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What does it mean to

“Go Digital”?

There’s a lot of pressure to “go digital”. It’s everywhere, from your relationship with your bank, or your supplier of dog food (Takealot for me), “digital” is poking its nose into every corner of our lives. At a minimum, consumers expect cataloguing on an app, uber-eats convenience and augmented reality business cards. Can present as some pretty anxiety-provoking stuff!

For Financial Planners, I get the sense there’s a level of fear around the thought. What does it mean to “go digital”? Does it have to come into the conversation between the planner and the client? What does that look like? Is it a whole bunch of fumbling around a complicated spreadsheet, with the client’s eyes on your fingers, feeling like an incompetent fool? That’s a terrifying thought, to tell you the truth.

“Digital” is a big concept that needs to be broken down so that we can understand what we’re talking about. Makes sense to think of “digital” over the list of activities that happen in a planner's life. There’s stuff that happens together with the client for example, the face to face discussion. There’s stuff happening in the back-office, submissions, escalations, and analyses. Then there’s stuff that happens over the duration of having a relationship with the client, like communications and reporting.

There’s actually a whole bunch of “digital” that could be introduced into the practice that never actually touches the client. There’s equally “digital” that could be introduced into the actual relationship with the client. Simply moving from paper to email in ongoing communications is a good example of “digitising” one piece of your practice’s activity, your communications. Figuring out how an app might integrate into your engagement strategy is another version of digitising elements of your proposition.

I think we could prioritise the elements where digitisation would have maximum impact in the practice, weigh up the virtues of digitising one part of a planner's activities over another. My sense is the most value to be gained from "digital" is to transform your face-to-face client experience. This is particularly effective if you do so in a way that tees up your operational processes for seamless efficiency. And this doesn’t mean clunky, highly complex spreadsheets to fumble around with for the client’s amusement. It doesn’t even mean sitting together with your clients crowding around a tablet or projected presentation necessarily.

What is does mean is having an artefact that can welcome your clients into the conversation. Could even be a piece of paper that brings everything together and intelligently represents the client’s life to invite conversation and transition easily, online, into your operational processes. The thing that makes it digital is not the “screen” that you use to present a graph or a picture, but rather the process by which data is captured, presented and recorded for your practice and your clients. It's the way that you are able to take information from multiple different sources and arrange it in a way that builds enlightenment for your clients.

I think we need to start being less hung up on feeling like a chop in front of our clients and more focused on “digital” as a process surrounding the natural conversation that we’d like to be having with clients anyway. As long as “digitisation” makes that conversation easier and uplifts the way in which we gather, present, capture and record our advice, we’re starting to make the most of this wave of technology.

The Financial Planning

“Tech Stack”

I don’t think it would be at all provocative to say that technology is improving our ability to give our clients significantly improved financial planning experiences. From CRM engines that help us remember the names of their cats, financial planning tools that print out fancy looking reports and aggregation engines that put all their stuff into a single pot, it feels like we’re almost able to replicate a very intimate, very time consuming, one-on-one relationship, en masse.

For a moment, let’s take a step back and consider the specific value that each component of your “tech stack” adds to your value proposition to the client. In the most basic sense, if you only had one, or even ten clients, your need for supporting technology would be greatly reduced. Sure, you’d need to fire off a few emails, but you’d have time and capacity to make them highly personalised, maybe even handwritten, to show the intimacy of your relationship. Your ability to remember their birthdays could be run out of a hardcopy calendar (or your head) and you could literally figure out their financial plans with an HP10B calculator and a protractor. It seems like there is a direct correlation between the number of clients we need to service and the integration of technology in our practices.

I do wonder what came first though, the chicken or the egg. Did we first get the tech and then increase the number of clients we had, as it gave us the ability to scale our service offering? Or, did we always have plenty of clients, we just used to give them shittier service? I suspect it was the latter.

I do believe that clients have been getting better service as technology has slowly started seeping into the operational processes of our practices. We are able to keep better track of client portfolios; schedule more regular face-to-face meetings with them; send regular reports and so on. The thing that sticks out for me though, is that most of the tech we have integrated into our practices seems to be focused on making the back-office operations more “automated” and seamless. This did have an improvement for clients but I don’t believe it “revolutionised” their experience. They went from getting a report in the post every other year, to having one every other month. A new business application went down from three weeks to a couple of days and our ability to build a comprehensive plan reduced from two days to a couple of hours. No doubt there were improvements, just maybe we should’ve been doing those things anyway.

Thinking about the face-to-face, or the more intimate part of the overall experience, it feels to me like there has been very little change. In particular, the client engagement piece of our proposition has remained largely untouched. We still rely on the same discussion documents, visual aids, graphs and dashboards. Planners still struggle to get client’s to connect with their plans. We still struggle to get clients to understand and feel emotionally invested in the process.

