State Super Financial Services has rebranded to StatePlus as part of a business transformation process with a heavy emphasis on digital engagement, it announced on Thursday.
Four years in the making, StatePlus’ new business model focuses on people and technology to meet the changing client needs and market forces, its managing director, Michael Monaghan said.
Their change in advice model is aimed at the firm becoming more client centric as it grows its planner numbers and use its capabilities to evolve its digital offerings.
“We have grown our financial planner numbers by 80 per cent over the last four years, opened three new offices and significantly enhanced the capabilities of our Sydney support teams,” Monaghan said.
In terms of planners, Monaghan said to grow the firm it was also looking to increase their female planner numbers through their graduate program, and had changed the demographic of their planners.
He said the graduate program was the way to grow a new generation of planners and increase diversity.
“As we’ve been growing our planning numbers we’ve been increasing been turning to younger people and some of our most successful planners over the last four years have been planners who are in their late 20s and early 30s,” he said.
“They are dealing with people who are in their 60s and I was sort of sceptical as well with their mismatch but we haven’t had that experience at all.”
Monaghan said this investment in people was complemented by the firm’s investment in technology.
“We’ve been thinking about ways of how to match a planner to a client and that starts to get more into more of the demographic of the client personal preferences and if we have a planner that can deliver.
“Our client relationship management system is very sophisticated and allows us to collect a lot of information on clients and it’s got the ability to process and understand “this client would want that sort of person” that’s one way.
“The other way we’re starting to experiment with is gamification type apps where you actually get people to play a game on their phone and we get the information that comes out of that and enable us to get a much better handle on how that person makes decisions.”
StatePlus has invested $50 million to enable digital service delivery and streamline key processes, including both front and back office systems, and the latest advice and customer relationship software.
“The goal was to be multi-channel so clients can make their own choice about how they want to do business with us either through digital or traditional channels,” Monaghan said.
