Asendium sponsors IFA Future Forum 2021
To say I am excited to be here would be an understatement. I not only believe that financial advice has an amazing future in Australia, but it will be you, the advisers, that will build that future by bringing affordable and accessible advice to the people who need it most.
With the theme of this event being the affordability and accessibility of advice, we are all here today to learn from each other as to what the future of advice will look like. With the level of exits from the industry, and the known mental health challenges of being an adviser, we need to work together as a group to build the profession and look after each other. This conference and the conversations that will happen here today have the potential to help us illuminate our way forward.
With discussions around individual adviser registrations and single disciplinary bodies, licensees will need to search for ways to provide value in a world where self-licencing is becoming more achievable for advisers’ day by day. The disruption to financial advice will continue, as the industry faces yet further reforms and I for one, am looking forward to a time where advice is more affordable and accessible for Australians and the passion, we all have for financial advice prospers.
At the heart of all this change will, as always, be the advisers, you, who must manage those changes, while continuing to deliver your services to your clients. It is going to be a challenging road ahead, but I have conviction in the determination of those here today to see it through.
It will be your independence and ability to work with any client, using any product, from any supplier, with any software, that will enable you to deliver advice that is truly aligned with your clients’ best interests.
For advice to thrive in our ever-changing landscape, you have been told you will need to find efficiencies in your businesses, so you can complete work more productively and to the highest standard possible to meet compliance obligations.
You will need to do so as the compliance burden increases, as regulation increases, and trust with the profession is rebuilt following the royal commission.
The pursuit of efficiencies is nothing particularly new, and as advisers, you are told endlessly that to be profitable, you will need to either reduce your client books to service only clients who can afford advice, or to increase your advice fees so you can remain in business.
As we have seen, this will lead to orphaned clients, and the removal of Australians from the advice journey who actually need your advice and guidance the most.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I spent many years as a financial adviser, and I truly loved my job even to this day. When I started out in advice, I spent about 80% of my time with clients, and about 20% of my time in document creation and compliance management. By the time I had finished my financial advice career, that ratio had inverted, and my business spent a disproportionate amount of time on paperwork.
This is because the structures of the day demanded it. I was filling out huge statements of advice that created a wall of paper for my clients when the value of my service was the relationship, strategy, and voice of reason during financial hardship.
The enormous amounts paperwork to create advice added nothing of value to the client, and yet it drove a six-week wedge between doing the fact find to delivering an SOA.
Filling out paperwork wasn’t the reason I entered advice and I had no desire to continue on that path. I knew there had to be a better way, but that didn’t exist yet.
And so, we have built it.
Asendium was born from the vision of making next day advice possible, for comprehensive and personalised advice across multiple scopes of advice.
Built on the guiding principles of “Automate where you can and humanise where you must”, our hyper focused advice creation solution targets the elimination double handling of data, removal unnecessary costs to create advice and the evolution of traditionally manual data entry roles to high performing, strategic roles.
Please visit our booth where you will be able to see how our system works, the current and upcoming integrations that are available and how we can help your business.
The future is not just about surviving but thriving and my team and I are excited to lead the way in helping advisers achieve that future.
Thank you.
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