Paraplanner friction limits IFA growth

The complexity of rules for IFAs creates operational and technical friction that limits potential business growth without investing significantly in paraplanner resource.  The speed of doing business is dependent on the complexity of rules and subsequent suitability report for any prospective customer.  The differences in funds, products and rules often resort in paraplanners working out the suitability for a potential client manually and taking time to carefully generate each suitability document.  Suitability reports can be over 20 pages long and because they are specific to that customers’ circumstances take time to ensure value and accuracy for the customer.  Intelliflo, used by most IFAs, adds to this time as the fund values returned need to be interpreted correctly.  All this serves to result in high technical and operational friction in most IFA journeys by its nature.

The IFA friction review

The core challenge at the centre of IFA friction is how to generate a suitability report for prospective customers with less paraplanner resource, allowing the paraplanner to focus on checking suitability rather than the administration of producing the report.  The shear complexity of the products, the options available and the associated rules understandably make solving this problem for IFAs a daunting challenge. 

To understand the friction the PrinSIX team spent time with the client to understand their data gathering requirements and the current operational and customer journeys in place.  They worked collaboratively to map out each of the IFA rules that was required to enable the paraplanners to create a suitability document for a potential customer and the impact that Intelliflo had on this complexity.  

The vision was to enable the client to be the first in the market to automate these rules because they had seen this complexity hold back effective market consolidation – it is a common problem.  The client wanted the data gathering to be done quickly and have confidence that the right suitability document was produced to be reviewed at the end.

The PrinSIX approach

The PrinSIX platform is configurable based on the requirements of each client, with a guiding principle that each journey created aims to reduce friction and enable a business to grow.

The PrinSIX team worked collaboratively with the IFA to identify the rules that they wanted to implement and PrinSIX mapped these into configurable journeys within the platform.

The complexity of this rule-based approach was simplified within these journeys so that the IFA business could be scaled independently of paraplanner resource.  Importantly for the client, these rules were made understandable and documented so they were auditable and not contained in any one IFAs memory.

Operational friction was reduced because these new journeys would now guide the paraplanners through what questions they needed to ask and when so that questions and outcomes were evidencable and that there’s an audit trail.  

The PrinSIX platform acts as a co-pilot to the paraplanner.  

The paraplanner always has the final say but they are guided using the information given to decide what to ask next.  The PrinSIX platform gives flexibility in how and where the paraplanner completes this information.  

Importantly, the platform integrates with Intelliflo to understand fund values.  The platform translates the output into a simple and digestible manor for customer to understand.

The PrinSIX platform is a white labelled solution that can be configurable to the rule set of any IFA resulting in journeys being built specific to your business.  You gain the value of quick and easy deployment, with a bespoke rule set to reflect the IP of your business. 

The benefit

The PrinSIX approach and platform had reduced operational and technical friction within the IFA journeys by achieving three core deliverables.  

1. Make it easy for the IFAs to collect information about the customer through a simple, intuitive journey
2. Use that data and Intelliflo to create highly personalised documents through the application of IFA defined rules
3. Empower the Paraplanner to take the output, review it and refine it to ensure it delivers good customer outcomes

Paraplanner resource requirements had been reduced by 70%, with 80% of suitability reports now created within one hour of the request being processed.