In an increasingly complex regulatory environment, financial advisers can get an edge by automating as many parts of their practice as possible.
This allows them to streamline administrative tasks, improve the scalability of their offering and spend more time on existing and new clients. Here, we explore five practice areas and tasks every advice business can automate.
- Streamline term-deposit applications
Liam Shorte, financial planner and director of Verante Financial Planning, has stopped doing one-off term deposit applications every time he wishes to take advantage of a new provider’s product for a client.
Instead, he now uses aggregator Australian Money Market, a tool that allows advisers to manage all their clients’ TDs from one spot.
“You complete one application at the start and that’s it,” Shorte says. “Every time I need to buy term deposits, all we have to do is check the available rates online and click to move the funds from one provider to another. It saves three to four hours admin time each week.”
- Consolidate your social media posts
Advice businesses that have an active social media presence can save substantial amounts of time by using tools such as Hootsuite to schedule social media posts throughout the week.
Shorte suggests saving interesting links as you read them, then spending 30 minutes on a Friday scheduling tweets and Facebook posts to go out at different times during the week.
“It means we can concentrate on engagement and interaction, rather than content, when we’re online,” he explains. “I use the free service so the only cost is our time.”
- Integrate your technology solutions
It’s been a busy week on the technology front for Pete Pennicott, a director and financial adviser with advice firm Pekada.
“The biggest move we’ve made in the last couple of years was to migrate our [customer relationship management from XPlan to PractiFI, which is built on the Salesforce platform,” Pennicott says. “This has integrated several standalone technology solutions we used to use to deliver advice and communicate to clients. It is the centre of our universe for back-office admin. Our vision is to input data only once and we are making progress, but we still have a long way to go.”
- Integrate workflows and data entry
Pekada uses workflow to sequence activities and processes across the business.
“Each step of the completed journey triggers another step that can be tracked by all team members,” Pennicott explains. “The result is more visibility into all stages of the advice process, better accountability among team members and improved efficiency.”
It’s a good way of managing work when a team member is away. The rest of the team has oversight of the account and can keep the momentum going until the employee returns.
- Turbo-charge the discovery process
At Pekada, discovery starts with clients filling in online questionnaires before their initial meeting.
“Once complete, data can be uploaded into a suite of calculators that can be useful in client meetings,” Pennicott says. “The depth of client data grows throughout the advice and fact-finding process, so it can be used repeatedly without the information having to be re-entered.”
The system can populate data into the system throughout the advice process. For instance, it can incorporate data into the business’s risk research tool, applications forms and records of advice. This cuts down on duplication and reduces the risk of human error.
There are many, often-inexpensive, tools and approaches advisers can use to make their practice run more smoothly.
The idea is to continually evolve the way tasks are approached in the firm to ensure new and better ways of doing business are incorporated into the company for the benefit of clients and the business.
