Improving the productivity and efficiency of your practice boils down to the quality and structure of data, as heard at a panel discussion.
At the Ignite conference in Sydney, HUB24 director of strategic development Jason Entwistle, an industry veteran in the development of adviser platforms, emphasised the importance of data quality and the effect it can have on productivity.
“The most amazing asset is the data that your clients have handed over,” Entwistle said at the conference hosted by HUB24-owned SMSF administrator Class.
“If we can make it good quality data, the ability to leverage that and integrate these systems together is massive. It will change the way we operate.”
Myprosperity founder Peter McCarthy agreed and said that new technology such as AI is intertwined with how data is structured as “AI is only as good as the data”.
“I think for firms that have a disparate database, just make time to clean up that data because then you’re ready for what you can do with AI once it matures,” McCarthy said.
For many advice practices, there is a countless amount of unrefined client data that is difficult to sift through – and Entwistle estimates around 80 per cent of a firm’s data is unstructured.
“[It’s] sitting in emails, notes, documents and files all over the place,” Entwistle said.
Clients’ declining patience and ability to focus on multiple pages of data means that practices need to find a solution that simplifies the process and improves efficiency.
Intralink Wealth Management general manager and partner Zoe de Jong said due to the digitisation of the firm’s client base, their patience “is getting smaller”.
“Get them to do what they need to do straight up then start to feed them more information as they start to understand what they’re looking at,” de Jong said.
She described the situation if not rectified as “death by data”.
Entwistle agreed, explaining that producing dashboard after dashboard is having a negative effect and deterring clients.
“What we’ve discovered is the more dashboards we’ve pumped out, the less people look at them because it’s just a massive amount of data.”
While firms acknowledge that technology is essential to organise and structure data, practices are apprehensive about building their own technology.
This is often due to the high price of building and maintaining new technology when there are already products that are much cheaper and require less work.
Joshua Williams, chief operating officer of SMSF administration provider SuperGuardian, said he would avoid creating new technology because of the cost.
“My approach would be to build as little as possible but have a really good understanding of what’s out there in the market and how you can utilise it.”
Having been a key contributor to the development of the HUB24 platform, Entwistle explained how expensive building new technology can be, especially maintenance and upgrading when the products deteriorate.
“Don’t underestimate the maintenance cost of changes that come through, the speed at which things go stale, the need to upgrade, etc.”
If the purpose of building new technology is to beat the crowd, your practice will lose money in the long run. When the big companies build the same technology, it will be widely available at a much lower cost.
“When you’ve got a different advantage, as in intellectual property that no one else has, that’s different, but if speed is the underlying reason I would avoid building,” Entwistle said.
However, practices should utilise existing technology to improve customer experience and simplify processes for both clients and the team – de Jong said the practice has a “client first mentality”.
“It’s really at the heart of everything we do across our business and changes we make reduce the noise and simplify,” de Jong said.
She asserted “if we can lean in on technology and make it simpler for our team and our clients, we absolutely should”.
McCarthy said he intends to “make the basics simple all the way through” in order to improve the customer experience as clients want the process to be “really simple and easy”.
Williams also maintained they “make sure the technology aligns with the core focus of the business”. The risk of jumping on exciting new tech features can result in companies spending money on things they don’t need and won’t improve the practice.
Great companies “avoid fads and focus solely on technology that can accelerate momentum,” Williams said.
