Financial advice is stuck in the “old world” and needs to adjust to how consumers want to receive and interact with advice.
Speaking at the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) conference, Jacqui Henderson, founder and chief executive of Advice Intelligence, said: “There’s a massive gap between how consumers interact and how they receive financial advice. Consumers interact via their smartphones whereas they receive advice via paper documents.
“We are really stuck in the old world of delivering financial advice via paper and PDFs whereas technology is evolving into something that’s interactive and can be delivered via a mobile device.
“Over the next decade, there are way like augmented reality that will enrich the consumer experience. So, we need to evolve technology from being in this old world to a new world of digital and that’s where the gap is because consumers are interacting that way so we need to step up and deliver advice in the same way.”
Based in the UK, Johann Koch, chief sales officer at fintech firm Intelliflo, said as the UK had reopened following the pandemic compared to large parts of Australia which remained in lockdown, that hybrid working would remain a constant.
“The feedback from the advice industry here is that hybrid working is here to stay,” Koch said.
“It’s great to see people face to face again but the way the industry has pivoted to service clients remotely is there, and clients are demanding access to advisers and access to information digitally.
“A number of things can be delivered digitally without the need to go to a physical location. There are certain elements of the advice process that can be digitised such as sending or presenting something to your client, electronic signatures, even presenting their net worth.”
As Intelliflo was launching into Australia, Koch said the similarities were “massive” between the UK and Australian financial advice markets.
“There’s huge crossover and similarities between the two markets, one of the reasons we were keen to launch in Australia was the market demand, market size and the regulatory changes coming in. So, the similarities were massive,” he said.
“We have had to localise the solution to cater for the nuances of the Australian market and making sure it is scalable but a lot of the learnings and best practice we have had in the UK, we have brought over here.”
