Tool developed to reduce ‘pain’ of SoA production
A former financial adviser has developed a new tool for quicker and easier production of Statements of Advice.
Tim Hall spent around 10 years as an adviser at Findex and SuperPartners and said SoAs were a “major pain point” for advisers. The documents were regularly referenced by advisers as a challenge to providing advice as they could take up to 30 hours to produce and cost thousands of dollars.
With a background in statistics and data optimisation, Hall wanted to see if there was a way this could be utilised to provide a quicker SoA.
His service, PrimeSolve, was developed over the last five years and recently came to market offering same-day SoAs
“I wanted to see how optimisation could be used in financial planning, there is a huge opportunity for SoAs as the delivery time is so long. The problem has never been solved.”
Advisers needed to provide the full-fact find, the client’s prioritised objectives and their risk profile and the firm then ran over 100 different stress-test models to produce the SoA. These were then sent back to the adviser for confirmation, including the alternatives which were considered and the reasons they were rejected.
“Our documents are fully-compliant, they meet the safe harbour obligations, they are still around 80 pages and we can provide extra information on stress testing for a firms’ compliance department.”
“We have a data-driven approach which hasn’t been done before with this optimisation, we are the only modelling tool which can run 100 different scenarios simultaneously and provide that stress test report otherwise you would have to do each one individually which would take hours.”
Hall said PrimeSolve could work with advisers to use their own SoA templates and overlay that with the SoA modelling and was confident it would help ease the advice gap.
“It can absolutely bring down the cost of advice and we want to make it easier for consumers to access, it will help advisers to get more clients and to service them more quickly.”
AUTHOR
Laura Dew
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