Investing in process efficiency ‘one of the best spends’

On a recent episode of The ifa Show, Tangelo Advice Consulting director and principal consultant Conrad Travers argued that advice firms should be making it a priority to analyse their processes and understand where they can improve.

“We think that investing in your processes is one of the best spends that you can possibly make because of the efficiency it generates,” Travers said.

Travers explained that simple tweaks to a firm’s processes can help them improve their efficiency significantly, speeding up the advice process for both them and their clients.

“Some advisers are missing what we call ‘moments of truth’, which means if they come to the first meeting and they haven’t brought the documents that you need them to give you to get to the next stage, you’ve always got to do the follow-up and with the follow-up comes a task and a thread and someone’s got to do a thing that takes time,” he said.

“So, whenever you can remove friction from a process, you’re going to see it filter through really quickly, and whenever you can actually have the data filtered through to your CRM in the back end, it’s going to make your process a lot more efficient.”

One issue that commonly occurs, Travers said, is the unnecessary double-handling of tasks. He explained that this can put a serious drag on the advice process while also creating additional work.

“When we look at processes, what we tend to do is, we sit down with an advice business and we just use a whiteboard and we just go, ‘Talk me through your process and what happens’. You would be amazed at the amount of duplication, double-handling and data issues that exist when you talk about it,” he said.

“For example, new business, seeing the client, getting the fact find completed, the KYC forms, the file note, getting the information back to the paraplanner who prepares the SOA, SOA gets rewritten, the SOA gets presented to the client, there’s another file note that’s completed. And then if the client wants to proceed, you’ve got multiple fee consent forms as well as the implementation forms on the back of that.

“Sometimes that entire process, on average, in my view, takes three to four months, and what the good practices are doing is saying, ‘Let’s look at all of these steps and let’s look at how we can optimise and make it as efficient as possible’.”

In order to understand if and where bottlenecks are occurring within their processes, Travers suggested firms gather all their staff and create a map of how information is travelling between each stage of their processes.

“I find the best thing is just get the whole team, go find a venue outside the office with a really big whiteboard and actually do ‘swim lanes’. So the swim lanes would have, here’s the role of the adviser, here’s the role of the CSO, here’s the role of the paraplanner, and just literally put dots in place about where information flows from one to the other,” he said.

“Just by doing that and having the team in the room going, ‘Why do we do it that way? Why don’t we just enter the data that feeds straight through to the CRM at that point, as opposed to sending out a fact find that has to be rekeyed in the back end via a process overseas? Like, that doesn’t make any sense to me. Why don’t we change that?’

“That’s where those conversations can happen, where you kind of look at the process holistically and go, ‘Well, why does it have to be that way? What’s a simpler way that we could do that?’

“Then that will lead to maybe a project around roles and responsibilities and maybe there’s an operating procedure that we can define, but the key thing is to get buy-in from the team around simplifying the process and making sure the data feeds through in a smarter way.”

Finally, he explained that businesses need to “figure out a way to kill off spreadsheets”, opting for other methods that can be automated and easily used by various staff instead.

To hear more from Conrad Travers, tune in here.