For instance, many clients choose to link their bank account via open banking, which gives you a more detailed picture of their spending habits and identifies held-away assets to support fully holistic, personalised advice.
We believe that providing clients with greater access to their own data helps improve overall engagement with the advice process.
We know from adviser feedback that clients really love seeing their own data brought to life through cash flow modelling.
By adding the client’s more granular financial data, you can also use modelling to demonstrate the benefits of making specific changes, for instance to their current spending habits or by using held-away assets more efficiently.
To help firms provide greater data transparency to clients, we have made simplified cash flow modelling functionality available in the Intelliflo personal finance portal.
This allows advised clients to look at different financial forecasts at their leisure, using their individual information to clarify the plan and create simple, interactive graphs around a range of ‘what if’ options to help understand the possibilities before talking to their adviser.
This functionality also reminds clients to provide any missing data, helping ensure the conversations you have with them are based on a full picture of their finances.
Alongside the obvious benefits to clients, making effective use of data to provide management information can have a significant impact on a firm’s ability to fulfil regulatory requirements, improve efficiency and build scale.
Understanding your data can provide insights into the firm itself, the wider market and prospective as well as current clients, identifying efficiency gains, processes that are working well or need improvement, and areas for investment.
Here again technology can help, delivering standardised data-sets and reporting to demonstrate regulatory compliance and deliver business intelligence on clients and operations to inform management decisions.
Data is at the heart of the personalised experiences that customers increasingly expect from providers.
However, without the right tools to manage, analyse and securely share the information they hold, firms will struggle to fully unlock the valuable insights within their systems.
Using technology to make the best use of the data you hold will help you deliver more personalised client experiences, encouraging greater engagement and loyalty and supporting future business success.
Richard Wake is the chief customer officer at Intelliflo
