Recently we have been out and about doing one of my favourite things; exhibiting at events. The reason it’s one of my favourite things is I always find these events so inspiring and motivating.
I love meeting with new and existing clients and finding out about their businesses. I love chatting to the other exhibitors, getting up to speed with what’s currently on offer. And I love meeting and connecting with people whose paths I would probably never otherwise cross. In particular, I had a wonderful time at Intelliflo’s Change the Game conferences, held in Manchester and London recently.
As the name suggests, the conference is all about the latest trends and developments in financial services. What struck me most was the sheer level of tech focused businesses. We all know of the generic ‘robo adviser’ term, thrown at anything that uses tech to automate elements of the advice process. But this week I saw so many businesses that are using tech to drive efficiencies across so many different areas of financial services.
My personal belief is that, right now and for the foreseeable future, the human element of giving advice is still incredibly important. Financial planning is such a personal matter to people, that having an adviser to talk things through, explore options and provide answers is essential. But, that doesn’t mean the adviser has to do every part of the process; and that’s where some of these products come in. They enable firms to simplify some of the elements that can be automated, providing efficiencies (which is good for a profitable business) and freeing up an advisers time to provide the human part (which is most certainly the step in the advice process that clients most value).
Seems win/win to me!
So here’s a few of the really interesting tech businesses I came across at Change the Game, that were new to me and I think we’ll be seeing a lot of in future:
i4C
i4C is a relatively new cashflow planning tool. It came from the guys at Epoch Wealth Management, who were using cashflow with their existing clients, but were frustrated with the tools that were available on the market. They wanted something simple to use as an adviser, easy to model different scenarios, and clear for a client to understand.
One of our team trialed it and found it super easy to use and very intuitive, and the graphs are pretty straight forward too. You can find more about them here.
Wealth Wizards
The initial offering from Wealth Wizards was aimed at large employers, helping them engage with their employees and understand the features of their defined benefits scheme. From this, the software can help to analyse the scheme, and the clients retirement goals, with the technology doing a huge part of it, and reducing the effort needed by the adviser and paraplanner.
They are now building additional offerings, including those for smaller advisory firms, to help them use tech to support the advice process. You can find out more about their current offerings here.
Certua
Certua have created technology to help drive protection advice, streamlining the process, including the research and application. It also goes a step further, helping to flex the cover as the clients circumstances change, and aims to remove as much of the manual work as possible to speed up application and underwriting.
My understanding is that this isn’t fully ready for the market just yet, but is very close, so sign up here for a demo and to be kept in the loop as the software is launched.
So that’s my little round up of some of the new, exciting technology heading our way! Thanks to Intelliflo for enabling us to exhibit and for showcasing these firms. It’s a very exciting time in finance and judging by the feedback we’ve been receiving about our own technology, I know I’m not the only who’s feeling ready to embrace new approaches/solutions to overcome historic challenges. The change is upon us!
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