There’s growing evidence that financial planners are wilting under the heat of time-consuming processes that could be automated and executed by technology in a fraction of the time.

Take this recent Twitter poll by public speaker, author and FinalytiQ founder Abraham Okusanya.

Okay, it’s just Twitter but 128 respondents is significant and they have sent a fairly clear message that onboarding clients is what’s eating up the hours.

As you know, this consists largely of fact-finding, risk-profiling, setting up client agreements, arranging billing and ensuring the client reads and signs multiple documents. In 2019, these are all processes that can be sped up with software and apps, freeing up hours every month that planners could use drinking tea (or wine!) with clients and discussing their goals.

Ah, those wasted hours. We recently conducted research here at Advicefront that revealed financial advisers are spending nearly five hours a week on unnecessary tasks, costing advisers £220 per week (over £10,000 per year!) in wasted time.

Breaking their week down, the respondents said they spent, on average:

  • 4 hours and 34 minutes on regular review service
  • 4 hours and 16 minutes preparing suitability letters
  • 3 hours and 8 minutes fact-finding
  • 2 hours and 55 minutes re-keying data

It seems that in some cases, all this is having an unwelcome knock-on effect for the client. As Ian McKenna, of the Finance & Technology Research Centre, explained in Morningstar:

“I actually think it’s really important for consumers to challenge the extent to which their financial advisers are using technology. Because if they are still receiving everything on paper the consumer is probably paying more than they should do because paper is expensive and time consuming to produce. Whereas the more advanced advice firms are now delivering information which can give consumers a holistic view of their savings on apps and other digital services.”

So how much time are you spending on time-consuming tasks that could be automated?

What does Advicefront do?

It would be neglectful, at this point, not to tell you that we offer a single suite of fact-finding, risk-profiling, client agreement, billing and digital signature tools in our product, Onboard. The idea is to help financial planners automate tasks that are boring and add little value so they can concentrate on nurturing relationships with clients.

And the best part is we integrate with many of the tools you all already use for risk–profiling, cashflow-modelling and more. So you won’t have to stop using them if you don’t want to.

Want to see how much time you could save with Onboard? Book your free 15-minute demo!