We tend to think of Millennials as 20-somethings, but the oldest are now well into adulthood. Many are building successful careers, climbing the property ladder and in some cases, doing this while raising a young family.
At this stage, financial advice is more important than ever, so why is this difficult to access? We felt this needed addressing.
We designed a service aimed specifically aimed at Millennials and Generation Z who can now take control of their financial futures using Informed Generation.
What is Informed Generation?
The idea was born over the fact that we were turning down clients who simply did not meet our minimum funds under management for ongoing advice, when in reality, they needed us the most.
We wanted to create something that debunked the myth that advice is only for high-networth individuals or the over 50s, by attracting digitally fluent generations of prudent planners and savvy savers.
The service enables younger individuals (aged between 21 and 40) to identify their future goals and create a suitable financial plan to help them get there, by offering a purely transactional, affordable and digital service to guide them in the right direction and help secure their future.
The details
The service is starting with advice offerings on new pensions, investments, and insurance plans. Clients will complete a short questionnaire to identify the service they require prior to moving onto the wholly digital service. There’s no need for lengthy face-to-face meetings - the fact-finding process will all be done digitally, with a short call to fill in any blanks. The aim here is to give clients the opportunity to do everything at a time that suits them.
We’ve shortened our reports, while making sure all the relevant risk warnings are still in there (which wasn't an easy feat!).
The process isn’t completely meeting free. However, the one important meeting in the process isn’t to sit and go through the recommendation report. Instead, the meeting we have with clients is for education purposes. It’s designed to show them how to use their new platform and the tech that sits alongside it.
Throughout the whole process, the emphasis is on quick turnaround times. In an age of Amazon Prime, people naturally expect things immediately.
This is the main reason behind not moving into investment or pension reviews just yet. Until the industry catches up, our service doesn’t match the 3-month waiting times quoted by some providers for information requests on a pension. Once that speeds up, you’ll see us move into this space.
The content
Our research indicates that many of this target audience refer to Google, robo-advice or even TikTok when it comes to questions about managing their money. But this is enticing extremely risky investments such as crypto currency and ‘Forex’ trading.
But it does at least show an appetite for knowledge. Our aim is to educate while providing sound advice on the more mainstream routes to financial success and security.
We have a number of Chartered Financial Planners (who also fall into our target audiences’ age bracket) who are at the end of the phone or an email.
In addition, we also have a content hub on our website full of blog posts explaining different areas of financial advice such as investments, pensions, and personal protection. The aim of these posts is to be ‘current, casual, and credible’, which is a theme across our entire service.
The idea to keep all our content in line with these three key words was to ensure financial jargon and overcomplicated explanations do not get in the way of our main focus – educating the younger generation in a streamlined, easy-to-understand manner.
The team
The Informed Generation team consists of six young employees within our organisation, all aged between 23 and 33 years old and is made up of Chartered Financial Planners, a Senior Paraplanner, a Compliance Officer, and two members of the Business Development Team.
Each member of the team has been involved in the implementation of this new service from the very beginning.
The cost
We spoke to our target audience and asked what they thought our services would be worth, and also compared our service to those of a mortgage broker, as this is the most common form of financial advice received by the younger generation.
We finally reached a conclusion that our services would start from as little as £395 (fixed fee). By being efficient, and utilising software such as our own client portal, our service can be both affordable and still profitable.
The results
Within a week of launching, we exceeded our expectations on the number of organic leads we received. In the first week, we had 11 enquiries.
One tagged post on LinkedIn read: “This is such a great idea! I wish this was out in my teens so I had more awareness/support around the financial and credit world (something I still believe should be taught in schools)! Congratulations and well done to your team!”
As far as we’re aware, this is the first service of its kind in our area that allows the younger generation to receive regulated, holistic financial advice from specialists of a similar age who have over 30 years’ experience between them. We believe this separates us from other competition and gives everyone in need a chance to receive independent and bespoke advice that is not based on algorithms.
We’re committed to educating about the benefits of managing money and planning for the future, and we believe Informed Generation truly fills that gap.