A new artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool aims to improve adviser productivity by streamlining the note-taking process, freeing up advisers to focus more on their client relationships.
Guideway Financial Services’ new tool, FinTalk, converts meeting recordings into compliant advice file notes by analysing what has been discussed with a client and breaking down the relevant information for an adviser.
Chris Garlick, executive manager for compliance, risk and technology at Guideway, explains why this is a different offering from the many transcription tools that already exist in the market.
“The average adviser meets their client for maybe one to two hours and it’s a really fluid conversation where a lot of ground gets covered. Some parts of that conversation are helpful for relationship management in the future, but they’re not really helpful to help an adviser demonstrate how they’re acting in the client’s best interests and meeting their compliance requirements,” Garlick told Money Management.
“The AI tool takes the transcript of the meeting, pulls out relevant points for each intended audience, and summarises the meeting for them. Now, a transcript that could be 20 pages long gets distilled into half a page.”
The tool is available to advisers and practices through its website or through API integration with XPlan.
To build the tool, Guideway trained it with over 10,000 hours of audio recording of advisers talking to their clients and has since described FinTalk as a ‘game changer’ for adviser productivity.
“When it comes to AI to generate statements of advice (SOAs), that investment feels moot since the requirement is going out the window in 12 months’ time anyway. To us, it wasn’t the right time to invest in AI to make advice generation or the SOA process quicker,” Garlick explained.
“We saw advisers were using AI to try to augment the client experience, and what clients value most is face time with the adviser. From that reasoning, we thought about what we could actually do to make an adviser’s life easier so they could spend more time with their clients and meet more clients.
“Rather than trying to get the AI to fill in the role of an adviser, it could take care of back-office tasks advisers get bogged down in, so they could focus on the relationship.”
On average, he estimates advisers are able to save 45 minutes to an hour after each client interaction with the help of the tool.
“Advisers are absolutely loving it. They can be a bit resistant to change sometimes, especially when it comes to technology, but for the ones that have taken the leap and tried it, we found over 95 per cent go on to continue using the tool,” he said.
FinTalk was opened up to advisers within Guideway’s network on 1 June and has been open to other practices since 1 August. It has produced over 900 compliant file notes to date.
The firm’s next generation of FinTalk, to be released in September, will expand the offering to verbal paraplanning requests.
Garlick explained: “Given we’ve now trained it to understand what happens with a client and an adviser, when they talk through different strategies and that sort of thing, the next logical step is for the adviser to be able to add a bit more through a self-made recording.
“[The tool] then takes the two recordings and prepares their paraplanner request along with what the recommendations are, what the advice is, the risks involved, and so on.
“It’s been in a pilot phase with 20 advisers within our network over the past month and it’s working as flawlessly as you could hope.”
According to Garlick, FinTalk is another demonstration of how Guideway has been utilising technology to improve accessibility and affordability of advice.
“Each of our advisers have about 160 clients on average, which is higher than the industry average as we understand it, and that’s because of how we set up our processes and procedures and the technology we use to allow them to serve more clients. The flow-on effect is they’re charging a lower fee than the industry to provide advice,” he told Money Management.
