Advisers bogged down by administration

Financial advisers spend almost 20 per cent of their time bogged down in administration with an average planner only affording 10 per cent of his/her working day to sourcing new clients and business according to new statistics released by Assirt Research.

According to Vanessa McMahon, who conducted the study of some 510 randomly selected advisers on behalf of Assirt, an average financial planner also spends 15 and 24 per cent of his/her time on initial client meetings and dealing with existing clients respectively.

McMahon says only 11 per cent of time is budgeted to sourcing new business with 18 per cent of time seeing advisers dealing with administration and training issues.

“With only 11 per cent of an adviser’s time being spent on searching for new clients it would be natural to assume that they would prefer to spend less time on administration and training to allow them to develop their businesses,” McMahon says.

According to Navigator, advisers can reduce the time spent on administration by adopting a more online approach to the task.

“There are still too many old school advisers relying on paper based administration procedures which just delay the process for everyone. A basic fear of technology is no excuse for not providing top quality financial advice and support,” Navigator national key account manager, Stephen Trist says.

“Not only does this cost advisers time and money, it also costs their clients because the simple truth is they can’t be as reactive to market shifts or as client focussed as a ‘techno savvy’ adviser,” he adds.

However while online solutions may increase the amount of time advisers can spend on other tasks, McMahon says these solutions may not improve the situation unless they, at least, lean towards straight through processing.

“It would be simple to say that online is going to make things easier, but it really depends on how simple the online forms and systems are to use and whether the products they use are inter-linked,” she says.

Trist says there is a lack of desire among some planners to change, leading to many old fashioned advisers steering away from technology solutions because they are view them as being ‘too hard’ or ‘too convoluted’.

However according to Trist, customers are becoming more demanding in every area of business.

“They want top quality service and they want it quickly [and] both advisers and financial service institutions have to provide this,” he says.