Changing tech systems can be overwhelming and disruptive to business continuity which is why it’s important for advice practices to thoroughly test out new suppliers before committing.
Finura co-founder and managing director Peter Worn tells Professional Planner advice businesses should identify what they want to achieve before investing money.
Then, firms must decide if they’re going to invest, what is “the outcome” they are looking for and what “the benefit” of spending money on tech is.
Worn says it is too risky to invest in multiple new technologies, especially for small businesses.
“Whilst we certainly encourage businesses to think more about investing more in technology, what we don’t necessarily believe in is having too many systems,” Worn says.
“In a small business, it’s likely that your staff can only really handle two, at most three, core operating systems that everyone has to work on and understand quite well.”
Investing in more than a couple of technological systems may turn out to be futile as “the more bits of tech you throw into a small business, the less likely that your staff are going to be adequately trained and get the best out of those technologies”.
Worn suggests that advice firms with ‘pods’ can taste test different technologies without it having a detrimental effect on the whole business.
“We would encourage businesses to try things within certain pods who are probably more ready to change and see how that experiment goes before looking to roll any particular technology or new process more widely across the practice,” Worn says.
“If there are learnings or unexpected outcomes, then you can sort of nip data in the bud quite quickly, rather than run the risk of disrupting the entire business with a change management.”
Expert Wealth director Paris Bisley agrees that when it comes to implementing tech, it’s important to identify the problem that needs to be solved before finding the solution.
“Then have a look at all of the available options,” Bisley says.
Bisley emphasises the importance of testing different technologies before incorporating them into a firm’s wider system.
“We tested for 18 months, a lot of this tech beforehand,” Bisley says. “Prior to choosing an option, we’ll test multiple.”
As a result, Expert Wealth has figured out what they want to achieve from the technology they invest in as a firm, and had further committed $1 million to spend on new technology over three years.
“For three years, we’ve got an idea of what we wanted to spend it on, and we’ve got money allocated, but we also know that might change as well,” Bisley says.
“I would say that’s a conservative estimate based on our current spend and our spending runway through a few areas.”
Bisley explains the firm will be using the money to carry on developing Salesforce as they already use the platform as the core technology engine that holds their stack.
“Our spend is definitely going to be on developing Salesforce, which we’re already almost a year into, and we did huge market research prior to that, having a look at a lot of technologies, domestic and international,” Bisley says.
“The technology innovations that we’re seeing now…allow us to identify opportunities as they happen with real time data accuracy and that’s what our tech spend is going to be on.
“We don’t spend blindly, we want to see we have a particular return on investments that makes sense for us.”
But Bisley says spending a lot of money in the wrong places is risky and something he often sees with other firms.
“People sort of going out to do everything all at once, where you don’t have a well-researched plan,” Bisley says.
