Given the rapidly growing demand for digital fact-finding solutions in the advice marketplace, Advice Revolution has recruited Thom to drive further growth of their business. They have successfully capitalised on this market trend to date, with their tools currently being used by over 50 businesses and their user growth doubling, quarter on quarter, over the last 9 months. The future for Advice Revolution looks equally bright, with a highly qualified and accelerating pipeline of large practice clients, which will continue to grow via Thom’s appointment.

Shaun Green, Founder and CEO of Advice Revolution says on Thom joining their team “There has never been more demand for digital fact-finding tools and we want to remain at the forefront of digitising data collection for the advice industry. We are delighted to have someone of Helen’s calibre join our team and spearhead the next phase of our growth, as we continue on our mission to help more advisers run their business like it’s 2022”.

Thom says about joining Advice Revolution “I’ve never worked for a product that has such a positive reaction from advisers and practices. Whether you’re a large or small practice, it can be picked up and used straight out of the box. This is so important for businesses that want to innovate quickly and grow”.

According to Netwealth, the need for digital fact-finding solutions has never been higher. Their 2021 AdviceTech report found that over 40% of advisers plan on adopting digital fact-finding over the next 24 months, representing the highest planned uptake across all categories of advice technology.

Advice Revolution’s tools have helped advice businesses from over 30 licensees to streamline their processes, improve their client experience and drive significant efficiencies in their back office. This is helping firms to create more profitable and scalable service offerings, while better realising their existing investments in technology and people.

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Adrian Patty

Businesses are struggling with the burden of fulfilling ASIC’s ‘know your client’ obligations in situations where multiple clients simultaneously require advice. These requirements are taking up to 8 Weeks for 100 clients to move from one licensee to another.

Advice Revolution is helping advice firms to retain more of these clients and simplify the onboarding process through their digital fact-finding solutions, with time savings of between 1.5 and 5 hours per client. Businesses who are required to migrate a book of clients, either due to Licensee change or acquisition, are reducing the migration project time for a client book by up to 5 weeks.

Advice Revolution’s client engagement solutions provide a suite of tools to enhance the pre-meeting and in-meeting experience for financial advice clients. Through its two-way data sync with leading advice CRMs such as XPLAN, Advice Revolution enables clients to directly verify existing information prior to meetings, with any changes flowing directly through into the CRM. Since their launch in 2020, Advice Revolution has now integrated directly with the CRMs of licensees including Oreana Financial Services, Centrepoint Alliance, Count Financial and Easton Wealth.

Murphy Hill Private Wealth, part of the Oreana Financial Services network, have saved time and bolstered revenue by adopting Advice Revolution’s suite of tools as part of their business acquisition strategy. Principal Adviser, John Hill, personally provides ongoing advice to 250 clients. He says “The way that it syncs all existing data and enables the client to self-serve saves me between 1.5-2.5 hrs per client. This capability is ideal for the foundational SOA process, with a reduction of weeks from the timeline of migrating a book of clients”.

According to Netwealth, the need for digital fact-finding solutions has never been higher. Their 2021 AdviceTech report found that over 40% of advisers plan on adopting digital fact-finding over the next 24 months, representing the highest planned uptake across all categories of advice technology.

Advice Revolution’s tools have helped advice businesses from over 30 licensees to streamline their processes, improve their client experience and drive significant efficiencies in their back office. This is helping firms to create more profitable and scalable service offerings, while better realising their existing investments in technology and people.

Says Green about the value of digital fact-finding to growth-focused advice practices “We’re proud to have used technology to create a genuine win-win for advice firms and their clients. Not only are our tools helping businesses to save time, reduce costs and grow more profitable businesses, but clients are responding faster and telling their adviser that they actually enjoy the experience”.

These sentiments are echoed by Netwealth’s report, with almost half of under 40s placing the digital capability of an advice firm in their top three reasons for choosing them. Practices using digital data capture solutions also report benefiting from more time with clients, improved affordability of advice, growth in client numbers and increased revenue.

By Adrian Patty, Chief Technology Officer

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(L to R) Shaun Green and Adrian Patty

Advice Revolution and Worksorted have partnered to help advisers reduce cost to serve and improve their technology experience.

