A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool set to hit the market by the year’s end seeks to alleviate financial advisers’ main pain points, led by Raiz Invest founder, George Lucas.
Expected to commercially launch before Christmas this year, this new AI-powered service called Your Beautiful Life (YRBL.AI) was created to directly address key issues plaguing the advice industry.
The tool allows advisers to produce meeting notes, review a client’s finances and produce a statement of advice (SOA).
Speaking to Money Management, Steven Goh, co-founder of YRBL.AI, began brainstorming the idea some five years ago.
“We believe that financial advice is too difficult for everyone and that the problem is structural. If you see a financial planner, it feels like you’re filing a tax return. You’re not trying to build a future,” he described.
In response, YRBL.AI was born to re-engineer the financial advice experience and drive a more efficient, lower-cost service.
Firstly, the AI tool transcribes an adviser’s meeting with their client and produces detailed meeting notes accordingly. A review of the client’s finances is generated before the tool automatically operates the adviser’s software, such as Xplan, and inserts the meeting data.
The adviser is then notified once these steps are completed and an SOA document is generated, all within a matter of seconds.
YRBL.AI also provides its own AI chatbot function, enabling advisers to ask specific questions about their clients using previous meeting files.
Moreover, the tool allows advisers to drop additional client data into the software, which automatically updates the entire process.
The implications
The AI software condenses a 20- to 30-hour process per SOA down to an instantaneous second-long process, Goh explained.
“If you think about what this means for the advice process, we can potentially collapse almost all of it into the first meeting,” he said.
George Lucas, who founded the Australian investment app Raiz Invest in 2016, is now a strategic adviser at YRBL.AI.
“YRBL.AI doesn’t replace a financial planner,” he told Money Management. “It complements them and frees up so much time that is spent on administration and compliance, allowing for a more low-cost model to service people who haven’t been able to afford advice before.”
In addition to the advantages it presents to advisers, the Raiz founder emphasised the benefits clients will also see as a result.
“[Advisers] can actually talk to it in an unstructured way and it will structure the data at the end of the conversation. It makes the customer experience a lot more enjoyable, rather than going through a prescriptive form, which is what financial services is very oriented towards today.
“This is a business model changer for advisers and the way people communicate with their adviser.”
Carl Brazendale, YRBL.AI’s chief executive for the APAC region, said the AI tool directly mitigates the tedious pain points advisers face with data entry and administrative systems.
However, he clarified YRBL.AI is not robo-advice: “We are very pro- the relationship between the adviser and the client. We just need to make that a more achievable experience and something that they can actually provide to more people.
“[This tool] is not disintermediating the adviser at all. We think it’s empowering the adviser to provide their service to more people at a better price point.”
By reducing the time and cost of advice, the three professionals say YRBL.AI seeks to close the advice accessibility gap within Australia.
Additionally, Lucas expects immediate and visible change to flow through the industry once the tool infiltrates through the market.
“It just sits on top of your existing infrastructure, whether it’s Xplan or Salesforce, and then off it goes. It’s not a major technical expense to get it up and running. The rest of it is how quickly the industry adopts it,” he said.
