Users can invest online or speak to an adviser either over the phone or in person.
Ms Boyle said: “The most important thing is making sure clients fully understand what they are doing. You can tell, talking over the phone or face to face, when someone does not quite get something but it is more difficult to gauge through messages.
“You will never be able to automate the entire advice process but it will certainly help to reduce the cost.”
| Key Points |
• Many people in the industry are excited about the advent of online investment management sites. • The market for tools that allow advisory firms to automate their services has been tipped to boom in the UK. • Artificial intelligence, while not yet available to the mass market, is being developed. |
Automation boom
While attention has focused on alternatives to the traditional advisory process, the market for tools that allow advisory firms to automate certain services has been tipped to boom in the UK.
Advicefront, which launched this year, claims to help advisers compete against online brokers and robo-advisers by automating ‘low-value’ tasks and reducing the time spent with admin, compliance and planning from nine hours to as little as 30 minutes per client.
It enables adviser firms to automate much of the initial engagement, the formal financial planning process, the financial plan and the suitability report production through a codified online system, according to Jason Butler, board adviser at the firm.
He said: “Most decent financial advisers are at full capacity and technology and automation have the potential to help them serve existing clients better and leverage their skilled staff to be able to advise more clients without lowering quality.
“As more clients interact digitally with advice firms, skilled financial advisers can focus on the more complicated and higher value advice work, which is difficult to automate or deliver digitally.”
He added: “My view is everything that doesn’t need an emotional connection, empathy, subjectivity or a personal explanation should be automated. In addition, some advice situations that are highly complex or rare are likely to be too expensive to automate, at least for the foreseeable future.”
Hygiene factor
Meanwhile, some firms have become wedded to the online approach to financial advice. Clients of London-based Alexander House Financial Services can choose to have all their correspondence with their advisers via video conference software and over the phone.
They are also able to draw on the firm’s UK-based financial advisers who can meet face to face at the client’s convenience. However, the company incentivises clients to opt for its virtual advice by offering a discount on its advisory process.
