Greater focus on client experiences around financial advice will be part of the new focus of NAB owned planning group Apogee with recently appointed general manager, Brendan Johnson, stating this was necessary to reach those who did not receive advice.
Johnson said the Apogee group already has a strong client-centric focus but wanted to lift the time advisers spent with clients and move them away from non-advice related work wherever possible.
He said planners across the industry, on average, spent much of their time doing other business related tasks with anecdotal evidence suggesting they only spent 5 to 15 hours per week speaking with clients.
“This is not efficient for advisers who need to spend more time with clients or they will find other ways to access advice and products,” Johnson said.
He said the push for better client experiences with advisers stemmed from the fact that, currently, less than 40 per cent of advice practices regularly survey their clients.
As a result of this Apogee had recently signed up with research group CoreData to assist Apogee practices survey their clients and help advisers understand what consumers think about their service and what they do and do not value.
Johnson said it was important for both clients and advisers to understand what they want from the advice relationship, noting this would help reach the 80 per cent of the population who did not receive financial advice.
“Technology is one of the main key opportunities for advisers in the coming years. The other key opportunity is how advisers can be relevant to the other 80 per cent of Australian not receiving advice,” Johnson said.
“We have been trying to convince people to see a financial planner for the past decade and, with our consumer insights from NAB, the question is ‘how can we be relevant to these people?’.”
“The planning market has not understood this sector well. It has had good outcomes with the 20 per cent who receive advice and 10 years ago the only way to access investments products was via an intermediary.”
“Now that is not the case and if we don’t remain relevant as advisers we run the risk of losing those clients we do have.”
