efficient and secure method of gathering and providing financial information, with the needs of the client. Clients want an interesting and informative technology resource they can access at any time and find valuable, even if they are required to do some work in providing information to the adviser.
Online questionnaires must therefore be intuitive for clients to complete and delivered in sections to ensure that only relevant information is requested and can be completed in a timely manner.
Advisers will want to tailor the experience to suit the needs of individual clients and where they are in the client journey (discovery or review), and whether they are retired clients, pre-retirees, or accumulators. They will also want information to flow into the database and populate interactive collaboration tools such as goals, values, scoping of advice and strategy modelling calculators, so that they can provide a visual and informative experience. This approach helps educate clients so that they can be empowered to make informed decisions about the strategies they choose from and understand the value of the advice offered.
But a client portal needs to do more. It should be capable of providing visual (graphic), high level as well as detailed information about the client’s financial and personal information. Capable of being updated by both the client and adviser, it should serve as the ‘source of truth’ for the client’s circumstances. Goals should be tracked, values determined, assets, liabilities, income, and expenses and much more should be able to be captured and then updated for review meetings.
The portal also needs to house a client vault that allows financial and personal documents to be uploaded and stored by the client in their own document folder system. This vault provides a secure place for clients to access at any time. The stored documents should be capable of being shared with the adviser (or not), depending on the client’s wishes.
In a similar way, advice documents should be able to be loaded into the portal, reviewed, electronically signed, and securely stored to provide a historical library of advice.
AstuteWheel was one of the industry’s early disruptors, transforming the way financial planning was conducted in Australia. We launched in 2012, with online questionnaires, simple to use modelling calculators, video presenters and interactive visual tools, all considered revolutionary at the time.
The latest version of AstuteWheel has been built on a modern platform, allowing us to leverage our understanding of adviser and client needs and rapidly expand our technology offering. We have built a best practice client portal, designed to be a valuable resource and extension of your service offering that is available and useful to your client throughout the year, not just at review time.
While many of these enhancements will improve the efficiencies and compliance of your business, we believe it is the built-in client engagement tools that will transform your business from providing financial services to providing superior financial experiences.
As was the case with Uber and Airbnb, your clients and prospects may not understand it yet but when they see it, they will immediately know that they can never settle for less than what the new technology has to offer.
