Financial planning practices are demanding greater freedom of choice in the service providers they use, according to the director of financial advice software start-up Adviser Intelligence.
“There’s still just so much arrogance and disconnect between the platform providers and the dealer groups, and the tools of what the independent financial advisers are needing,” Jacqui Henderson told a media gathering in Sydney yesterday.
Martin Morris, principal of My Financial Mentors, agrees. He established his financial planning business in Australia three years ago, after relocating from South Africa.
From his somewhat detached perspective, he says: “I think what is happening now with the dealer groups, is that their lives are becoming much harder than they used to be.”
“Compliance was driving every plan, every system to look the same, and there was no ability to be creative. [Dealer groups] are now having to get creative and help their advisers look different to other advisers,” Morris adds.
Dealer groups aren’t keeping up
According to Henderson, “The technology’s changing, the industry’s changing and they’re not keeping up with the actual needs of the adviser.”
A former partner in financial planning business Henderson Maxwell, she is launching a cloud-based software platform in the first quarter of 2015, aiming to tackle the incumbent market leaders of COIN and XPLAN.
“We are the Xero for the financial planning industry, a new entrant that’s taking on COIN and XPLAN, with a cloud-based software platform that’s all about simplifying advice.”
This will include tools for marketing, client engagement, customer resource management and workflow management.
“You can systemise your entire practice, through to practice management that enables you to see your whole business performance in one dashboard, so you can see how your SOAs are being used, how your business is performing at any point in time,” Henderson adds.
Innovation hub
Adviser Intelligence is the latest business to join Advice Innovation, a collective of companies that markets innovative solutions to Australian financial services businesses.
Since launching in August 2014, seven companies have joined its foundation member Astute Wheel, creators of a financial advice client engagement tool. A further two companies are joining in the new year, lifting the total number to 10.
Michael Topper, co-director of Astute Wheel, says they recognised this resistance from dealer groups early on, after launching around three years ago. To work around this, they instead targeted practices, and found this soon started growing demand from the bottom up.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the clout that some of those bigger practices have. If they really like something, they’ll go and engage with their dealer group, whether that’s through a business development manager or a head of compliance, to actually go through the tool [with them].”
The Advice Innovation members who gathered yesterday in the Sydney headquarters of Thinktank, a CBD-based workspace for startup companies, agree that the view on platforms adopted by practices inside dealer groups varies widely.
Other companies who participated are Now Sorted, a provider of document backup and security; Client Wire, a social media engagement tool for financial advisers; Flongle, which aggregates leads from mortgage providers; and Innergi, a specialist financial adviser content marketing company.
“They’re becoming a lot more agnostic now, slowly, and it will continue to evolve that way I think,” Henderson says.
Hans Egger, co-founder of Astute Wheel, believes it has never been as easy as it is now to find some of the specialised solutions that are available.
“It’s also expensive and risky to build some of these things internally. How do you build an Astute Wheel, a Now Sorted internally. And why would you bother if it’s already out there and it’s pretty cheap? Just plug it in.”
