Digital advice starts with compliance
There is too much focus on the engagement piece rather than compliance when it comes to financial services firms embracing the digital advice path, Decimal believes.
Decimal chief executive, Nic Pollock, said while people liked to get “wowed” by a nice website, which was still important, it would be irrelevant if it was not compliant.
“The starting point needs to be what is the platform that can deliver advice and scale up to thousands and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people, in a compliant scalable way, rather than here is a ‘cute sexy little engagement piece’ that doesn’t do that and may not be compliant,” Pollock said.
“And when the legislation changes, and you’ve done a completely bespoke user experience and the legislation changes you have a whole bunch of work to keep that up. And if you want topics and all sorts of stuff.”
Pollock said the starting point was to have a solid piece of technology first and then build up from there as opposed to starting with the fund and engaging elements.
“Because what we quite often see time and time again is institutions that do that and they get to the point where they want to switch it on and the compliance people say ‘no, you can’t do that’,” Pollock said.
“If everybody in the room says yes but the compliant people say ‘no’ it’s not going to go anywhere.”
Pollock also said that technology could play a role in restoring trust in the industry.
“If you look at all the scandals that relates to advice, it would be really bad for the industry, and we don’t want people to fail as we have a vested interest into people trusting online advice. We don’t want more scandal with online advice and we think technology can play a role in that,” he said.
“I can tell you that I do know organisations that did build stuff, or with third party, and then had to shut it down because it wasn’t compliant, or as regulation change it didn’t stand up.”
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