Creative paraplanners reinventing the SOA
Passionate paraplanners are incorporating colourful flow charts and even photographs of Teslas into Statements of Advice (SOAs) to support the adviser-client relationship.
Most people wouldn’t consider paraplanning a job for content creators. But that’s exactly what it is.
Jackie Bennett, head of operations at Clique Paraplanning, said every SOA needed to tell a story.
“It needs to be engaging and tell a story about the client’s goals and how those are going to be achieved with financial advice.”
Senior paraplanner at Clique, Brittany McBean, started her career as a trainee financial adviser before quickly realising she was more suited to creating engaging documents.
If you’re passionate about communication, creativity and presentation then a career in paraplanning could be for you.
“I’m so excited to see how SOAs will develop over the next few years,” McBean said.
“Younger generations are far more visual. We’ve been raised on devices and social media. There is no value for us in a 60-page black and white document. But anything with pictures, colourful shapes and flow charts will have us hooked.”
She said she had recently been working with advisers who had been happy to experiment with PowerPoint SOAs. These created far more engagement with clients and prompted new innovative approaches to the traditional SOA.
“When presenting goals to clients, why not include a picture? If a client has a goal to buy a Tesla, then put a picture of a Tesla in the document. The client will feel far more emotionally attached to it,” McBean said.
However, one major battle for creative paraplanners were the extensive compliance requirements, which McBean said had removed some of the soul of advice documents.
“Sometimes we feel like we are writing an SOA for the auditor, rather than the client. It shouldn’t be that way,” she said.
“Going through 60-plus pages of black and white text does not grab the client emotionally and unfortunately the level of compliance requirements can make it difficult to sell the client on the importance of our services.”
Clique found that a well-engineered and compliant SOA should be relatively time-efficient to write.
The first few pages of the document should include a summary of your recommendations and benefits with pictures or flow charts that were personalised and specific to the client.
“This makes it easier for the client to understand the advice and can hold their attention throughout the presentation meeting,” McBean said.
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Lets be honest, there is no value for anyone in a 60 page black and white text document. Visual aids like graphs and charts aren't a generational thing they're a people thing. Knowing who you are writing the SOA for, auditor, regulator or client etc is the balance bit.
Great idea... I know my clients would like their SOA to be further padded out with a picture of a Tesla. :P
Why not write a bog standard compliant SoA and deliver it alongside a beautiful presentation of the advice? Satisfy the regulator and the client without the cost of customising SoA templates to meet compliance needs.
She is correct...but I laugh when I hear these statements about "younger people won't stand for this"... what makes you think "older" people stand for this now? A 60 year dosen't like a 40 page document now also....Until compliance checklists become a similar "smiley emoji" we're stuck and if you're writing a SOA for a client you've already failed. Yes in 20 years time I do really hope my SoA becomes a 5 second Tik Tok presentation with myself dancing and pointing to hyperlinks, but for the time being that audience can't and won't pay for the advice within the current legislative guidelines.
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