I think this is in part due to where we have focused in our own practices – how we have introduced technology into them. My sense is that the “tech stack” that advisors have built in their practices has been focused on very operational and analytical outcomes. We’ve found it easy to justify the business case for change where automation, efficiency and scale are sitting in the driver’s seat. We find it less easy to find a space for technology that doesn’t fit into these categories, although confining ourselves to these categories creates a massive gap in the infrastructure required to deliver value to your clients.

I think we need to redefine the framework by which we evaluate whether our operations and “tech stack” adequately support the value proposition we want to put out to clients. As discussed in a previous article, successful financial planning must make an appeal to the client’s Heart, Head and their Hand. By “Hand”, I mean we must appeal to their orientation to take action; “Head” means the numbers need to stack up and make sense; and by “Heart”, I mean we have to make an emotional connection to bring all the elements together. So if you assess the tools in your practice, do you have supporting technology in each of these spaces? CRM tools will tick off the “Hand”; planning tools, the “Head” but what do you have for the “Heart”? How has your engagement process evolved with the advance in technology to help you to make better connections with the Heart, if at all? A major oversight in the propositions I see in the world today!

The Next Evolution

in Financial Planning

We’ve seen some serious evolution in the profession of Financial Planning. As a profession that has sprung up out of a hard-core sales world, I think we can be proud to see the ever-increasing inclination toward ethical practice and good outcomes for clients. I still think we’re trying to shake off the “policy-smous” reputation reminiscent of our beginnings, but things are improving. I recall the start of my career, nearly 20 years ago now, training financial advisors at the time, we would joke that second to traffic cops, “financial planning” was the most despised profession.

Given the bad rep, even the policy-smous age had some good elements though (although admittedly, also many poor ones). What it did do, was get the client to the point of implementation. Although there wasn’t much in the way of ensuring it was an appropriate one, it was an effective mechanism to get clients to take action. Fortunately the tactics to overcome inertia have moved on, but the fact stands that without action, no amount of even the sincerest of pontifications can have any positive affect for the client at all. Getting them to take action, usually involving some sort of financial product, is undeniably a critical element in improving their financial circumstances. Let’s think of this part of a good financial outcome as appealing to the HAND, the metaphorical symbol for action and implementation. And it still feels like there’s plenty of opportunity for more evolution, making it easier for clients to access financial advice and to execute the outcomes.

Then things started evolving a bit and we started making an appeal to the client’s HEAD. We started doing a better job of analysing their portfolio, tax situation, cashflows over time, estates over generations, personal risks, and so on. This was an important advancement as we cultivated the tools and artefacts to validate the need for a trained specialist in the profession of advancing our client’s financial welfare. Unfortunately though, so too did the profession start becoming more fancy. To show clients how clever we had become, we’d speak to them in a language that they couldn’t understand. Big documents, reams of analyses, economic commentary, graphs, regulatory jargon and terms & conditions. We were living and breathing this new HEAD-space. I recall sitting in FPI sessions listening to Marius Botha (not to pick on Marius, I think he’s awesome) speculating on the “… promulgation of sub-paragraph B of the white paper separating the discourse of neo-libertarianism behind the state of Section 11W …” etc , etc. And thinking “What the hell?!?!” Which planners were talking to which clients about this crap? As a CFP Professional, I didn’t have the inclination to stay tuned in for longer than a minute. What must clients think? And I’ve seen planners that speak to clients in the same way…

Not to take away from its importance, good client outcomes need to have an element that appeals to the HEAD as well. But if your clients are saying to you, “You choose, you know best”, metaphorically, you haven’t flipped on any lights for them. You may have been telling them a whole bunch of stuff but unless you actually help them to hear, you haven’t made any connection at all.

Finally, I think we’re in the process of moving into the age of the HEART. This is the age where we make genuine, generous connections with our clients. We stop dealing with clients as “experts” and rather make connections where clients can feel truly enlightened, empowered and in control. We speak to them on their terms, deal with their money so they can understand. We’ll know when we’ve connected with the HEART. Clients feel inspired, committed, impassioned. Getting to this point isn’t obvious or easy. You have to help clients make the connections between their money and their day-to-day lives. And help make the day-to-day stuff feel like it counts. If your advice process looks the same as it did ten years ago, I bet your clients are missing the third important ingredient.

The real magic happens where we connect to clients with the HEART, HEAD and HAND. This is the space where clients are committed to their plans and conscious of their behaviour. This is also the space, not-so-coincidentally where clients are committed to the financial planning relationship and experience real value.

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Fanny pack pabst etsy portland 90's. Woke tousled cray poutine af, food truck jean shorts freegan mlkshk iceland viral. Neutra roof party lo-fi selfies helvetica lumbersexual.

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