The adviser lifestyle index
Where the hours actually go.
Ask anyone in financial advice what’s changed in the last five years, and technology tops the list: more automation, more integration, more of the admin that used to eat into evenings. Ask them if they’ve actually got those evenings back, and the answer is less clear-cut.
We surveyed 228 people across the UK financial advice industry, advisers, planners, owners and support staff alike, to find out how their hours really stack up, what part technology plays, and what they’d do with the time back. Here’s what we found.
What the data means for your firm
Look at the six trends together and admin keeps turning up as the layer that’s hardest to shift: rekeying, chasing paperwork, building forecasts by hand, typing up notes after every meeting. None of that is client facing work, and none of it needs to take up the amount of time it currently does.
That’s what makes the tech-impact figures worth pausing on. A shift from 3.23 to 3.75 out of 5 isn’t dramatic on its own, but it’s an entire group’s average moving because their tools got better, not because their workload changed. Multiplied across a firm of ten or twenty people, the difference between a handful of disconnected systems and one connected platform stops being a back-office decision and starts showing up in people’s actual weeks.
That burden isn’t shared out equally, either. Owners and advisers are working over 40 hours a week at more than twice the rate of their own staff, and parents are doing the same at roughly double the rate of colleagues without children at home. A firm that expects the people at the top to simply absorb more hours, indefinitely, is leaning on something that won’t hold.
The fix isn’t a wholesale rebuild. It’s an honest look at where the admin actually lives, cashflow and forecasting, onboarding, meeting follow-up, logging into three different platforms to do one job, and whether a firm your size should still be doing it by hand. That’s precisely what intelliflo office is built to remove, without changing how advice itself gets delivered. If you’d like to see it against your own workflow, we’ll happily show you.
Book a demo with us.
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