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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Ben Nash

XY Adviser, an exclusive online community for the financial advice industry, has been named as a finalist in the category of ‘Excellence in Innovation’ for the 2021 Sydney City Business Awards.

The Sydney City Business Awards, held in partnership with the City of Sydney and Business NSW, recognises growth, entrepreneurship and celebrates business success across all industries in the Sydney central business district and surrounding inner-city suburbs.

The Excellence in Innovation Award recognises “a business that has made significant contributions to their industry and/or community, or implemented innovative solutions for new and existing business needs through the introduction or improvement of an idea, method, technology, process or application”.

Founder Clayton Daniel says “Financial advice is simply too important to be done poorly, and we’ve worked extremely hard to provide an environment for the best advisers to share and learn from one another. To be a finalist for this prestigious award is something our whole team is really proud of.”

XY Adviser’s nomination for this award was based on the launch of their professional network for the financial advice industry in January 2020. This exclusive platform allows members to ask honest questions and receive reliable peer answers in a safe and supportive environment. This has seen their professional network becoming the catalyst for advisers to start their own businesses, build their professional network and grow through industry-wide collaboration and idea-sharing.

Peter Tribolet (Foundation Financial Australia), says about the value of being part of XY’s community “The value XY Adviser offers is unparalleled, not just in Australia but globally. Where else can you ask a question and receive replies ranging from some of the most experienced Advisers in the world to the freshest, keenest new entrants with innovative solutions?”

Initially a ‘passion project’, XY Adviser was officially launched as a commercial entity in 2019 by Clayton Daniel, Adrian Patty (Advice Revolution), Ben Nash (Pivot Wealth), Ray Jaramis (Employment Hero), Emily Blanch and Andrew Rocks (Virtual Business Partners). 1 in 6 financial planners in Australia is now part of their private professional network, with members in almost 20 countries. Their financial adviser-oriented ‘XY Podcast’ is the most popular Financial Services podcast in Australia, consistently ranked in the top 15 most popular Business News podcasts in Australia.

In 2020, the success of this innovation allowed XY Adviser to raise capital from 200 advisers and since expand into South Africa and South-East Asia. They have also recently launched two new industry marketplaces; one for recruitment and the other for the buying and selling of financial advice businesses. Shortly they anticipate taking on an additional round of investment to further improve the user experience of their platform.

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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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Richard Dunkerley

Financial advisers have an opportunity to elevate their services into that of ‘financial coach,’ making themselves as relevant to their clients as other lifestyle professionals, according to a new whitepaper by Zurich Life & Investments.

BusinessFIT: Navigating toward the advice practice of tomorrow, launched yesterday, is based on findings of a workshop which included some of the industry’s most progressive and successful thought-leaders. It considers the fundamental characteristics of prosperous advice practices over the medium-long term, to 2020 and 2025. This is in the face of changing consumer demographics and demands, increasing industry regulation and advancing technologies.

The four main recommendations are:

1. Advisers need to consider how to shift their service from one of ‘technical specialist’ to one of financial lifestyle coach, relating money and wealth goals to their clients’ lifestyle aspirations, objectives and passions. This becomes particularly important as the values of target audiences change, appreciating experiences as well as things, for example. This trend is becoming more common in Millennials who are being forced to rethink home-ownership as the great Australian dream, and Baby-Boomers who are looking to enjoy their retirement with greater health, hobbies and travel.
2. Advisers need powerful back office technologies to support increasing regulatory demands. Ever-increasing regulatory requirements and greater demands for transparency means that successful advice practices will have no choice but to invest in technologies that can automate reporting. Those practices can install the right technologies – within their businesses and through their dealer groups – to efficiently support these administrative requirements, will also be able to dedicate more focus to client consultations and outcomes.
3. Clients will still demand the ‘human touch,’ but emerging automated technologies can play an important technical role. Artificial intelligence and robo-advice, amongst other emerging technologies, may be able to model portfolios much more quickly than an individual financial adviser, and so they have the potential to play an important role. This will not, however, supersede the human relationship between financial coach and client – the building of trust and relationship, emotional intelligence and the translation of lifestyle aspirations into monetary and wealth goals.
4. Consider scalable digital solutions to keep in touch with ‘roaming’ clients, facilitating ongoing communication from wherever they are located. Beyond the ‘human touch’ of a face-to-face appointment, this involves having tools that clients can engage with whilst they are on the go. This might include an app that provides real-time updates on their portfolios, but also let’s them scenario plan, seeing the potential impact should they save or invest more money each month, or change their investment ratios or strategy. By private-labelling basic financial apps, advisers can give clients the opportunity to be as hands-on or hands-off with their money as they please, while still having the trust and personal guidance of a professional financial lifestyle coach to build a wealth strategy in line with their life aspirations.

Zurich’s BusinessFIT whitepaper was developed with the input of workshop participants including Jessica Brady from BT Financial Group, David Clark from Koda Capital, Tim Deamer from Crosbie Wealth, Peita Diamantidis from Caboodle Financial Services, Matt Heine from NetWealth, and Adrian Patty from AP Financial Services, along with futurist Anders Sörman-Nilsson.

In summing up one of the main recommendations, Peita Diamantidis, said, “Our industry can be under a misnomer that money is the point for clients, when it’s not; lifestyle is. There is a great opportunity to change the way we’re approaching financial planning to relate it in terms of dreams, hopes, motivation, inspiration.”

Tim Deamer, Director, Crosbie Wealth Management said, “Clients want to be excited about their financial futures. The sale of a product is irrelevant to them. Having tools that they can engage with are important, so when they interact with their adviser, they feel as though they are being supported on their journey.”

This research is the latest in a series sponsored by Zurich which is dedicated to supporting the continued success of the financial advice industry in Australia.

Richard Dunkerley, Head of Marketing and Communications at Zurich Life & Investments, said, “In the face of increasing regulation and ongoing pressure on the advice industry, we wanted to bring together some of the industry’s best minds to consider what opportunities there were for advisers servicing some clients through their retirement, but also engaging the next generation – the lucrative but relatively un-tapped Millennial market.

“What became clear – in considering changing lifestyles and demographics – was that people still value money and wealth, but as an enabler to reaching other goals, and this provides an opportunity for advisers. The role of technology is also crucial – both for reducing the administrative burden of reporting and regulation, but also to service clients in between appointments, and from wherever they may be based.

“Harnessing evolving technology, and speaking to clients in values-based terms, offer exciting opportunity, according to our think tank of thought-leaders,” he said.

Download a full copy of the research – BusinessFIT: Navigating toward the advice practice of tomorrow

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