The first is the right people to do the job – people who are keen to engage with lower-value clients, and who can progress in their careers by doing so. The good news is that there is now a strong talent pipeline coming through the industry. The training academies run by the larger firms are bringing on new advisers at scale, ready to cut their teeth on smaller clients with less complex needs.
Other firms are looking to apprentices or graduates to fill these roles, using less experienced, lower-cost team members to triage new clients before handing them on to more senior colleagues. This is a win for everyone: more clients served at lower cost, and a more defined development path for new advisers.
The second ingredient you need is the advice tech to speed up all your processes and help you get it right first time, every time. Today, there are systems that can turn advice and planning that used to take hours into a job of minutes.
Providing cash flow to every client – a core component of value – becomes quick, easy and affordable. A consistent definition of risk throughout this technology supports greater levels of automation.
Firms need to use all the technology at their disposal to ensure they really understand the client and capture their preferences around risk, sustainability and income, as well as their financial wellbeing.
And the advice system must talk to your CRM and other software, so that all the data you capture pulls through into your back office, re-keying is minimised, and processes automated. There was no room for re-keying before consumer duty, and there is even less today.
The third key ingredient is digital client engagement: secure, intimate, app-based planning that takes the pain out of client communications and helps your customers understand whether they are on track to meet their objectives – central to consumer duty.
Simply giving clients access to their valuations is not servicing them. Instead, you want to be able to demonstrate to them: these are your objectives, this is the risk level we agreed and I am tracking you against that. And, for low-end clients in particular, to be able to automate that process as much as possible.
Smaller clients tend to be younger – but across age brackets, people increasingly expect to be able to do everything through their phones. A mobile app-based approach allows you to deliver an engaging client experience that provides real ongoing value at low cost.
Almost every firm I meet has its own advice gap – a long tail of smaller clients, whether they are the next generation who have been brought onboard to help retain the grandparents, or those brought on as favours to friends, or those that have not grown as expected.
