Finding the balance between digital and traditional advice delivery

Speaking on a panel at the Adviser Innovation Summit in Sydney last week, DASH Technology Group’s head of distribution, Tim Rogers, and Foresters Financial’s chief executive, Emma Sakellaris, encouraged advisers to discuss how clients want to use technology in the advice process.

Rogers explained the importance of asking how clients would like to receive financial advice and then implementing it without overcomplicating the process.

“So, how do people like to take information? There are people that are readers, there are people that are listeners, there are people that are both. It’s about understanding what’s important to them, first of all,” he said.

“Secondly, how do they actually want to receive that information and then matching that, and you don’t have to be a technology genius to do that. You just need to engage with the right businesses that are there, that understand it and can put that into your practice rather than turning your practice upside down to change the way you do it.”

Sakellaris stressed the importance of not making assumptions about how clients may want to receive advice based on their age or other factors as there will always be outliers and those who want a combination of digital and traditional delivery.

“I just don’t think it has to be one or the other. I don’t think that all generational cohorts think the same either. You’ve definitely got some 95-year-olds being told to put their device down. But then you’ve got some other 95-year-olds who have either lost capacity or are close to losing capacity,” she said.

“You’ve got some in younger generations who will be definitely preferring a high attachment, high engagement model versus someone that will want to close their parents phone down using a bot because they don’t want to talk to someone in a store.

“It’s really about better understanding people and, without becoming melodramatic and too over the top, I think that the world is in a problematic situation because we keep trying to view people in these boxes and put labels on them and say, ‘They come from that box so they don’t want this. They come from this box, so they’re going to want that’.”

With so much focus on digitising advice, Sakellaris urged advisers to pull back on the digital front and focus on what clients actually want.

“We just need to be a bit more human again and take the time to understand how people will digest information, how they learn, and how they like to buy, and I think it doesn’t have to be an extended high-cost process,” she said.

“It’s just about taking the time to listen and understand how individuals want to engage with us and then making sure that we continue to use those avenues to have those conversations.”

Sakellaris explained that it’s important to understand what clients want and how they want to be receiving information, rather than making assumptions.

“It’s about really understanding what your clients want. How do they want to get X information and then how do they want to get Y information and really bringing both pieces together,” she said.

Rogers added: “We kind of get caught up in the sci-fi and Hollywood of what digital advice is but digital advice is quite literally, in its most basic form, converting that statement of advice that you do exactly the same way, from listing all your templates and creating a Word document, is clicking two buttons to turn it into a URL and delivering it as digital information. That’s digital advice.”