‘CRMs probably die a slow death’: Netwealth CEO

Netwealth chief executive Matt Heine believes customer relationship management (CRM) software will “die a slow death” as their place in the advice process becomes redundant, telling the Professional Planner Licensee Summit that CRMs may become obsolete in the next two years

“What you need is great data, but if you think about what you do when you’re going into your CRM, it’s to look up a bit of information,” Heine said.

“Do you need the whole page with every bit of information on it? Probably not. Do you just want that one key bit of information with context around it? Absolutely. I think CRMs probably die a slow death in the future and groups like Salesforce are going to thrive because they’re doing a whole lot more with the data and data aggregation behind the scenes.”

Heine predicts licensees will begin to develop more tech, but that there are two contrasting parts to the licensee market: small and medium-sized licensees that don’t have the balance sheets for technology R&D and larger licensees that do.

“[Smaller AFSLs] still need access to the services that I think many of us, as platforms, are thinking about,” Heine said.

“They want to use our user interface in the future, they want us to keep investing into the user experience and the efficiency tools, and a lot of the AI tools.”

The other side to this, Heine said, was the larger licensees that are now better capitalised and likely to develop their own tech.

In this circumstance, Heine borrowed the “new tech term” of being “headless” whereby a system’s backend (the body) becomes separated from the front end (the head).

“They’ll build their own experiences over the top and we’ll be demoted to the background and that’s fine,” Heine said.

“We need to make sure that everything we do is accessible via APIs [application programming interface] and MCP [model context protocol] connections and other ways of integrating with the advice solutions that they build at the top. Platforms, moving forward, we need to be able to support both parts of the market.”

Evolution of AI in advice

The financial advice profession has already begun to embrace AI, but Heine was wary about making any big calls about where the technology will evolve next.

“Anything I say now is going to be completely wrong within a month,” Heine said.

“Things are moving so quickly at the moment that it is very hard to say with total conviction this is where things are heading and this is what the future is going to look like. Anyone that suggests otherwise, I think you should run away from.”

Kailee Maloney, head of Australia at AI file note developer Marloo, said there’s a big disconnect between capability of AI and real implementation at scale.

“Yes, everyone is automating file notes, so there’s that pervasive use of AI there, but it’s topical and fragmented and the use cases fall off a cliff after that,” Maloney said.

She added some advisers are leveraging AI and automation already and are seeing the benefits.

“The flip of that is the adviser who is throwing data unwittingly into generic tools that they don’t understand… and wasting resources, particularly at a self-licensed level, is that the right use of your time to be building the infrastructure?”

Maloney said file notes have become the major use of AI in advice, but document generation is starting to catch up.

“We’re on the cusp of that going mainstream and that’s a massive capacity unlock and the third is the intelligence layer – that connective tissue and that’s the piece that I think is really transforming advice practices,” Maloney said.

Heine said that AI tools are only as good as the data put into them and the value of data lies in the outcomes produced, not the collection.

“It does need to start there, but the conversation has moved, where as an industry, we need to really accelerate some of these commoditised aspects,” Heine said.

“Data is not the asset, data is not where your value sits… it’s in the intelligence layer. That is taking all of the data which is static and supports the systems and client information, but the intelligence layer is what do you do with that data.”

Road to 300

The overarching theme of the summit was how to help advisers reach 300 clients, and Heine said AI and automation should be able to give time back to advisers.

“If there’s 280 working days in a year, is it really that big a stretch to think that an adviser should be able to see one customer a day? If you work backwards from that and think if they’re going to see one customer a day, what are they going to do for the next six hours and where are they spending that time?”

Heine said that time was spent on file notes, preparing for client meetings, ROAs, SOAs, but AI and automation will streamline those processes for advisers who haven’t previously outsourced them.

“We’ve suddenly got three or four hours back in the day,” Heine said.  

“You might have a managed account, that’s probably got rid of another two days of work that you might have done historically. We’re starting to get there really quickly.”