If you’re reading this column, the odds are greater than 50:50 that you’re doing so on your phone.
In the last quarter of 2023, mobile devices excluding tablets generated 58 per cent of global web traffic. This doesn’t feel surprising.
By next year, it’s predicted that 95 per cent of the UK population aged 16-plus will be smartphone users.
We do everything on our phones, from tracking our fitness to shopping for food, to controlling our central heating.
Today, mobile banking is banking; 71 per cent of bank account holders in the UK use smartphones or tablets to process their financial affairs.
The best banking apps make engaging with your finances, tracking your spending and moving money around feel seamless.
With a couple of taps, you can see where you stand, through a hyper-personalised interface that makes you feel known and understood.
Security feels robust but at the same time simple: your data is encrypted, and you can unlock your device and access your apps with face ID.
Push notifications let you know when money goes in or out so you can quickly see if anything is amiss.
They also prompt and remind you when action is needed – and that action is easy to take, because you just need to tap the notification and open the app.
Banking tasks don’t even make it onto the to-do list because they are so easy to address as they arise.
Bringing financial planning into the mobile age
Compare that with the way the financial advice industry communicates with its customers.
Interfaces for web-based portals feel tired, clunky and highly transactional, so it’s not rewarding for your clients to come back.
There are multiple passwords to remember. There’s two-factor authentication. Documents to print and sign. Email requests and manual reminders that quickly slip down the client’s inbox. It’s definitely the old world.
Clients are not incentivised to engage with the planning process, which makes it harder to meet the consumer duty requirement of demonstrating that you’re delivering ongoing value for your ongoing fee.
Manual communication ties up too much adviser time. New clients are quickly mired in paperwork, creating friction at the start of what would ideally be lifelong relationships.
But change is on the horizon. Client-facing app technology has the potential to bring financial planning into the mobile age, enabling firms to deliver a more engaging service that’s more highly valued by clients – and which represents less work, not more.
Clients who are already used to running their lives on their phones will encounter best practices they’re familiar with from other industries: clean, appealing, positive design; biometric security measures; hyper-personalised home screens.
For the financial advice industry, the time to enter the mobile age is now.They will be able to check in regularly from wherever they are and gain comfort that you are helping them to achieve the outcomes they’re looking for.
In periods of market turbulence, when clients tend to panic and make decisions that will harm those outcomes – or at least to seek a lot of reassurance by phone or email – they will be able to see that they are still on track.
If market moves feel outsized and uncomfortable, they’ll be able to check that their portfolio continues to be managed in line with their risk preferences. If they have a concern, they can reach you through the app.
The full value of segmenting your clients into target markets will become apparent as technology enables you to deliver personalised content to those markets. For example, in those turbulent times, your client might log on and find their home screen already shows a piece on staying invested in periods of volatility.
Clients approaching retirement could be served content that helps them prepare for that shift, while those with young children could be nudged to start thinking about school fees.
When combined with the targeted support proposal in the current advice guidance boundary review and with the content generation possibilities of artificial intelligence, this could be powerful.
Just like your bank when it needs you to look at something, you’ll be able to message your clients securely within an app and share any relevant documents.
If you need them to take action, you can prompt them. If they don’t respond to the first notification, they’ll get automated reminders.
The time saved could drive huge productivity gains, opening up capacity for firms to grow and scale their businesses, and enabling more people to access the advice and planning they need to fund the lives they want.
For the financial advice industry, the time to enter the mobile age is now.
By putting the financial plan in the palm of the client’s hand, firms that embrace the new technology can create meaningful digital engagement that enhances client relationships, while dramatically reducing the cost to serve.
Ben Goss is chief executive of Dynamic Planner
