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How much should an advice firm spend on an IT provider?
Are you paying too much, paying too little, or simply paying for the wrong things? It’s a question I hear regularly from advice firms: “How much should we actually be paying for IT?” Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic number. At one end of the spectrum, there’s DIY. Someone in the business looks after the technology…
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Serving the clients you can't afford to advise
Last year we turned away a 34-year-old teacher with $180,000 in super, a mortgage, a new baby and a genuinely good question about whether to salary sacrifice or pay down debt faster. She wasn't a bad prospect. She was a bad fit for a $6,600 engagement. So we did what most practices do, gave her twenty minutes of general…
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The Good, the bad and the ugly: What judging taught me about our SOAs
Judging awards is one of the genuine privileges of this job, and I say that as someone whose working life is mostly legislation and exposure drafts. For a few weeks a year, someone hands me a pile of submissions from advisers putting forward their very best work — their strongest argument for why they should be crowned…
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Retirement Is changing – what 25 years (and more) of advice has taught me
After more than 25 years working with Australians approaching and living in retirement, there is one thing I know for certain: retirement rarely turns out exactly as planned. That shouldn’t really be a surprise because life rarely turns out exactly as planned. That is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some of the most…
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How to provide constructive feedback when peer reviewing a colleague's SOAs
A guide to help you ‘not be the person uninvited to Friday night drinks’. A peer review is essentially a risk control, and a lot of practices use it. It is another set of eyes confirming the advice is appropriate for the client, meets licensee rules, and satisfies the clear, concise and effective requirement. However, the…
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Do your client relationships stand the test of time?
In the second article of The Quiet Client series, we discuss the best of client sentiment - what they rate highly about their adviser. Therein the pitfalls, traps and opportunities, to guide you to deliver the experience your clients are looking for and expect. Since the launch of our CATScan service over 20 years ago, we…
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Why every retirement plan should address Support at Home
Most financial advisers have heard clients say, "I'm only leaving my home in a pine box." For many older Australians, remaining in their own home isn't simply a preference - it is an emotional and financial priority. However, maintaining independence often requires increasing levels of support as health, mobility and…
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Three ways to fix client portal adoption
Since 2022, we have run the Finura Tech Health Benchmarking survey, and every year we ask advice firms whether they use a client portal to engage their customers. Every year, more firms tell us they want one. Every year, the number who actually have one working sits roughly where it was the year before. In our most recent…
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Xplan cases changed everything for us
An advice process is much like a piece of string: it has a start, an end and a lot of knots. Around nine months ago, we moved back to Xplan with a simple goal: reduce duplication, bring more of our advice process under one login and make life easier for the team. I took a closer look at cases, threads and tasks, then…
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Trust will define the future of AI in advice
In financial advice, Artificial intelligence (AI) success will be about trust not adoption. AI is moving quickly from experimentation into everyday business. Across industries, organisations are exploring how AI can improve productivity, simplify processes, and create better experiences for customers. Financial advice is…
