Floware for Financial Advisors

Financial planning is a tough industry, and it’s becoming increasingly tougher. Costs and compliance burdens both seem to rise every year.

You need a clear roadmap for reducing business costs, increasing efficiency and ensuring compliance.

Manual processes like collecting signatures or populating your System of Record (SOR) can eat up hours of time across your entire client base. Not to mention the critical risk of mistyping key details that comes with manual data entry.

Wouldn't it be great if you could hand over the more repetitive, low-value work to an automated system—instead of having your workers tied up and frustrated with endless manual tasks?

Now you can. Floware is a Business Automation tool specifically geared towards Financial Advisors.

Perfect for large and small companies, Floware is the smart way to do business.

With Floware, you get an all-round business tool that will improve your process efficiency—making your clients happier while boosting productivity company-wide.

So if you're looking to take your Financial Planning business to the next level, rean on and find out how Floware can optimise your resources, improve your market position—and improve the profitability of your company.

Urgent challenges facing Financial Advisors

The financial planning industry is growing at a remarkable rate. Unfortunately, while the sector is expanding, the cost of doing business as a financial planner is also rising.

If you’re like about 80% of financial advice licensees, your firm is a small one with fewer than 10 financial advisors on board. You simply don’t have the staff in-house to keep up with the increased paperwork.

As a financial advisor, new compliance regulations, rising administration costs and more complex reporting requirements could all combine to dramatically shrink your future margins.

As the costs of doing business rise, so too does your burden of compliance. You need to meet stricter qualification standards, undertake more regular professional development, and document everything in more detail.

Three of the areas most affected by these issues are:

• Signature collection
• Manual workflows - both within the firm and externally with licensee partners
• Integration with your System of Record (SOR)

Together, issues in these areas add up to a huge drain on time and money.

Why Business Automation is the answer

The only way you can maintain a profitable business is to decrease your costs by increasing efficiency.

Automating your Advisory firm’s processes can help by directly reducing your administration expenses, improving accuracy and making compliance easier.

Automating your workflow frees both you and your employees up to work on income-generating activities rather than manual processes. As a result, your business becomes more competitive, and you get more time to spend on customer engagement.

In short, integrating your data entry with your SOR means you can spend more time focusing on growing your business rather than manually handling data.

Business functions that can effectively be automated

Here’s how process efficiency can help to bring down your costs to improve your bottom line.

1. Beat rising administration costs directly

As a financial advisor, you’re facing ever-increasing costs of sale. You need to pay for your licence, insurance, software, and possibly employees. That’s on top of all the other operational costs of running your business.

It’s probably tempting to try to do it all yourself to save on outsourcing. But your strength lies in sitting in front of the client, giving them financial advice – not in filling out paperwork.

A more comprehensive financial report could take an average of 26 hours to prepare. Doing all that paperwork yourself could lose you literally thousands of rands. And that’s just for a single document.

Improving the efficiency of your processes by automating parts of your administration can save you significant time and money.

That also means far less manual administration to outsource to your paraplanner—directly lowering your business costs.

2. Do away with manual signature collection

The process of getting signatures on paper forms is laborious and time consuming.

Think about the steps involved in manually getting just one client to sign one form. You need to:

• Download the form
• Fill it out manually
• Liaise with the client for their signature, which may take several phone calls
• Follow up with the client when they haven’t signed
• Pay for printing and postage if you need to send the form to them
• Finally, scan or lodge it with the licensee

Let’s say you spend an average of two hours getting client signatures for a single job. Extrapolate that out to an average client base of 100 clients, and it quickly adds up. You probably waste hundreds of hours each year on simply collecting signatures.

Plus you have the costs of printing, posting and return posting, on top of paying your admin staff to handle it all.

Once you’ve sent paperwork off, getting it back can take days. Then, when it finally arrives, you need to reopen the client records, re-familiarise yourself with the account, and check where the job is up to.

So what should take two hours instead drags out for weeks, all the while costing you extra time and money.

And if your client has missed a single field on the form, you’ll need to go back through the entire process yet again.

Automating the process of signature collection with digital signatures can save your firm hours of time.

With digital signatures, clients can sign your form wherever they are. They don’t need to wait for paper forms to arrive in the post, or have to come into your office.

The quicker the process goes from start to finish, the less time you have to spend reminding them or chasing up documents.

