The Financial Planning Industry on the Cusp of a ‘Shazam’ Moment

The financial planning industry is on the cusp of a technological change, but it’s going  to be slow. Like the pre-2000 consumer world of VCRs, unbreakable Nokia phones and slow  internet speeds, the financial planning industry is solving the problems in advice creation  with a pre-millennium mindset, where everyone is operating independently and solving  things in a siloed fashion. 

“Right now, financial planners enter information into the Fact Find. Then, they repeat this in  the Strategy Paper, and again in their File Notes, only to re-enter the same information again  into a Paraplanning Request form for someone to manually copy and paste it into a  Statement of Advice,” Asendium CEO, Scott Miller said. 

“Solutions today are built with a siloed architecture in mind that still requires a manual  process, which is a pre-2000 mindset.” 

Post-2000s, things start to become seamless and automated with one example being  Shazam, the music app that can recognise a song from a snippet of audio. Consumers use a  smartphone to listen to an analogue sound that is turned to digital. Shazam looks up their  database to find the song and then leads you to actions, such as buying that song or going  to a provider to stream their music. In one fell swoop, Shazam has hooked up three partners  from three different organisations. This is a solution that did one thing extremely well and  connected everything else to make it a seamless experience for the customer. 

The financial planning industry is on the cusp of an innovation such as Shazam, but it’s  going to be slow due to the regulatory nature of this industry and the 3-4 levels of  compliance frameworks that financial planners must operate within. There’s a lot of platforms  that exist within this environment that are very fragmented. 

A “Shazam” style solution for this industry requires a reimagining from the ground up, taking  into consideration all aspects of how advice is created, rather than looking at each step as a  standalone act. 

“While some financial planners may believe their pain in creating advice lies with their File  Notes or Statements of Advice, it may actually be a deeper issue. They are symptoms of  deeper problems that lie in how the advice creation process is structured from the very  beginning - maybe it’s the start of the process that has caused the issue and you are seeing  it manifest in the Statement of Advice when it can actually be solved earlier in the process,”  said Scott. 

Asendium’s guiding principle is to do one thing really well and hook our partners together to  seamlessly produce the “Shazam” effect. Asendium focuses on digitising the advice creation  process to eliminate the manual double data entry from the Fact Find through to the  Statement of Advice. Once information is entered into Asendium, our back-end system  begins to build, not only the Fact Find, but pre-completes 50%-70% of the remaining advice  documents - instead of manually transferring it as you are right now - as the data is  connected to seamlessly flow together. Once you are ready to conduct a client presentation  meeting, Asendium pulls all the relevant information from the system to construct your  Statement of Advice from the ground up - word by word, line by line in 30 seconds. 

If you are looking for that “Shazam” moment in your business, reach out to Asendium today.