The biggest problem for financial advice businesses is the cost to serve. The seamless integration between Advice Revolution and Worksorted takes 30-60mins off their advice process while providing more choice in how they design their own technology solutions.

Advice Revolution is a digital fact find with deep integration capabilities. It helps advisers capture an end to end fact find and connect this data into the next stages of the advice process.

Worksorted is an intuitive, easy to use CRM, Workflow and Revenue system made for Financial Advisers. It incorporates document management, Fee Disclosure Statements (FDS) and Opt In. Worksorted has built its reputation by delivering great practice management solutions to advice businesses. They’ve decided to partner with Advice Revolution as their first specialist digital fact find and client engagement integration.

Nathan Fradley of Lime Financial, the Affinia Adviser of the Year, uses both systems, and says, “The new integration saves me an additional 30-60mins per client on top of the multiple hrs of time savings these applications already provide me.”

Adrian Patty from Advice Revolution says, “This partnership is just the beginning of many integrations which will dramatically reduce the cost to serve and improve the technology experience for financial advisers.”

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(L to R) Shaun Green and Adrian Patty

The Royal commission has doubled the cost of advice for many practices. Fact finding with clients is the most time consuming part of the advice process. Advice Revolution is offsetting this impact by reducing the time to deliver advice via its digital fact finding solutions. Adviser users of the platform are seeing an improvement in compliance, client experience and a reduction in time to provide new advice by up to 5.5 hours per client.

To help accelerate the benefits of digital adoption for advisers, Advice Revolution has recently released a free mini fact find, the first of its kind in the Australian Advice marketplace. This powerful tool removes the need to use PDF-based fact finds, DIY online survey tools, or expensive software…all for free. The impact of this is a better experience for clients and less time spent by advisers, leading to more profit, not to mention more productive meetings.

Founder Adrian Patty says “We want to help Advisers who have borne the brunt of ongoing regulatory change. The most effective way to counter the increased cost to serve is through digital fact finding. So far, only 25% have made this leap and we want to help take this to 100%. There’s so much opportunity ahead with technology and the first step is to go digital.”

Advice Revolution is founded by two former advisers who have both experienced the challenges of delivering advice with antiquated fact-finding solutions and inefficient processes. Other than their experience as financial advisers:

• Adrian Patty is also a founder of XY Adviser, the largest community of financial advisers in Australia.
• Shaun Green worked inside one of the largest licensees in Australia, partnering with advice practices to grow and improve their businesses.

Advice Revolution has recently formed partnerships with Centrepoint Alliance and other mid tier licensees to make the solution available to their advice networks. They also have a range of practices using their solutions, the benefits advisers are experiencing including:

• Saving advisers up to 5.5 hours per new client
• Making it easier to satisfy Best Interest Duty
• Providing a more user-friendly and less time-consuming client experience
• Unmatched integration capability with Xplan

Advice Revolution has raised funding from a number of industry participants, advisers and early users. They continue to raise funds and intend to complete a larger seed round in 12 months to provide market leading client engagement solutions to advisers.

The Advice Revolution team was further boosted in January 2021 with two additional appointments to their advisory board:

• Hugh Bickerstaff is a Venture Partner at Vulpes Investment Management and was previously ex Chief Investment Officer at Investible.
• Kate Holmes is a leader in the global advice community and a tireless advocate for innovative and impactful financial advice.  Kate thrives on being ‘on the pulse’ of technology innovation, is a member of the CFP Board’s Women’s Initiative (WIN) Council and the founder of ‘Innovating Advice’.

From Kate’s perspective “Advice Revolution delivers great adviser efficiency and the mini fact find is the best example of frictionless data capture available. I’m very much looking forward to it entering the US market”

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The digital change is pivotal, but it’s not the only shift going on.

The world has shifted. These are tough times and they will affect people differently. Advisers are going to experience their own hardship through this time, but it’s also a big turning point for them.

Advisers have been under pressure for the last few years where the industry has been belittled and downtrodden under the weight of a Royal Commission. It gave no mercy to the 1000’s of small advice businesses currently helping their clients navigate the tidal wave of change hitting society and the financial world.

