One of Rob Caprioli’s priorities as AMP’s group executive, advice and banking, is working out how AMP-aligned financial planners can deliver more advice to more customers, more often.
“We know that providing high-quality advice delivers significant value to a customer,” Caprioli says.
“We know that we have a large customer base. We know there’s probably not enough advisers in the industry to service our customer base, let alone the 20 per cent of [people] in Australia that seek advice; so we’ve got to find this way of how do we provide more advice to more customers more often.”
Caprioli says the answer can’t be just a question of planner numbers, with a recruitment answer.
“It is also about how we streamline and make the advice process more efficient,” he says.
“If I can do that, it means I’m freeing up time for our advisers to spend more time in front of customers. We’ve been doing some work in that space and we have one example that we’re launching and retraining our advisers on from August, it’s called Evolve Advice – it’s an iPad app. An adviser can sit down with a customer with this iPad app, go through goals, go through an understanding of what they’ve got today, understand product comparisons and capability which we get from the industry, and create a statement of advice for them – on the app – which then integrates into our system software.
“It’s streamlined form something that takes multiple hours [to] a benchmark [that] can be 60 minutes. It’s very dependent on the situation, and therefore the statement I’ve just made will be for relatively simple needs. But this is taking really significant chunks of time out of the process. And our planners and advisers cannot wait to get it.”
Multi-branding to stay
The multi-brand strategy AMP uses in the financial planning space will remain, and although shared services between licensees will be centralised, each licensee’s value proposition will remain independent and distinctive from the others’.
Successful financial planning businesses, Caprioli says, must be completely consumer-centric, focused on identifying and solving the customer’s goals, and has to be “adaptable and flexible to be able to do that either specifically, around particular goal, or holistically around a whole range of goals”.
“It also has to engage with customers in a range of different ways,” he says.
“And the experience that the customer is getting between one or multiple ways of engagement, there has to be consistency and commonality.
“The advantage of the multi-brand approach is that customers have made a choice about who they want to engage with and who they want a relationship with, in terms of a particular adviser, and therefore the association they have made around the licensee and the brand. It’s absolutely appropriate for the customer to preserve that.”
Product when product is needed
Caprioli says putting the client at the centre of a business process means the issue of product comes into the picture only when a product solution is needed. He says AMP won’t shy away from providing the product solution – in fact, he business is being re-engineered to be better at developing product solutions – but that will not be a starting point in the provision of advice.
“AMP has a large number of customers. Our ability to analyse that customer base, segment that customer base, understand the opportunities around our customers base and what are the advice and solution opportunities, becomes pretty important to us,” he says.
“That, combined with human-centric design, makes us start to say, not only have I got the right solutions, co-designed with the customer, I actually know which of my customers could actually leverage it.
“Think about that from an advice perspective. That’s pretty useful because then we can say to an adviser, here are the customers we have, who are you clients, and when we analyse that customer set there’s an opportunity, and by the way the solution and the process supports that.”
From consulting to line management
Caprioli has a career spanning 24 years in the financial services industry, and has been with AMP since 2010. Prior to that he worked almost exclusively in banking, including 14 years as a management consultant for Andersen Consulting and Accenture. As well as working with each of the major banks in Australia, Caprioli spent five years in the UK working with Barclays. Lloyd TSB and Nationwide. As a consultant, Caprioli focused on large-scale transformation programs.
Returning from the UK, Caprioli joined Westpac, and spent more than six years there before moving across to AMP.
At Westpac Caprioli segued from a consulting role into line management responsibility, covering the retail and business lending operations, and that coincided with Westpac’s merger with St George.
Caprioli joined AMP before its own merger, with AXA Asia Pacific. When Paul Sainsbury took the lead role on the integration project, Caprioli stepped into Sainsbury’s role overseeing product manufacturing across the group.
“That had the administration, the wealth products, the insurance products and AMP Bank,” Caprioli says.
“As the merger went through I took carriage of all the group’s wealth management products – North, Flexible Super, Signature Super – and continued to run AMP Bank. More recently with the change in CEO, Craig [Mellor] reshuffled the deck and asked me to lead a new business unit, which is called advice and banking.
“This is the first time that we’ve actually brought together all of the businesses that represent the primary ways customers come to AMP. So I look after all the licensees; I look after AMP Bank; and I also look after corporate super.
“So thinking of the ways that customers come to us, that’s through our advisers; from the bank perspective that’s through advisers, direct and through brokers; and for corporate super that’s through our advisers and direct.”
Customer at the forefront
Caprioli says the point of the internal reorganisation he is overseeing is to put the customer at the forefront of developing services and products.
“My responsibility is to say, from a bank, corporate super and licensee perspective, how do we make sure high-quality advice is part of that proposition, and how is it integrated?” he says.
“To make that kind of shift sustainable organisation-wide, you’ve got to look at many dimensions of it.
“Looking at what’s the mechanism we have in place to get insights from customers, orientating the organisation around a new approach called human-centred design is very fundamentally different than what we used to do. I’ll give you an example.
“Traditionally, organisations – I’ve worked with many of them – would go about understanding customer goals and requirements and solutions in quite a traditional way. We’d do some surveys; we’d have to do some sort of focus groups; we would engage staff and advisers; and we’d capture requirements.
“We’d then go away, design, build and deliver, and spend lots of money doing it, only to find whoops – it didn’t quite hit the mark. Industry-wide that’s typically how things get done.
“But if you’re going to put the customer at the centre of your business, that whole process has to start with, and keep, the customer at the heart of the process. One of the major shifts we’re undertaking with this human-centred design approach where everyone in the organisation, including executives – and we’ve partnered with a consultancy out of the US who’s a real expert at this – is actually spending time in customers’ homes. It’s about understanding and observing what they do, and what is important to them.
“It’s not talking about, ‘I’ve got a solution for you; what do you think?’, it’s actually saying, ‘Tell me about your life; tell me what’s important to you’.”
Execution, implementation
Caprioli concedes that putting the customer at the centre of what a business does isn’t a revolutionary approach – other businesses profess to do likewise – but it’s the execution and implementation of the strategy that is critical and will determine whether it succeeds.
“For us, that goes to how we’re organised,” Caprioli says, and a cornerstone of that structure is Sainsbury’s role as chief customer officer.
“He’s championing the customer in everything we do,” he says.
“When we’re setting up our engagement meetings or design forums, the customer is represented either through Paul, or through the various mechanisms I’ve spoken about. That’s really fundamentally different.”
But how good are customers at knowing and articulating what they actually want?
“That’s the real art in this process,” Caprioli says.
“That’s the real IP that differentiates us in the execution of it.
“You’re starting from…a basis of at least getting the scope of the area right. You get to the end [of the process] where you’re prototyped it and tested it with customers, you’ve fined-tuned it and optimised it, you’ve got a fairly good level of confidence that what you’re about to launch is gong to hit the mark. And by the way, you haven’t spent a lot of time building systems integration at that point, because that’s what’s next.
“For us, because it’s new, that first set of iterations is taking a little while. But as we build capability and experience in that, it will start to accelerate.”
Caprioli says the first practical result of the new process is likely to be a new product or service to help customers manage debt better.
“I’m not sure there are many banks that would have that focus,” he says.
