79% of business decision-makers believe that digital adoption and automation will solve productivity problems.
Meanwhile, 78% of employees believe that automating tasks will improve their work life.
But if you’re still mulling over the decision about how to introduce digital solutions to your firm, here are three of the top benefits for you, followed by three ways your employees will benefit too.
1. It helps you to reduce costs
If your business has inefficient processes, this will be costing you money. Organisations with inefficient processes lose 20-30% of revenue every year.
Chances are, if you haven’t integrated digital solutions into your advice firm, you’ll also be spending more on wages.
Switching from manual to digital processes also helps you reduce manual errors, so you and your team will waste less time and money running around fixing issues.
A typical adviser manages 125 clients and to cover the adviser’s salary alone means that each client pays £40 per month towards this. Obviously, there’s also rent, levies etc etc. But if a system can do 75% of their role (all the unvaluable stuff) and it costs £10 per month there’s an obvious and significant cost benefit.
Some modern systems can make a step change in improvement to advice practices. Utilising software that can undertake 60-70% of the tasks and workload of a paraplanner, for example, will instantly cut costs and lead to much greater profitability.
2. It increases productivity
Imagine how much time you could save by digitising your most tedious and time-consuming tasks. The right digital solution for your advice firm should automate your everyday processes, research and analysis. By automation this should be true automation where an administrator, paraplanner or adviser is not manually logging in and doing a number of tasks in order for the system to run.
With the time-consuming tasks automated, you and your staff will have more time to focus on serving your clients, allowing you to concentrate more resources on revenue-generating activities.
Imagine a system that removes 60-70% of the time-consuming admin, capable of analysing client holdings and making recommendations, before automatically producing the financial plan. No re-keying, no copying and pasting, no switching between systems.
Imagine what your team could do with all that spare time…
3. It increases scalability
With improved processes and more time available, you will find your team are able to expand the numbers of clients they can service and thus increase your client base. Significantly.
Digitisation can not only help reduce the time it takes to onboard a new client by 60-70% but also service existing clients, especially in regard to annual reviews.
Newer disruptive systems can cut the time spent onboarding a new client down from the typical 20/30 hours to under five (including face-to-face meetings), saving 60-70% of the time it used to take.
Intelliflo analysed nearly 4 billion clicks over the last year, scoring and segmenting advice firms based on their level of tech adoption.
Tech-savvy firms were found to have 48% more assets under advice per adviser and 28% more clients per adviser than the lowest adopters.
Advice firms in the top technology adoption group generated 59% more ongoing revenue per adviser than the lowest group.
Benefits of digital adoption for employees:
1. It saves your employees’ time
Saving time is always a winning strategy. And one of the top benefits of introducing the right digital solutions into your business is that it will, almost certainly, save time.
A study found that regular office staff spent 2.12 hours per day on administrative tasks such as searching for information, approving paperwork, and processing documents. Put this into a financial planning context, and you can easily see – with the addition of fact-finding, data entry, compliance reporting, etc – how this time can extrapolate.
By digitising and automating admin tasks, employees can complete jobs much faster and error-free. The obvious advantage of this is that they can then use their work time more effectively and profitably.
2. It improves employee work life
According to a report published by Blue Prism, 78% of knowledge workers believe that using tech to automate tasks would improve their work life. Removing mundane tasks enables staff to undertake more engaging activities in line with their skill.
Repetitive, simple tasks are not only dull but frustrating when there are so many of them or it limits the time available to spend on more important tasks. Being under pressure to complete these becomes stressful, which reduces job satisfaction.
3. It increases job satisfaction and engagement
Digital transformation removes mundane tasks increasing people’s self-worth improving satisfaction and engagement. The greater engagement the higher likelihood of better outputs, whether that be in specific tasks or talking to clients and colleagues.
This can be built upon further through increasing people’s skills by offering training and thus upskilling your team.
By investing in employee development, even tangentially, staff are likely to feel more motivated and valued by the business. Of course, another positive for the business is that this will inevitably lead to higher employee retention.
Conclusion
There are clear benefits to implementing technology to a firm. It provides increased productivity, satisfaction, time and cost savings through improving business processes.
This allows teams to focus on more strategic work, helping to make an organisation more innovative, and helping it to accelerate forward more quickly.