Better Business  

The future of advice is hyper-personal

True Potential's centralised advice proposition is deployed across its 1,200 advisers, including a central advice team of 110 people, of whom 25 per cent are advisers and the rest are relationship managers.

The set up allows it to serve 75,000 clients centrally on an ongoing basis.

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The proprietary technology allows clients to observe their portfolio's performance and get insights into what has gone well and what hasn't gone so well at any time.

The annual review then shows the clients how much their pension or investments grew in the year versus their goals.

True Potential wants to serve millions of clients in future, says Harrison (Carmen Reichman/FTA)

"Goals are really important, because a goal gives a client context every day, or every month, to say I'm on track for the journey or not," says Harrison.

With ideas borrowed from Spotify Wrapped, it plays back a client's investment performance and gives them a chance to update their details. It also plays back last year's fact find to check if anything fundamental has changed since.

If clients are using open banking, it takes a scrape of their past six month's expenditure and income to see if they're still hitting their affordability criteria.

For one product it typically takes about 15 minutes to complete, says Harrison.

"That's really important for the client because the client is in control. They're doing it at a time that suits them, not at a time that suits them and the adviser."

"But importantly for us, it creates flags, which might say this client has had a "significant change" iin their risk profile or total assets, for example.

Behavioural analysis

In the background the system collects vast amounts of data on the client's behaviour, what information they like to seek out and their changing circumstances, as well as the number of log ins, time of log ins and general browsing behaviour.

Last year it had 3.5mn logins from the 75,000 clients the central advice proposition currently serves.

Letting clients fill in their own suitability reports may seem unusual to some, but not to Harrison, who believes in a healthy degree of 'caveat emptor'.

"We have to start treating consumers like adults," he says. "If they fill something in and say it's correct and it turns out they have forgotten something, it's not always our fault."

He adds: "Clients don't need that ongoing advice. What they do need is access to information and transparency, but importantly, access to somebody to look after them as and when they need it."

The system has checks and balances in place to ensure the reviews are being completed, should clients refuse to do them they are off the books after three years.