How technology can drive a ‘golden age of advice’

Speaking on a recent episode of the ifa podcast, the co-chief executive officer and founder of Padua Solutions, Matthew Esler, said he is “hugely optimistic” about the future of the advice industry.

“This is going to be the golden age of advice, I can tell you,” Mr Esler said.

“And the reason being is that you’ve got a situation where there’s a huge demand for financial advice, a very low supply of financial advisers, and technology about to open up that will enable advice to be provided scalably at high quality [with an] extremely fast turnaround.”

He explained that he sees advisers who have delays of up to 100 days from an initial client fact-find meeting to actually delivering advice due to the complexity of the advice and how difficult it was to produce the advice, as well as working through backlogs.

“That is a yesteryear comment, even though it’s happening still today. In two days’ time, tomorrow will be yesterday,” Mr Esler said.

“So, it’s something that is very close to occurring and I think that advisers should be very positive about the state of the industry and the potential of where advice is going in Australia.”

According to the CEO, technology is at a point where it can streamline the strategic modelling process so that advisers can spend more time working with their clients to fully understand their objectives.

“Under the old technology regime, doing that modelling and producing that advice took an incredible amount of time. You’re talking 30 hours to produce complex advice. That’s an incredible amount of time,” he said.

“I can guarantee you that was not looking at every strategy available and it didn’t model every scenario possible. What we’re talking about is being able to do all of the modelling, looking at all of the strategic benefits available in each of the strategies, and actually being able to rank them from the top benefits to the least benefit, and that actually happening instantly rather than taking hours and hours and hours.

“What that does is then allow the adviser to spend an inordinate amount of time with the client, understanding their objectives and really delivering advice that’s incredibly beneficial and valued by the client, and so the value of advice goes through the roof.”

Mr Esler added that it can be difficult for advisers to achieve this with the regulatory hoops they need to jump through.

“I think this tech is going to turn the corner in terms of it’ll bring positivity back in the industry, it’ll attract the best talent from a university graduate perspective,” he said.

“And you’ll really see a change in the industry because this industry is incredibly important. You’re talking about managing the financial interests of individuals.”

To hear more from Mr Esler, tune in here.