Firm snapshot
Revenue: $1-5M
Clients: 2,000+
Staff: 21-40
Services: Investment, taxation, business advisory, superannuation, accountancy, lending services, risk & estate planning.
Tech Stack: myprosperity, Xplan, Supermate, MYOB AE, NetWealth, Macquarie Wrap, BT Wrap, Employment Hero
Top 3 areas of focus in your business? Increase Revenue; Increase Efficiencies; Improved Client Engagement
Sovereign Financial began using myprosperity in 2016 after a comprehensive technology search to identify a client portal platform that they could use within their advice business. Back when they started to use the platform, Director and Head of Wealth for Sovereign, Sarah Connolly, said that they were looking for technology to help with streamlining the way they worked with clients in order to help scale the business. A key objective was to enable advisers to manage larger numbers of clients.
“We wanted to increase revenue without increasing staff. We had heard through other advisers about myprosperity, and when we looked into it closely we realised that this was a platform that could not only help us to better engage with our clients but also manage how we collect much needed financial information and keep it up to date.”
Like many advisers who start out using myprosperity, understanding the change management required to deploy new technology was a critical lesson. Sarah admits that in the early stages of rolling out the platform, they treated the onboarding of each client as a product sale and focused on the benefits to the client.
“Yes, many clients see the benefit in using the wealth portal, particularly the peace of mind of knowing that everything is in one place, but we soon realised that this was actually a tool for us. Myprosperity is a platform that allows us to really know our clients and enables us to meet our obligation to provide informed advice.”
Amongst many benefits, Sarah has found the ability to gather insights into all assets and liabilities, not just those that are under management by Sovereign, as key to building a complete profile of clients that allows her and her advisers to easily prepare for client meetings.
Initially, Sovereign experienced reluctance from some clients in making the move to digital but we’re happy to see a 50% uptake in the first wave of rollout of the technology to their client base. “This is something you need to persist with. Many clients embrace the new digital led approach, but you always find some that resist and so you need to train them on the new way of engaging. It’s definitely worth the effort because the benefits to us in terms of efficiency gains are substantial.”
Onboarding of new clients is now completed in an initial 30-minute meeting, usually over Zoom, where the client portal and their entire personal balance sheet is completed on the spot.
“Clients love it when they can leave that meeting with everything set up properly and working on a mobile app. It certainly makes our lives easier as well.”
Sovereign is then able to keep client data updated with the use of a digital fact find which has been customised and branded for Sovereign and made available in the Advisor Portal for all their advisers to use with their clients.
“We have also just recently rolled out a digital Tax Checklist which our accountants love using.”
Like many other advisers, Covid-19 has certainly helped fast track adoption and in addition to completing digital forms, the uptake of digital signing has also seen a substantial increase across the entire client base.
Sovereign’s focus going forward is to identify referral opportunities amongst their tax client base, where they can offer other services provided within the wealth arm of the firm and according to Sarah, myprosperity is an integral part of this.
“Accountants are typically reluctant to raise new opportunities with clients. With the insights we have across the various client portfolios using myprosperity we are now able to run analytics across our whole client base to identify these new leads.”
As an example, Sovereign are able to review mortgages that may not have been looked at for three years or more and can execute a marketing campaign to generate leads for refinancing.
“If anything changes in our client’s financial world we are the first to know, and it means we can offer the right services at the right time.”
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