Your IndustrySep 7 2016

Portal to help IFAs woo ‘clients of the future’

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Portal to help IFAs woo ‘clients of the future’

Advicefront, a new hybrid advice model, has been developed to help UK advisers attract and service millennials and less affluent investment clients.

Jose Supico, chief executive and co-founder of Advicefront, said the service, which is set to go live later this year, will allow adviser firms to attract new clients, generate investment plans and create fully compliant audit trails online.

According to Mr Supico, these clients would not necessarily be the wealthy, older clients traditionally serviced by firms, but millennials and digital natives who would be the “clients of the future”.

Advicefront’s portal will be a standalone piece of technology sitting alongside a firm’s existing back-office software.

Advisers using Advicefront can white label it to fit the firm’s own brand, service proposition and compliance.

The site will offer a hybrid model of advice: there would be a real, named adviser behind the service with whom the client could engage online, and the client would also fill in the investment proposition, risk tolerance surveys and fact-finds online.

Mr Supico said: “Advicefront aims to help advisers find their clients of the future, keeping their pipeline healthy, as well as being suitable for legacy clients who might need advice but not necessarily face-to-face advice.”

It caters for those with simple investment needs, and for clients who do not have complex financial needs, or do not have enough assets to warrant in-depth, face-to-face advice Jose Supico

It gives clients the ability to engage with their finances, setting their own goals and exploring how different levels of contributions or estimated retirement age might affect their financial goals, and taking clients through risk profiles to help them gauge their attitude to risk.

Clients can submit their plan to the adviser online, who can make suggestions and explain them to the client, or approve the plan and build an investment proposition.

Damian Davies, director of The Timebank (UK), said: “What we tried to do is approach suitability in a different way to how it is usually approached. It is all about helping the adviser explain to the client why this particular plan is suitable, making it all about the client’s goals.

“It is looking at what the client wants to achieve and how to do this, and the products are secondary to that.

“With Advicefront, we can really look at what the client wants, and this is really refreshing, which is why I wanted to get involved with it.”

simoney.kyriako@ft.com