Could SOAs remain in a different format?

Speaking on a recent ifa podcast, Scott Miller CEO of Asendium reflected on his time as an adviser, noting that an overwhelming amount of paperwork has since crippled the industry.

Statements of Advice (SOA) are customarily loathed by advisers, not only because they swallow a large chunk of an adviser’s time but because they considerably cut into their profit margins. As such, technology providers are always looking for new ways to simplify processes and enable advisers more one-on-one time with their clients.

Asendium’s latest offering promises to do just that.

“The main challenge of bottleneck did end up being the SOA. It could be a four-to-eight-week turnaround time, a $1,000 document and so the way we’re addressing not only past challenges, but future challenges are with what we’ve developed over the last six months, which is what we’re calling a statement of digital advice,” Mr Miller explained.

“It’s a new mechanism in order to manage, create, store and document advice strategies, risk bids that are personalised to each individual user.”

One of the challenges that a lot of industry participants face is the customisation of an SOA, Mr Miller explained.

“Every planner, including myself, has their own unique way of wanting to explain things or document things. The previous ways to manage that, and even the current ways are quite cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming to manage an SOA. Simply getting an SOA into a legacy system can take up to three months and then it’s the management from there and it’s the tens of thousands of dollars to look after it,” he said.

“One of the main challenges of the SOA creation phase is really the post-editing time. Sometimes it takes longer to post-edit the SOA coming out of a system than it actually does to create the SOA in the system. Some planners and paraplanners we’ve spoken to, take anywhere from two to eight hours in post-editing of an SOA,” he continued.

What Asendium has done is it has built a unique statement of digital advice mechanism that allows it to easily manage all strategies and wording for every planner and every user.

“We have digitised and stored all the strategies ready to be retrieved based on the individual circumstances from that Asendium login. Once you can configure your SOA and how you deliver advice into Ascendium, even if it’s 16,000 different ways, one for every planner, we can handle that; we do that through our SODA system as we like to call it,” Mr Miller noted.

“Now, one of the benefits of this system is minimal post-editing so it gets post-editing down to under an hour and we’re looking to improve that even further. The speed to market now only takes two to four weeks to get a comprehensive, complex SOA in with a library of wording.”

Commenting on QAR’s promise to scrap SOAs, Mr Miller said the general consensus in the industry is that SOAs will remain but in a different format.

“What I’m hearing throughout the industry is licensees, planners will still do an SOA, but they’re not going to give that SOA to a client, they’re going to give a more friendly, understandable client-facing document if that proposal is to go through,” Mr Miller said.

“You look at the SOA now, not as a client-facing document but as a compliance document, which is what it has so badly become, it’s just filled with coveralls and ticking boxes to make sure the compliance is checked off. It’s not really made to be easily read and understood.

“If that comes through, I see a lot of planners switch into more digital presentations or a shorter client-friendly document to explain the advice with the SOA being held on file and that seems to be some of the trends I’m hearing from licensees as well,” he concluded.

To hear more from Mr Miller click here.