In a heightened security landscape, advice practices need to find balance between allocating capital to innovative solutions or shoring up cyber protection.
Burcheart founder and managing director Sacha Burchgart tells Professional Planner the firm is allocating quite a bit of money to spend on technology, particularly on automation and client experience tools.
“In terms of software that’s costing us about $380 a month; the setup is a little bit higher,” Burchgart says.
“To automate and have specific messages sent and all that, the coding would probably cost around $10,000.”
Expert Wealth director Paris Bisley says the business has increased its tech spending in last 12 months from $1 million to $1.5 million over three years.
“We have an internal developer, so hiring someone to lead the team internally, but we also spent money on two different Australian tech developers,” he says.
Bisley says the firm is one of the first to create an AI financial services agent, which used up time and resources. They use Salesforce primarily, which helped to fund the creation of the AI agent.
“We were tracking fairly well, slightly over, as you tend to do with some tech spend, but we think we’ve increased the scope of the tech as our project realisation has come to fruition, as well as some other tech becoming available,” Bisley says.
“A big part of that was incorporating property data – adding the AI agent and including integrated property data.”
Client value
Value for clients is at the forefront of advisers’ mind and drives aspects of the spend on tech, as new technologies can help advisers engage with their clients on a deeper level.
Burghart says a part of the firm’s spend on tech is to create “deeper personalisation” in order to improve the client experience.
“We want to be able to not just fit all our clients into a box, [but] be highly personalised with their goals and their data and their personality, so we know how to reach them in their most effective way.
“When push comes to shove, if clients see money coming out of their account and they’re not really engaged, they’re likely to not continue an ongoing service.”
She says automation and efficiency are the “primary drivers” in improving services and ensure clients are receiving value for money.
Bisley echoes the importance of efficiency and says the firm is happy to spend on technology if it saves time and therefore improves the client experience.
He adds the firm is “huge” on value and they invest in technology that will improve the client experience and the efficiency of the business.
“Time efficiency is a huge one because time has costs, and it reduces our costs, but also billable hours to clients,” he says.
“We think it will put downward pressure on the costs of advice whilst maintaining profitability and enhancing compliance.”
The importance of increasing efficiency and productivity to provide a better client experience is echoed across the industry.
A roundtable in November 2024, hosted by Professional Planner in partnership with HUB24, heard driving up productivity levels was essential for businesses to prioritise.
Cybersecurity concerns
With recent attacks on super funds and threats on smaller businesses, spending on tech to improve the cybersecurity is crucial for firms.
Bisley says part of the reason they chose Salesforce instead of a domestic, industry-specific CRM solution was for cybersecurity purposes.
“It was an 18-month research project in choosing which avenue we would go down as the heartbeat or core to our tech and cybersecurity was absolutely at the fundamental point.”
He adds that data integration has been part of the business’ strategy, so they don’t have to manually send or receive sensitive data from clients.
“The benefit to us is we have data much more quickly, but also that we don’t expose clients to that risk of having to manually send out or receive this very important financial or personal data,” Bisley says.
Data integration has been a problem for advice businesses, as platforms don’t want to share client data, which can make it difficult for firms to access client information.
Buchgart also prioritises cybersecurity in the firm’s tech spending and she says it is the bigger price bracket they have to allow for.
“In terms of password storage and all of that, for the team, that pops us around probably a couple of thousand dollars a year,” Buchgart says.
The AI journey
Buchgart says they are working on improving inefficiencies by investing in some AI tools as timesavers, but adds it is a journey constantly evolving.
“We’ve been using a lot of the CoPilot and those kind of AI efficiencies for quite some time now, since CoPilot Pro came out, so I ensure the teams use that,” she says.
“We also have note taking devices that obviously help with that efficiency piece and client data collection piece.”
She says she’s seen a “jump up” in efficiency from file notes as the tool has reduced the amount of time it takes to type up the notes.
However, she steers clear of jumping on every new shiny AI tool and says that’s where people can waste money.
“I believe you [should] just stick to one, because they all do very similar things,” Buchgart says.
Bisley says they see a lot of value in investing early into AI, as evidenced by the AI agent.
“Being either the first or one of the first to come out with an AI agent, we knew that that was both a time and monetary cost to us, but we saw that technology is definitely moving that way.”
