Having the right business management system in place to support your business is imperative. With everything moving online, advisers have the opportunity to run their business and advise their clients through cloud technology. The cost and time savings enable them to spend more time on their clients, reducing the burden of administration.
The main areas of benefit to advisers are:
Researching valuations
Before using an online, automated business management system, Clairville York spent two to three hours on each report. Since switching, they are now spending 10-15 minutes on each valuation. If there is too much administrative work associated with researching valuations, it can limit the number of clients we deal with,
they say.
Producing client portfolio reports
Intelligent Office (iO) is worth the money just for the portfolio reports,
according to Invest Southwest. The time taken to produce portfolio reports is cut in half with Intelligent Office. With the touch of a button, we can create a 20 page pdf portfolio report,
add Andrew Oliver & Co. iO saves an immeasurable amount of time.
Reconciling income
Advice firms using iO save time and resources by reconciling their income. Foster Denovo told us that they had reduced the amount of time spent on income reconciliations by 60%.
Fact finding
Fact find papers were taking us one and a half hours to complete pre-iO,
according to Beaufort Financial Planning. The same process now takes us 30 minutes.
If clients can create fact find documents by themselves – which they can through the Personal Finance Portal (PFP) – it saves advisers a lot of time. Alexander House note that, for 3,000 active clients, 75% of them complete fact finds on their own, which saves over an hour for every client meeting.
Regulatory reporting
The bane of many an adviser’s professional life, regulatory reporting time can be drastically reduced through iO’s automation processes while crucially improving the accuracy of regulatory reports. RMAR reports took two full time employees (FTEs) two weeks to produce, on two occasions each year,
say Menzies Wealth Management. With iO, the same amount of reporting takes one FTE three days.
Communicating with clients
You can reduce the time taken to produce and send mail through the PFP by simply submitting relevant information digitally. Beaufort Financial Planning told us that, before iO, we had three FTEs spending one week per quarter on client mailings. Now we have one FTE spending one day per quarter on them.
Recruiting advisers
Having a professional system like Intelligent Office has helped us recruit more advisers which has in turn led to growth in the firm,
Invest Southwest informed us. iO certainly increased the service offered to the advisers because it is so slick.
Working on modern, efficient systems is a plus point for advisers looking for their next career move. Andrew Oliver & Co have experienced a similar upturn. The value of our firm has increased. Last year, a few guys from big firms approached us to see if they could work together because we were using iO and their current firms weren’t.
Managing regulatory risk
The risk of a fine from the FCA is ever present, but iO can help advisers to stay on top of compliance issues by flagging high risk business cases and allowing each adviser’s activity to be monitored. The chance of regulatory fines has reduced by 50% with Intelligent Office,
say Alexander House. The time to support a regulatory review has just disappeared since we have been using iO. Now, instead of two to three support staff spending weeks dealing with the regulators, we can just give the regulators access to iO and they can pull any data they need immediately. The access to information is instantaneous.
Managing a practice management system
Implementing upgrades to practice management software can be time consuming, particularly with older, desk-based systems. At Intelliflo, clients benefit from continuous system upgrades, ensuring that they are always working on the most up to date version. We have saved 20 hours per upgrade, three or four times per year with iO,
say Invest Southwest.
Each advisory firm is different, but they all have one thing in common; they can save a great deal of time and money by adopting the most widely used practice management software – Intelligent Office.
The above responses were gathered by Intelliflo’s marketing team as part of a survey of some of its clients to find out what return on investment they have experienced, in real terms, since switching their business management system to iO.
Intelliflo is running a ROI calculator challenge which you can take here: https://www.intelliflo.com/roi-calculator. This demonstrates how much time, and ultimately expense, you could save by switching to Intelligent Office.
