Clients don’t want paper

No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time printing out and initialising ongoing service agreements.”

And yet, if you’ve spent any amount of time working in financial advice, you’d know that a disproportionate amount of time is spent on paper: printing it, signing it, scanning it, reviewing it and verifying it with all relevant stakeholders before the whole process starts again ad infinitum ad nauseam. To a significant degree, this routine is dictated by regulatory requirements that were designed to protect clients – at least in theory. 

What a bitter irony, then, that most clients say they don’t necessarily read it. 

Integra Financial Services co-founder (and Advisely board member) Deborah Kent has conducted multiple client surveys with different partners over the years. While feedback was always broadly positive, a common theme emerged: clients just weren’t interested in all the paperwork. 

“They don’t value those documents or even necessarily read them,” Deborah explains, referring in particular quarterly review reports. “One of the things we heard a lot was that clients don’t want pieces of paper. They want personal contact to see how they are going and give them any updates in between formal reviews” 

For the time being, of course, there’s always going to be a certain amount of paper in the equation; it’s the law, after all. So how can advice businesses balance legal expectations with the consumer reality? 

For Deborah, who recently found out she was in the Advisely Index top 10, one of the most important solutions was implementing a client portal. 

“One of my key problems has been getting some efficiency in the backend,” she says. “We’re a great team but we’re small, and that creates certain challenges. So we have spent at least the past 12 months investigating different ways to ramp up efficiency, and the big one for us was the portal.” 

Deborah’s investigations revealed OFAs as being one of the biggest bottlenecks in the advice process especially around clients signing them on time – or, as she puts it, “the big efficiency rock we need to get over.”  

“They all need to be done in a specific timeframe and in a specific way,” she says. “Before the portal, we’d send out the documents and some would sign with DocuSign while others couldn’t. Someone would print it off, sign it, scan it – others would mail it back. The regulations make it quite inefficient.” 

Now that around 60 of her clients are on the portal, she says, “all of their service agreements and advice documents are uploaded into it. They log in, read it, sign it digitally and it’s done. Sent straight off to Xplan. Finished.” 

Beyond the time saved, being able to streamline and centralise client consent requirements for ongoing service and advice recommendations has had a material impact on execution. She says: “Without the use of the client portal and a robust Xplan thread process, there is a higher risk of something being missed, such as with share sales or purchases, where these need to be actioned in a timely manner.” 

Ultimately, though, Deborah believes the most important benefit of increasing efficiency is being able to focus on what clients actually value. 

“The real aim of efficiency is to spend more time with clients,” she says. “To keep them in the loop and provide a personal touch. I call them the ‘hello, I love you’ calls – check-ups that are separate from the formal reviews. They want that personal element because they need to know they’re not just a number.” 

To that end, Deborah has all of her clients’ numbers saved on her phone: “I know all of them. They can call me up and I’ll be able to say, ‘Hi, Joan,’ and have a chat. Efficiency allows you the time to do that.” 

The first step in accelerating your journey to efficiency, as Deborah did, is to understand where you sit today. In just 5 minutes, you can take the Advisely Index here.