Many independent financial planners are not taking full advantage of the capabilities of their financial planning software, contributing to practice inefficiency and missed business opportunities.
Managing director of The Risk Store Peter Wincott said that the client relationship management (CRM) opportunities provided by software are being particularly under-utilised.
"A lot of financial advisers, whether in the risk space or the wealth creation space or both, are still not utilising technology and the software that's available to them these days to drive efficiencies," he said.
If all the relevant client data was correctly entered, software could be used to send referral notifications to businesses with which the planner shared a referral relationship, such as an accountant.
That way the accountant knows the clients he or she has referred are being serviced and will have greater confidence in the referral relationship, Wincott said.
Software can also be set up with family information so the planner can send the client a message on their birthday, or their children's birthdays.
By adding family information the planner can also keep track of whether to offer clients child trauma insurance, and the software can also help them plan ahead for the next generation of clients when those children grow up, he said.
Furthermore, by automating more business systems through software CRM capabilities, financial planners can cut down on the administrative burden of the business and potentially reduce staffing costs, he said.
Pathway Licensee Services general manager Kate Humphries said that once planners have the software they often don't make the time to get it working properly.
A lot of time went into data collection before a plan could be generated, she said, but then people tried to spit out a plan in the minimum time and then spent hours fiddling with the template – which wasn't the way it was designed to function.
Humphries said some advisers got frustrated at not being able to properly use the software, and instead of persevering with it just used Microsoft Word documents for SOAs – but that could compromise the integrity of the data.
IRESS senior business development executive Michael Kinens agreed that CRM was an often underutilised aspect of XPLAN, which he said might be partly because many planners viewed it strictly as SOA-generating software.
Kinens also said there was an issue of other office staff being the ones trained to use the software because planners performed the more entrepreneurial and relationship-driven roles in the business rather than the operational roles.
