Infocus Money Management is about to launch enhanced online capabilities of its financial planning software, part of a multi-million dollar investment in its IT infrastructure.
Infocus has invested $10 million in its IT over the last 10 years, $2 million of which was in the last year, according to managing director Darren Steinhardt. He added that improving efficiencies in the current environment was the group’s number one concern.
Infocus is looking at a more efficient way of delivering advice, which by current costings can be between $2,500 and $3,000. Steinhardt said in a fee-for-service environment many people may not be able to afford paying for financial advice upfront or may be less inclined to pay as they were led to believe that advice was something that their industry super fund could provide for free anyway.
“We need to find a better way to deliver advice that is cost-effective,” Steinhardt asserted.
He said Infocus has made a “massive” investment in its IT processes and over the last 12 months it has been finetuning its online fact find capability, while it will launch its improved statement of advice building capabilities at its annual conference in October.
He said the enhanced system will give advisers the ability to generate advice documents in a compliant and efficient manner, adding that this investment will bring down data input costs – which include research and analysing strategies – to between $300 and $400.
Steinhardt said this system was a differentiator in the market as it enabled advisers to do everything they needed to remotely and in real time. He said the system that advisers use was the same as that used at head office, enabling the dealer group to monitor client accounts and more easily identify errors or areas where advisers may need further training from a compliance perspective.
Steinhardt agreed that the re-election of Labor has created further uncertainty among dealer groups as to where to invest in terms of infrastructure and processes. However, he added that regardless of what reforms are passed through, there was a general expectation from retail investors that commissions would be banned and therefore Infocus was confident that it would be well-placed in light of its IT investments for a fee-for-service environment.
