Practice management systems move into the driving seat

Nick Eatock, CEO of intelliflo

When intelliflo was established 20 years ago, much of the advice sector was driven by paper. While some advisers used a standalone back office system to store client information, it was by no means universal. Today, you’d be hard-pushed to find a firm that doesn’t have some sort of back office tech. It’s generally accepted that technology plays a fundamental role in ensuring advisers can work effectively and efficiently.

Back office evolution

And of course, over the last two decades, adviser technology has evolved significantly and is no longer simply digital filing cabinets. Yesterday’s back office solutions have transformed into today’s business management systems and become central to many firm’s advice propositions.

Yet despite the advances of the last twenty years, advisers still too often have to rekey information and switch between different tech. They find themselves jumping from their business management system to an investment platform to a client portal to a cashflow tool and back again, multiple times a day. We call this the ‘swivel chair effect’ and it leads to unnecessary friction and errors.

In addition, while many providers have introduced digital processes in recent years, driven in part by the need to improve their service to advice firms, too many still require wet signatures for some transactions. And although integrations have come a long way, data sharing and connectivity are often not where they need to be, with a lot of systems still requiring data entry and manual workarounds. All of this adds time and risk into the process, ultimately impacting firms’ efficiency and profitability.

Our 2024 market-wide intelliflo advice efficiency survey, examining how well today’s advice processes are functioning, identified that overreliance on manual processes and a lack of integration and digitalisation are generating preventable errors and extra work for advice professionals. A stunning 94% of advisers think their advice journeys could be more efficient, while more than one in five want to eliminate all manual processes. We also found that the average time allotted to implementing financial plans is 45 working days a year, with 11% of firms spending over five hours implementing each plan.

It’s not surprising then that, according to the lang cat’s latest State of the Advice Nation study, when advice firms were asked whether they would switch out their existing tech stack, given the choice, only 18% would keep everything; in other words, four out of five are dissatisfied with at least one element. The report states: “A staggering one in three firms would change at least four component parts.” There is “widespread dissatisfaction for most firms’ tech ecosystem as a whole.”

Embrace the right technology

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a comprehensive, flexible practice management system in pole position, you can create a central hub that delivers functionality and/or connects third-party tools that seamlessly support your proposition. When you properly embed the technology into your work processes, your practice management system will underpin the entire advice journey, from the initial fact find, through goal setting and risk profiling to investment research and cashflow modelling to ongoing monitoring and review. It will simplify processes, improve efficiency and save time, while helping deliver good client outcomes, consistently and profitably.

wealthlink contribution

With the right solutions and functionality fully integrated with your practice management system, you can key in data once and use it for a variety of purposes, automate processes and move seamlessly between different tools to provide an engaging, best-of-breed solution. You can also share data securely with trusted third-party providers as well as clients, presenting a comprehensive view of their wealth and how the financial plan is meeting their objectives.

Having the right business practice management system embedded within your firm is proven to enhance efficiency and profitability and support better experiences and outcomes for clients. Bringing together all investment activity within a single journey delivers added efficiency.

The US launch of wealthlink, also recently launched in the UK, and providing full investment platform functionality without leaving the intelliflo office environment, saw submission errors fall from 50% to 1%, thanks to intelligent data collection and removal of paper forms. It is early days for the UK version, but we fully expect to enjoy similar efficiencies here too.

To gain the greatest advantage, advisers need to embrace the technology and make maximum use of available functionality. Putting a high performance business management system in the driving seat of your business, supporting the whole advice journey, will help keep your firm on the road to success.

 

This article was first published in Money Marketing on 1 November. Please find a link to the original piece here.