Creating a culture of innovation
Roxanne Corrieri, Customer Experience, intelliflo and James Bartlett, Product Strategy Lead, intelliflo
At intelliflo, we believe innovation is not about jumping on the latest technology trends. It’s about understanding and solving the customer’s real problems.
At our innovate 2024 conference earlier this month, our Head of Customer Experience, Roxanne Corrieri, and Product Strategy Lead, James Bartlett, outlined our approach to innovation and some of the developments we’re working on.
James set the scene by explaining intelliflo’s culture of innovation: “It’s about ways of working primarily. On the product development side, we’ve grown our user experience team so we are better able to research and deeply understand our customers’ needs and bring them into the design process. We also dedicate time to innovation, including regular all-day ‘innovation marathons’, where the development teams have free rein to develop and demo different ideas. Those ideas are then reviewed with a wider team to be considered as future enhancements.”
Roxanne added: “Giving time and space to get creative is often underrated but is extremely powerful. As well as the innovation marathons, we also have dedicated customer experience days throughout the year which are about gaining a better understanding of our customer needs. All teams come together to review customer feedback and collaborate on how we can improve our products and services and how we work together. After all, although innovation is about tech, it’s not just about tech. It’s about working with our customers and partners to shape the future together.”
At intelliflo, collaboration is key to ensuring the technology continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of our customers. The customer-inspired change programme, where intelliflo office users put forward suggestions for improvements which all customers can then vote on, has played a significant role in the development of our technology in recent years.
James noted: “We recognise that there’s a huge benefit in getting customers involved in the discovery and design process. The customer-inspired change programme was born from customer feedback and the importance of the customer’s voice in shaping our services. We have dedicated teams responding to customer-inspired change and since it was established in Oct 2022, the programme has resulted in over 250 changes suggested by our customers and we’re on track to deliver one every three days for the last two years running.”
A common theme we’ve seen through customer feedback is that firms want to be more efficient so they can spend more time with clients and deliver advice more widely. AI has huge potential to free up adviser time. Our recent marketwide adviser research found that very few firms, just 7%, think AI will negatively impact the advice profession, and almost half (46%) are using, or plan to start using, AI in some form.
However, 95% of respondents feel they don’t have the skill set to fully harness the power of AI. To address these concerns, intelliflo is working to provide a full stack of AI capabilities to support customers in seizing the opportunity.
James explains, “We can really see the benefits of using AI to create efficiencies around a range of advice processes. We want to create a full ecosystem of AI capabilities across different functional areas to use throughout the advice processes from note-taking and report writing to data analysis and compliance.
“We’re taking a three-pronged approach to this. The first is leveraging our open architecture so firms can access the right partners and tools in the intelliflo store. We’re also creating deeper strategic partnerships which give a more embedded intelliflo office experience. And we’ll look to develop our own capabilities within intelliflo office too.”
One of the partnerships we’re building is with Aveni, which specialises in automating notetaking and meeting summaries, an area customers tell us is a major priority.
James says: “Firms can already install the Aveni Assist app from the intelliflo store and invite the Aveni ‘bot’ to join client and create summaries that can then be stored in intelliflo office. The AI is trained to financial services, so delivers more relevant content than if you used ChatGPT for instance. We’re also planning to expand that functionality so the meeting transcript automatically populates fact find data in intelliflo office. And future plans include integrating Aveni Detect, which reviews meeting transcripts for quality and compliance.”
Personalised client communication is another area where customers tell us they’d like greater support. We’re addressing this with the forthcoming launch of intelliflo video, in partnership with Money Alive.
The partnership will initially leverage Money Alive’s existing video library and technology, while future developments will see the creation of a bespoke learning experience for intelliflo office customers. This will include educational videos, engaging provider information and interactive tools which you can use to create a personalised playlist for clients shared directly through intelliflo office and the personal finance portal.
Roxanne notes: “We’ve seen the rise of video content to help provide financial education and guidance, but clients still want to have a relationship with their adviser. By leaning into the popularity of video content and making it accessible as part of an advised client journey, we can better support you in communicating with your clients in the way they want, enhancing their overall experience.”
“Crucially, the client’s interaction with the video – whether they watched it, if they understood the information and so on – will be recorded in intelliflo office. This will give you a better insight into how your clients are engaging with the process and highlight gaps in their knowledge, supporting the consumer understanding outcome of Consumer Duty and demonstrating that you are complying with the regulations.”
Access to data is a hugely important part of the advice process. It not only evidences the service you have provided and the products you’ve recommended, it also provides vital insight to underpin your firm’s future strategy and success. However, interpreting vast amounts of data can be a daunting prospect.
We’re continuing to deliver dashboards to present management information in a meaningful way, but we’re also currently in the process of understanding how AI functionality could improve data interrogation.
James outlined the areas we’re looking at to help you get more out of the data available within intelliflo office, “There are capabilities offered by our strategic partners that we’re exploring involving data and AI. For instance, natural language searching to help you find information more easily and present it visually, and data extraction functionality which could help bring documents and handwritten text into intelliflo office without having to input it manually. But we’re very much in the discovery phase at the moment, working to validate the use cases for this type of technology and ensure the solutions are addressing real customer needs.”
This is just a flavour of our continued focus on innovation. If you’d like to help guide the future design of our technology, please raise your suggestions and vote on ideas in intelliflo connect (available for existing customers only).