Worst thing about fact-finding? You might be surprised…

A motley (although good-looking, so we’re told) crew of former financial advisers, tech whizzes and design mavens, has given the Advicefront team much to think about when it comes to a key assumption — thanks a bunch, Twitter!

We asked you what your pet peeves about the fact-finding process were, expecting to provoke complaints about this often admin-heavy, time-consuming part of the advice cycle. As you probably know, we’re all about The Value of Time here, our daily work centred around giving advisers more of the elusive t-word, by helping them fact-find quickly with our software so that they can have more time for clients and their business.

So we were pleasantly surprised when the majority of advisers mentioned the other all-important factor driving our work and that’s at the core of what we do – ‘Being Human’! Comments like, “If you don’t like getting to know your clients get out of the profession” (@RedCircleFP) were followed by a deluge of replies in the vein of “If anyone finds the ‘fact finding’ process frustrating, they must be doing it wrong (caveat: I’m thinking of client interaction only, getting info from providers is a different ball game all together!)”, from the likes of @ovationchris and others. Doesn’t matter how admin-heavy the process might be — if you don’t spend time getting to know your client, you might as well close up shop.

Something unpleasant we had almost forgotten about since leaving the frontline of advice (see what I did there? 😊) did crop-up amongst the human-centric comments quite a few times:

Getting information from providers or well know wealth managers!

— Adam Carolan (@Adam_Xentum) August 7, 2019

Naively thinking gathering info from existing providers will be a straightforward process 😫

— Sean Banks (@SeanBanksIFA) August 7, 2019

So, it seems the chasing of “providers and wealth managers” for client info is all worth it, in the name of getting the satisfaction of actually talking to a fellow person and finding out which dream or lofty goal has brought them to your door. That’s exactly what we thought you’d say!

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Main photo by Helena Lopes from Pexels.
This article was written with the help of our lovely friends at Foco.