Digitisation provides many benefits to both financial advisers and their clients. But, once you’ve decided to embrace going digital, how do you know where to start? Which areas of your KiwiSaver advice process should be the first to go digital, and which will bring the most benefits to your business?
Here are our recommendations of where to start when changing to a digital KiwiSaver advice process:
1. Fact Find
Collecting client information is an essential part of the advice process. However, manually collecting and entering this information can be time-consuming and prone to errors. By using digital technology, such as an online fact find or online forms, you can simplify this process and give yourself more time to spend on tasks other than data entry.
Clients might also prefer to supply information via a digital process. Supplying all the information an adviser needs can be a lengthy process, and an in-person meeting for this may be inconvenient. Being able to supply this information at a convenient time, is a benefit to your clients.
2. Product Comparison
Once you’ve collected your client’s information including their preferences and risk profile, you then need to select the fund that suits them best. In New Zealand, there are over 300 KiwiSaver funds. Although an adviser will not offer all these options, they will still have a large number to select from. Advisers need to compare fees, returns, and more, against their client’s information. Doing this for each KiwiSaver fund an adviser offers, can take hours. Using a digital tool to automate these comparisons, will enable advisers to generate a Statement of Advice in less than 10 minutes.
3. Compliance
As a financial adviser, you are subject to compliance regulations. You must disclose why you are doing what you are doing, at various stages in the advice process. Keeping these records manually can be time-consuming and detract from other important tasks. Digitising your records of the advice you provide to a client and using a process that electronically records client signoffs, will help to simplify compliance and enhance your productivity.
4. Client Reviews
For those not yet offering regular KiwiSaver reviews, a digital process will make implementing them much easier. A digital client review process will enable you to set future review dates for clients, it will remind you when a review is due and will simplify the process of sending a review to a client.
If you are already offering KiwiSaver reviews, but doing them manually, a digital process will simplify your review process, making it much quicker and ensuring all clients are covered.
When you’ve decided it’s time to change to a digital KiwiSaver financial advice process, you should ensure that you are digitising your fact find, product comparison, compliance and review processes. Making the switch to digital will bring many benefits to both you and your clients and will help to make sure your business is successful.