Despite the immovable compliance burden, there are some changes that are going to shift the way advice is delivered and consumed forever.

The digital shift happening right now as a result of social distancing will help advisers in a number of ways.

Digital signatures

Digital signatures have been around for years and it still boggles the mind how they are not accepted everywhere…that is now changing. Along with the legal and medical profession, financial services providers who would only accept a wet original signature for a range of different reasons are now rapidly changing their tune. The outcome of this is a reduction in costs for the advice process and faster advice delivery.

Digital whiteboards

A whiteboard is a crucial tool for most advisers… these are being digitised as well. Advisers that are used to drawing complex diagrams are reporting that a digital tablet over screen share is working fine, if not better.

Digital meetings

You’ve got people of all ages downloading Zoom and having catch ups with friends for the first time. These people are prospective advice clients who now engage in video meetings as a matter of normalcy. The concern held that online meetings are less valuable than a face to face meeting is diminishing by the day. This gives a massive opportunity for advisers to remove the cost base of an office without any actual or perceived reduction in quality of service.

Digital fact finding

Everyone has incorporated some form of digital in their business in the last few years…but there has still been the remnants of the paper age. While paper fact finds are still the norm for some businesses, many advisers want nothing more than to drop this clunky method and switch to digital fact finds. One of the biggest concerns is not wanting to break a client engagement formula that works and that the tech will get in the way. For this exact reason, we’ve focused on choice, flexibility and customisation for the adviser at Advice Revolution. This combined with a compliance backbone means that flicking through paper or word documents to check what’s been missed is a thing of the past.

Where is digital advice adoption on this curve?

I think as an industry we’re now well into the late majority and even touching on the laggards.

For some advisers this is catapulting them into the digital age and for others, this is the same way they’ve been operating for years. For the newly digital advisers, the benefit will be that they transform their practice efficiency and reap the productivity and compliance benefits. For the already digital advice propositions, they’ve just had their addressable market boom.

The bottom line is that the capacity for more Australians to access advice is only going to improve as a result of digitisation.

People are looking for leadership

The financial markets downturn, actual or prospective job losses and stimulus changes have created an overwhelming tsunami of financial decisions for many people. Angus Woods and the team at Adviser Ratings have seen a tripling of interest for advisers on their site.

There’s plenty of examples of adviser leadership at the moment. I was talking to an adviser the other day who has had a few clients who have lost their job. He was in a bittersweet world. His clients were having a really tough time in life, but at the same time all the emergency buffers and planning done previously had come to the fore. They were prepared as a result of advice, so even with the unfortunate event of losing their job, they’re still of the view that their adviser is an essential and valuable spend.

It’s been brilliant to see messages of conviction in XY Adviser where advisers are wearing the overwhelming demand from they’re clients as a badge of honour…in the end most advisers are in the game because they have made a choice to take responsibility for other people. For most, the flux that’s going on, just means game on, this is what they’re here for.

All sound good, but you’re not feeling it?

If you’re feeling a bit isolated from the general hum of the office or the city, check out XY Adviser, the social network specifically for financial advice. There’s a whole range of people in the same boat working together to continue looking out for their clients, while staying on the pulse as these immediate changes unfold.

Another challenge being experienced right now is how to connect with new clients in this climate. All the adviser marketing gurus (Steve Salvia, Adele Martin and Paul Giannotti) are saying the same thing, the message of aspiration and future has to shift to solving the problems of here and now. There is also a clear message that strong leadership is what is going to cut through. If you want to hear more you can check out all their great content on the XY Adviser Social Platform for free.

So the digital change is pivotal, but it’s not the only shift going on. The adviser mindset has lept from compliance fatigue to one of resolute client support, squashing the unfounded doubt that had built up over the last few years.

There’s a chance that the government will see the value an adviser plays and the need to reduce red tape, but that’s a dependency I’m not willing to wait on. Tech is the answer for reducing the pain and we’re doing our damnedest at Advice Revolution to make advisers lives easier.

Advisers have had the toughest of times over the last few years and they’re still not out of the woods yet, but this is a time for the leadership that they can bring to the table, to assist people regain control of their financial lives.

By Adrian Patty, Director of Innovation

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