Consultants to the financial advice industry believe technology will drive profitability in 2025.
Management consultant firm Business Health owner Rod Bertino has three items on his 2025 to-do list for clients – insights, succession and innovation.

The company is busy collating data for its 10th Future Ready Report in late February which will provide benchmarks, ratios, thematic issues and other insights for its clients.
“While we’ve started aggregating data … what’s equally important about these insights and findings is implementation tools. I think we can help business owners understand what it means and have a stronger focus on implementation,” Bertino said.
“Business Health has been running for the past 24 years and our vision hasn’t changed since day one…helping business owners run better businesses.”
Bertino said his second focus for the year is preparing succession plans for many businesses.
“The demographic makeup of ownership is older and these owners have worked through a tumultuous period in the past five years,” Bertino said.
“In the coming five years, many of them will start to think about their future.
“We’re going to help practices work through what the future looks like for them in terms of succession transition.”
Bertino, who has worked in the United States for more than 20 years, will also export Australian best practices to its US business and look for innovative ideas to import back.
Finally, Bertino will keep a watching brief on artificial intelligence.
“We’ll be watching closely how this unfolds for advisers,’’ he said.
“This is the golden age for advice in the next five to seven years as Baby Boomers retire and see good quality advice.”
Peloton Partners principal Rich Abbey said 2025 will herald the launch of its AI-backed pricing software, yourLeadOut, after three years of development.

The decade-old company, which specialises in helping practices price their services for a reasonable profit, has gathered 500,000 data points from 150 firms and employed data scientists to develop the pricing solution.
“Our role is to help advisers believe in and communicate their full value,” Abbey said.
“We have specialised in understanding client psychology, how to communicate, how to be fair, and how to calculate the fee. With the last component, how to calculate the fee, it was only this financial year that we launched our all-encompassing software to support new client, one-off, ongoing and fee reviews.
“There’s nobody else doing pricing like this in the world that we’re aware of, we’ve just gone into the UK and had our first successful engagement there, and we’re just starting one in New Zealand.”
He said advisers in other countries have the same need so that’s another opportunity for them this year.
Abbey said yourLeadOut and the firm’s advice would give firms confidence to charge fair and appropriate fees for reasonable profitability.
“Our current offering now is to enable the firm to keep updating their P&L, and therefore changing those price points of their fees, and therefore keep repricing their clients, and therefore keep the profit margin, okay, and so it maintains the firm’s profit in perpetuity,” Abbey said.
Vital Business Partners general manager consultancy Sue Viskovic said 2025 would be a year to focus on practices’ back office.

“We now have a huge amount of resources behind us, and our focus is very much on helping businesses to transform the engine room and to improve their business through their back office services,” she said.
“I can teach somebody to charge more for their services, but I’m doing them a better service to make sure that those costs aren’t blowing out unnecessarily, and they’re not passing on the cost of their inefficiencies to their clients through higher fees.”
Viskovic said most advice practices were focusing on how to lift the number of clients every adviser can service and building teams, technology and infrastructure, around those advisers on those parts of the value chain that did not need a licensed adviser.
Outsourcing was part of that matrix, Viskovic said.
“It’s very difficult to try to improve margins and quality of services if a firm is only utilizing onshore staff, because we know the cost of hiring people has increased, but also just the availability of staff.”