Tupicoffs: Harnessing the power of client data in one place

Tupicoffs started as an insurance company in 1970 and when Neil Kendall joined in 1986, he left after one year. But he remained in touch with the company and in 2002, when Neil was looking to start his own financial planning company, he decided to speak to Gary Tupicoff about launching a financial planning arm at Tupicoffs as they had a great client base. The agreement was that Neil would buy half the business, stop purely providing insurance, start providing financial planning services and obtain independence (self-licensed). It also meant moving away from one product provider to multiple product providers and truly providing the best option for each unique circumstance. 

Through hard work and perseverance, Neil managed to cut 8000 insurance-only policy holders to 500 engaged annual fee paying clients. “Our clients are actively involved and have multiple touchpoints with us throughout the year.” Majority of Tupicoffs client base is made up of 50-70 year old business owners and retired business owners with an average networth of $3 million and a healthy FUM of $3 billion. The challenge Neil faced was predominantly around obtaining data as there are multiple sources and multiple systems. “myprosperity was the only way we could bring all the data from different sources into one central place where we and the clients could understand their full, automatically updated financial position.”

When it came to introducing the new wealth portal and app to Tupicoff’s clients, Neil admits it was a mixed reaction and had to position the portal differently to communicate the value for each kind of client. “70% of our clients understood that this was a part of our service moving forward and were happy to have consolidated access to their information. 20% couldn’t see any value, as they believed we should just manage everything on their behalf and then 10% who were security conscious.”

With the 20% of clients who just wanted the firm to take care of their finances, Neil tweaked the conversation to say, “Not only will you get the information, so will we. Instead of us contacting you for bits of information, we obtain it directly with the portal.” This worked incredibly well; clients were then happy for Tupicoffs to have access to their data to add value to their services to them. The security conscious 10% manually upload data when needed, but still get all the other benefits of the app. Every client household has the Tupicoffs app downloaded on their ipad and smartphone.

Neil mentions that each of the 9 financial planners are responsible for introducing the Tupicoffs client portal and app to their clients. Each adviser can already add in various points of data then set up a zoom meeting to help them go through the remainder, which only takes 20 minutes. Neil mentions, “We have bigger clients with high net worths which brings more complexity, so they get a lot of value from being able to bring it all together and see a consolidated picture. Whereas typically they’ve got their super fund, their trust, their company, their personal wealth all over the place and they struggle to get an overall perspective. myprosperity has delivered a consolidated up to date view extremely well.”

Diverse data is key for Tupicoffs and because they are independent, they don’t believe clients should be pigeonholed into one investment portfolio. “If you are independent, you have an obligation to consider and recommend various investment portfolio options,” says Neil, “You also need to know how to manage that data appropriately and provide the proper service to your clients. myprosperity has enabled us to do that brilliantly along with all the other benefits the client portal provides.”