What do F1 teams and advice firms have in common?
Johann Koch, Chief Sales Officer, UK and Australia, intelliflo
In motor racing, the principle of marginal gains is crucial to winning races. Claire Williams, former Deputy Team Principal of Williams Racing, spoke about the concept at our recent innovate conference.
She said, “In Formula 1, innovation happens in the margins. From the aerodynamics department to engineering, the design office, manufacturing, across everything, the whole team is looking at every single area where they can drive marginal amounts of performance.
They’ll look at areas where they can perhaps get a thousandth of a second. And they will take that thousandth of a second… because if someone else in aero has found another thousandth, and someone in the design office has found a tenth, put it all together, and if you start the championship year half a second behind your main competitor, you can close that delta quite quickly.”
The idea that small, incremental improvements across multiple processes can deliver a substantial advantage also applies to financial advice.
Our 2025 eAdviser index shows that maximising technology adoption has a dramatic impact on business performance. It found that firms that fully embrace technology, our Champions, significantly outperform Adopters, who use only core functionality but aren’t leveraging the full capabilities, across all metrics, including managing 105% more revenue per adviser and 39% more clients.
However, while the right technology can drive business performance, ineffective systems can prevent firms from working effectively. Advice professionals frequently switch between multiple systems, often rekeying information, which adds unnecessary work and increases the risk of errors. And fragmented systems don’t just impact advisers. By slowing down turnaround times and increasing the chance of errors, they can affect the client experience too.
The latest marketwide intelliflo advice efficiency survey finds that fragmented systems and disjointed processes are adding unnecessary friction to the advice process. Overall, 96% believe their advice journeys could be more efficient.
Reducing the number of technology solutions used within a firm can bring benefits, but the nature of financial advice means that there will always be a need to access different provider systems to manage clients’ financial plans. Although integrations continue to improve, emerging technologies may ultimately offer a more seamless way to move information across platforms.
We recently launched a collaboration with Zerokey to eliminate manual data entry by allowing advice professionals to pull data from intelliflo office and push it into third-party systems at the click of a button. The process saves a few seconds each time, and those small time savings, repeated over many actions, can add up to a significant difference in efficiency over a month or a year. And importantly, removing rekeying helps to reduce errors and retain the data’s integrity.
A study by PwC for the Government Office for Science earlier this year found that productivity gains generated by the adoption of emerging technology have the potential to increase UK GDP growth by 8.4%, or £223.4 billion, by 2035. It estimates that technologies like AI, robotics and future computing will drive improvements in operational enhancements, automation and efficiencies across industries.
Firms are already looking at different types of technology. For instance, our advice efficiency survey found that 43% are actively using AI within their advice journey, with the most common uses currently being personalisation and automation, data analysis and compliance. And there is more to come, with 64% of advisers wanting to see greater use of AI in report writing, meeting transcription, fact finding and system integration.
However, realising the full benefit of technology requires more than just installing the right systems. It’s about embedding those systems throughout your advice process and creating a culture of continuous improvement so you’re always getting the most out of the functionality available.
Just like in Formula 1, fractional changes, compounded over time, can produce better outcomes in financial advice. By embracing technology, firms can unlock greater efficiency, serve more clients, and focus on delivering quality advice. Success rarely comes from a single breakthrough; it’s built on hundreds of small, smart improvements working seamlessly together.
This article was first published in Professional Paraplanner on 11 September. Please find a link to the original piece here.
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