"We shouldn’t under-estimate how technology can help advisers produce results and recommendations for borrowers, even with these more complex arrangements."
However, we shouldn’t under-estimate how technology can help advisers produce results and recommendations for borrowers, even with these more complex arrangements. Indeed, in this respect I agree with the views issued by a number of commentators recently in that we shouldn’t be afraid to empower clients and to give them numerous technological routes to provide the required information advisers need to do their jobs.
Up until now, there has appeared to be something of a reticence from the advisory community when it comes to expecting clients to provide that information. We perhaps have believed that clients don’t want to do this, when I’m not so sure that is the case. Think of your own experience when it comes to, for example, sourcing car insurance and other products – most of us do it online with the price comparison sites and no-one else is taking down the required information for us, instead we are plugging it into those sites order to achieve the required results.
Now, of course, robo-advisers are relying on clients not just being committed to doing this for their mortgage but also being willing to go through the rest of the mortgage advice process online, with no human intervention. Again, if theirs is a complicated case then this might be incredibly tricky, but that shouldn’t mean that the initial provision of information can’t be delivered by the client to the adviser.
Another point we should not forget is that while people still demand and value advice, they may not be so enamoured of sitting down with an adviser for two to three hours in their home, or having to go into an office. A big part of such interviews are the collation of all the necessary information but advisers can simply allow their clients to do this themselves at a time of their own convenience. And, we might say, that clients who are willing to do this are perhaps more committed to receiving advice and to going through the whole process.
Essentially, clients willing to provide this information online/via the adviser’s forms are much more likely to be highly motivated and perhaps far better client prospects. Technology is readily available to allow advisers to offer this ‘service’ to clients and the information can simply be transmitted seamlessly into the adviser’s CRM system where it can be put to all manner of uses.
A word of warning here though – as an adviser requesting this information you are only likely to get one shot at this. There would be nothing worse for a client than having to go through multiple screens of information, inputting them all, only to find glitches and crashes rendering that time redundant with the information not uploaded or having simply disappeared. If you are to empower your clients to provide this information, then you need to have a system which is going to get it right every single time, and to be 100% confident that the information will be transferred to you in a manner/format that you can use.
What should make this ever more important is the advent of Open Banking, where advisers will be able to combine the client-provided information with that of their bank accounts, to give a much better initial view from which advice and a recommendation can be delivered. It is likely to cut out much of the mundane admin/information-grabbing that advisers currently have to do, and with respect to Open Banking it’s also going to give a clear and truthful picture of the client’s finances. Again, this will make the adviser’s job much easier and should mean they’re able to cut down on the admin, and up the number of clients they can deal with. So, let’s not shy away from client information requests, and let’s use the technology to make the advisory job easier to achieve.
