Advisers operate in a complex industry rife with technical, human, and regulatory challenges. When it comes to their advice software, advisers don’t need another challenge. That’s why simplicity is the name of the game.
Ask an adviser why they decided to make a career in financial advice, and chances are data entry, compliance management, formatting documents, software integration and a whole myriad of other time consuming and often cumbersome tasks will not make the list.
Helping people achieve their financial outcomes, providing peace of mind, or building a profitable business are more likely responses.
Advice software needs to align itself to the cause.
For an adviser to focus on building client relationships as well as engaging and educating their clients, they need a software package that they can trust as well as one that will do the heavy lifting in their practice.
Simplicity
Advice software should be easy to learn, easy to use, require little implementation support and improve efficiency for advisers and support staff.
With growing cost pressures, the difficulties of managing work and family commitments during lockdowns, and increasing compliance and educational burdens, everyone is time poor.
To alleviate these time pressures, advice software must be intuitive and reduce the time it takes to perform tasks. In turn, advisers will have more time to spend with their clients and support staff will be able to manage more clients without becoming overburdened.
The need for simplicity extends beyond the software package itself. Many advice practices do not have an IT department to install and manage software. A pure cloud solution managed by the technology provider is the easiest way for advisers to access the software they need to run their practice.
Utility
As well as being easy, advice software also needs to be effective.
A lot of ‘heavy lifting’ tasks can, and should, be done by software.
Effective advice software will minimise data entry requirements, provide a simple way to produce advice documents, and help advisers meet their compliance obligations, amongst other tasks.
It will also have a sophisticated and powerful financial modelling engine. One that can handle complex tasks and produce reliable, accurate outputs in a way that provides clarity around a client’s financial situation and options, so that an adviser can easily present and explain these their clients.
Trust
Reliability and accuracy are imperative if an adviser is to trust the outputs produced by their advice software.
Just as important as building and gaining trust with clients, advisers need to trust the software tasked at producing and delivering the advice they produce for those clients.
This means accurate results produced from reliable software with bank-grade security and an established and reputable company backing it up.
The challenges of the financial advice industry are not likely to go away anytime soon. Thankfully there’s software available to help you navigate these complexities.
Put simply, simple does not mean feature poor. You should expect more from your advice software, just with less time, cost, and hassle.
Find out more
To find out more about Midwinter’s financial advice software AdviceOS, click here or request a demo.
