Insignia looks to AI for advice efficiency to meet 2030 targets

Insignia chief executive, Scott Hartley, has said the licensee is “on track” with revenue and client number targets for its advice division, part of its 2030 strategy. 

The firm stated last November that it wanted its advisers to be reporting $1–1.1 million in revenue per adviser by FY28 and $1.1–1.3 million by FY30. This revenue increase would be driven by accelerated organic growth via referrals, marketing and new propositions rather than enacting inorganic growth and acquisitions that it might have done in the past. 

When it comes to client per adviser, it is targeting 115–125 by FY28 and 125–140 by FY30.

In its financial year results for FY25, it said these targets are “on track” as clients per adviser increased from 90 to 96 driven by strong client growth and improved adviser efficiency, despite adviser numbers declining from 200 to 188. 

Revenue per adviser increased from $750,000 to $854,000 driven by a focus on higher value clients and higher asset-based fee income. 

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Hartley said: “We are driving revenue growth in advice through improved efficiency, client acquisition and both initiatives are progressing well.

“The internal tools are a lot about providing efficiency and administration efficiency for advisers and their teams through the use of technology. Some of those tools will be developed specifically for us using AIm but others will be adapted from existing industry technology. We see a significant uplift in advice efficiency as a result of changing the advice and review process, allowing advisers to be able to spend more time with their clients, so 140 [clients] isn’t a stretch.”

Insignia said it is re-engineering the advice review process to increase the capacity and also investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technology to capture file notes to assist with statement of advice (SOA) applications. An AI-enabled advice ecosystem will streamline and automate activities across the advice process, it said, and can be used for an AI-powered assistant, knowledge hub and client service agreements. 

Hartley said: “Using AI and robotics, we are further improving straight through processing from advisers’ back office to the platform. The client services agreement fees form that goes straight through now, that’s being rolled out to all advisers as we speak, and SOAs, where removing the need for re-keying from an SOA to a new business application by the back office, that will now go straight through to the Expand platform, extracting only the necessary data from the SOA.”

Overall, the advice division reported net revenue of $160.6 million, up from $150 million last year, thanks to strong new client growth and higher asset-based fee income in Shadforth, partially offset by lower insurance commission. Operating expenses declined from $120 million to $114 million due to the realisation of benefits from the Rhombus Advisory separation. However, it was offset by salary increases and adviser incentives.  

In the second half of the financial year, the firm also enacted a bidding process between CC Capital, Bain Capital and Brookfield which resulted in a scheme implementation deed signed with CC Capital for a cash consideration of $4.80 per share. 

This is expected to complete in the first half of the 2026 calendar year – possibly as early as February – subject to regulatory and shareholder approval which it expects to take around six months. 

Elsewhere in the results, the firm reported a statutory net profit after tax (NPAT) of $16.1 million. 

Commenting on the increase, it said this was attributable to a $213 million decrease in remediation costs, legal settlement and penalties, $47.4 million decrease in transformation and transition costs, and $60 million decrease in base and reinvestment operating expenses.

Average funds under management and administration (FUMA) were $323 billion, a 7 per cent increase from $301 billion.