Openwork is investing in technology to create many ways for clients to contact member firms, the marketing director of the network has confirmed.
Philip Martin said it was "pretty clear" there was a generational shift in the way people are looking to engage with financial services.
Speaking to FTAdviser's Damian Fantato, Mr Martin said: "Networks such as Openwork and other established businesses emerged over 30 or 40 years, principally through giving face-to-face financial advice and are now profitable.
"But it is clear there is a different generational view of how advice and guidance and interactions with financial firms has to happen, so it is vital for a business such as ours to think of different ways that a customer might want to engage with us."
For some, this will remain face-to-face; for others it will be more digitally enabled and in many cases, customers may want to dip in and out.
"This will require a big technology investment in terms of getting the infrastructure to work, and in a data sense to understand the customer at a central point, to enable them to go through different outlets", Mr Martin commented.
He said therefore the primary spend would be in customer relationship management (CRM) and in engagement systems, which would be a project not just for the rest of this year, but "something we will do over the next two to five years", Mr Martin estimated.
Although he described this as a changing landscape for financial advice, he said the role of Openwork was not to tell advisers how to run their own businesses.
However, it is important for the network to encourage the advice market to take up a "fantastic opportunity" to start to move up the client base and make the most of changes in the way clients are seeking advice, he said.
Technology, he said would be a "principal enabler" to help advisers make that happen, and if the firms did not use technology more effectively, Mr Martin said it would "start to hit businesses in the bottom line if they do not embrace technology".
He also said restricted advice, "if used appropriately", can deliver "real, demonstrable benefits to customers" as this can be used to drive costs down for customers when done in volume.
simoney.kyriakou@ft.com
