The most valuable forms of advice technology are those that complement human skills by completing complex, time-consuming tasks, allowing advisers to spend more time on what they do best.
This can hugely aid compliance processes as well as doing the heavy lifting and frequently complex calculations – that would take a human hours to complete – in a matter of seconds, so the adviser can focus on conveying the results and articulating the benefits.
Version two of Focus Solutions’ business replacement software is a great example of this.
The new features streamline the process of recommending replacement business in a range of scenarios to significantly reduce the number of manual processes users need to perform off-system.
These allow users to create scenarios incorporating all the necessary actions to construct a replacement business recommendation and to balance the resulting portfolio to a target asset allocation.
In this interface, users will be able to generate full compliant assessments of the case for revising portfolios and even switching a client’s assets from one platform to another quickly and efficiently – a task that is usually laborious and time-consuming.
Clients’ holdings data can generate an initial model that shows the client’s current position, reflecting risk and cost. Changes can be made to create an optimal target asset mix for a given risk level.
The process allows users to view the current versus proposed portfolio with a comparison view on risk cost and rating on a single screen, as well as a full visual representation of the proposed investment strategy based on this comparison.
The action of recommending a scenario will create all the required transactions to execute the recommendation and feed these back into the Focus case process, so that the user does not have to manually key in these transactions, saving time and reducing the risk of error.
This is a great example of technology helping advisers to work smarter, faster and improve compliance.
Ian McKenna is the founder of Protection Guru and FTRC
