The hybrid advice journey starts with trust and engagement

This article first appeared in Professional Paraplanner on 4th November 2021.

Early ‘robo advice’ offerings were touted as the evolution of financial advice, the potential solution for the advice gap, with threats that it would all but wipe away the need for traditional financial advisers.

It was promoted based on ‘build it and they will come’ but that didn’t happen as expected because, in our experience, no-one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I need financial advice’. Usually that happens because of a life event or a change in circumstances and then people turn to trusted brands with which they are familiar to serve them. Typically, that will be their bank or a financial adviser.

Hybrid advice does provide that easy next step for the industry, with banks and financial advice firms offering different levels of service to different types of customers supported by technology.

It will be built on trust as well as introducing clients to advice in the way that best meets their circumstances.

This can take the form of guided advice where the client is walked through a digital process aligned with the advice firms pensions and/or investment policies, using chat bots to ask questions at each stage to help the client progress; or it can be offered as the same digital process but with the option to speak to an adviser; as well as used to support the full advice service.

Intelligent automation of the advice process can take out the heavy lifting of the advice process, such as fact find and suitability report creation, freeing up advisers’ time to see more clients and to focus on the advice elements where they deliver most value and are most valued by the client – talking about the client’s goals and aspirations and the advice recommendations.

Hybrid advice also allows clients to interact with the advice firm in the way that best suits their needs at the different stages of their wealth accumulation journey, allowing them to engage in the way that they want and build on their use of the services as their needs increase.

Similarly, using a modular hybrid advice system, advice firms can add technology into their business incrementally. This may start by automating elements of the traditional advice model and move on to offering a low touch digital advice/guidance service further down the line.

Using hybrid advice, we have the opportunity to serve more people in the way that suits them and so get many more people used to financial advice and see it as a benefit rather than an out of reach service.

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If you'd like more information on digital and hybrid advice please email simon.binney@wealthwizards.com