Using technology to get personal in financial advice

By Santiago Burridge, Founder of Lumiant

The need to personalise while you digitise has increased ten-fold in 2020 as COVID-19 continues to change the way we interact with each other on a professional and personal level.

The financial advice sector is no exception. The fallout from the Hayne Royal Commission has put significant pressure on advisers to improve the advice experience for consumers.

The financial advice industry seems to be the last frontier when it comes to integrating technology. The process to date has been anchored in product with no evidence to back up the proposition that an adviser can pick the next winning investment.

There has never been a better time to re-think the way that financial advice is offered and delivered. Despite the challenges wrought by a once-in-100-year pandemic, the latest EY Fintech Australia Census shows that the Australian fintech industry is sustaining its revenue base, with more paying customers and plans for future global expansion.

In fact, this moment of crisis is driving a step-change in digital adoption and has adapted quickly to grasp new opportunities, with the consumer digital payments and transactions sector in particularly seeing a huge uptick.

Here at Lumiant, we are seeing structural change taking place in our industry that is ensuring clients of financial advisers not only comprehend the advice they are receiving, but engage with it.

We believe that financial advisers have a great passion for the client, but until now have had their technology solutions anchor the conversation to product.

We believe there is a sizable gap in the current suite of financial planning solutions on the market, preventing advisers from being able to offer a deeply personalised and individualised experience at scale.

And so, we are responding to that gap with a new technology solution.

In the past, tech innovation in the wealth management industry has largely focused on meeting compliance and regulatory requirements, on middle to back-office efficiency and Statement of Advice generation.

And while these facets are certainly crucial, there is still ample scope to evolve the financial advice process to include the client’s personal life circumstances and goals, so they can truly plan for their own future and track their plans over time.

What we’ve built does not centre around the Statement of Advice, but around uncovering the client’s relationship with and to money, their values, their goals — what living their “best life” means to them.

A dynamic planning process that brings to life what really matters, enabling a continuous and valued engagement process which can critically underpin the regular advice recommendations and review processes between the client and adviser.

Advisers can connect their financial strategies to the things that matter most to their clients. And the solution we’ve built makes it seamless and easy to do so.

With the right tech, advisers can provide clients with a more engaging investment experience – one that goes far beyond the common offering of managed funds or core/satellite approach and still delivers a huge reduction in administration and time.

Because what is often missing (or rather perceived to be missing) from the financial sector is the heart, the raison de rigueur underpinning the need for financial security. As the husband in a couple who recently went through the Lumiant process with their Adviser, said: “I think it was a magnificent process… I wanted my wife to get more out of life for herself, to be more rewarded with some of the things that she deserves. I don’t think our [Financial Adviser] can be their best without doing that. Because unless they know everything there is to know about our lives, it would be an arduous task to mould our financial situation and help our decisions moving forward without understanding exactly what we’re about as a couple”.

Our platform offers just that: a way to uncover through a series of modules and via a human-centred design process, the ‘things’ that truly matter to people and how most money ‘things’ are actually life ‘things’.

Globally, every industry and business is on the cusp of a generational change. The pandemic has only forced what was already happening: the unravelling of the one-size-fits-all service and the ushering in of a more personalised approach not just to advice, but to everything.

But we can’t ask financial advisers to find a way to connect the numbers and decimal points to the desires and lives of their clients, without equipping them with the right solutions to do so.

That’s where we’re aiming to help.

(Lumiant’s interactive client engagement platform for advisers and their clients goes live in early 2021).