Plus, by speeding up the entire process, you’ll increase your client satisfaction. They’re going to be far happier with a process that takes hours or days, rather than weeks.

As a bonus, you can also make fields mandatory. That means you’ll never have to repeat the process because a client somehow didn’t see a field they needed to sign.

3. Automate manual workflows

Creating each client’s Statement of Advice and other documents takes time. Compliance regulations demand that each document is unique.

But managing the document workflow as it moves between you, your paraplanner and your client can be time-consuming.

Consider a simple manual document workflow:

1. Your administrator or paraplanner prints the document
2. They give you the document to fill in
3. You move the document back to your paraplanner
4. Your paraplanner sends the document out to your client
5. Your client fills out their part of the document
6. Your client sends the document back
7. Your paraplanner checks the document and moves it to you
8. Repeat from Step 1 until the job is complete

At each step, someone needs to manually track which drafting stage each document is at. They need to ensure it moves on to the right person, and that it doesn’t get stuck in someone’s in-tray.

It’s the same with all the documentation that your firm creates. The complicated process of filling out forms, chasing for signatures, lodging with the licensee, and making sure all of the documentation is correct is time-intensive and hard to keep track of.

You can make the entire document process more efficient by automating your internal workflows and digitising your forms.

Digitising your workflow allows you to automatically move documents where they need to go. You can track exactly where they are in the process, and immediately see if they’ve got ‘stuck’.

You’ll free up time and feel confident that you’ll never miss any steps from the process. And of course, you’ll stay compliant with the relevant regulating body.

4. Reduce manual data entry

Having a System of Record (SOR) is critical, but manually entering data into it is time-consuming. Not only that, but it also leaves you open to errors and possibly risks non-compliance. Typos are all-too-easy to make, and deciphering some handwriting can be a challenge.

Using digital forms to capture and store client data can save this manual data entry step. But that will only happen if the information the client provides automatically populates into your system.

The issue lies in getting the data into the system in a way that’s efficient and error-free.

Plus, if you use paper forms and manual data entry, there’s a lengthy delay between the client filling in the form and you receiving their information.

Automating the flow of data between your SOR, your internal systems and your external licensee saves an enormous amount of time. It also reduces the potential for costly errors. And it gives your customers a better experience by saving them from repeatedly having to fill in forms with the same information.

Benefits of Automation in the Financial Planning industry

Here are some of the benefits of using business automation software to facilitate the financial advice process:

• Improved efficiency
• Reduced time spent on administration and compliance
• Improved client engagement and communication
• Improved client satisfaction
• Reduced business costs

The verdict is clear. Implementing process efficiency and automation through digital forms, digital signatures and automated workflow saves your business time and expense.

It frees up time that you can then spend on growing your business to become more competitive. It also lets you scale your business so you can take on more clients without having to increase staff.

Finally, saving time on manual processes enables you to give more value to your existing clients, increasing customer satisfaction and longevity.

Floware—business automation done right

Floware is the leading business automation solution for Financial Planners worldwide.

The software makes it easy to get up and running in minutes—right after you register your account at Floware.co.

Floware is your key to flawless business management.

Floware allows you to automate several functions that are essential to the running and growth of your business.

For example, the software can automatically send email and text message reminders to clients about upcoming appointments, and can also automatically generate and send out customised marketing materials.

Floware helps with finding new clients and maintaining relationships with existing ones.

Through advanced integrations, the software allows you to communicate with clients via email, telephony, live chat or mobile messengers. Which means your clients can receive important updates or special offers via SMS, email or through social media platforms.

Simply set your automation triggers (ex. send SMS to clients who’ve been inactive for over 6 months), and floware will take care of the rest.

Floware gives you full control of your client data and  how the data is stored.

Furthermore, documents and contacts can also be managed inside Floware.

With Floware, it’s possible to take paper, confusion, and mistakes out of the equation and replace them with fast and simple forms for collecting more accurate data and saving time.

For example, the software can automate repetitive tasks such as contract creation, data entry, and portfolio management, which can save time and reduce the risk of errors.

If you have already decided on your needs, contact us for a detailed discussion of the project. If not, we will be happy to help you choose the best solution based on your business objectives.

If you’re ready to get started with painless business automation, drive rapid digitization and see a six-week ROI, hit the button below to get in touch.

Try floware now and take your Financial Planning business to a totally new level!

Get Floware today.