AdviceTech Podcast #27 – intelliflo – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the Ensombl AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis and the guest joining me here today to deep dive into Intelliflo was born in Nairobi, Kenya, created a video game at school that reached number one in the gaming charts at the time, was a film script writer and is a fellow Tolkien fan. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Nick Eatock.

Nick Eatock
Okay, so thank you very much. I didn’t know we were fellow Tolkien fans, that’s fantastic.

Peita Diamantidis
Tolkien is particularly Lord of the Rings well, and The Hobbit. They’re the only books I own where the spine is no longer visible. I’ve read them so much.

Nick Eatock
I’ve got a book just the same as my grandfather gave me the original Lord of the Rings. And it’s um, it looks brilliant because it’s old. But just like you the spine has just fallen away on it. It’s really sad. I’ve got to be really careful with it that

Peita Diamantidis
Right? It’s but that’s when you love it that much, you know, at that point. And I feel sad for kids these days that they may never have a book like that, because it’s all on Kindle or whatever. Yeah, so all I’m so excited to dive into intelliflo and all the things that you guys can do. But first, let’s just get to know you a little better through your own tech usage. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Nick Eatock
Cool, so I use emojis. Everyone uses emojis. Right? I’ll tell you what, though. I have changed my use of emojis. And I changed it because of of education in Australia. So I was at the FPO FBA event in November in Sydney that just just last year, and there was there was someone talking on about what emojis actually mean these days. Really educated me there was this piece. I always I’m probably of an age where I’m slightly behind the majority of people in emoji use the my default emoji used to be just a simple smiley face emoji. And then I discovered at the FDA last November, that that means passive aggressive and I thought oh, that’s no good.

Peita Diamantidis
I was the same. It’s like thumbs up is a similar thing. Like, these days, it can have a lot of sarcasm in the thumbs up. You know? Don’t you love that? This this little picture now has sarcasm implied.

Nick Eatock
How will you to know that? How will you to know that? It’s ridiculous.

Peita Diamantidis
This stuff’s fraught with danger. I’ll tell you.

Nick Eatock
I’m trying to expand my my emoji use. I quite like the flame one at the moment. That’s quite good. Yeah. And then sort of the Thank you, you know, put your hands together. They quite like that one. So I’m trying to trying to move on from my old favorites. Is

Peita Diamantidis
that true? Nice. Well, then, in fact, I’ve got a subconscious like yourself, I’ve heard that I’ve now started using Bitmoji which is when it uses your like a cartoon character you into pictures because then at least it’s my like, It’s me doing it. Like, send the wrong message with this anymore.

Nick Eatock
is an excellent idea. I mean, you could always go back to your kids and say is this appropriate to say and normally it’s No dad, what on earth are you using them for?

Peita Diamantidis
Love it. All right. And so then we look we’ve all just leave Have enough smartphones? Don’t worry. So you’ve got to wipe everything off. And you’re only allowed to keep three apps on your smartphone. What are you keeping?

Nick Eatock
Or good ones? So there’s a really boring one, which is outlook on my phone. Because you know, that’s just work stuff. But the reality is WhatsApp is the app I probably use the most. That’s my default communication with with with everyone I communicate with. We kind of again, from a working perspective, use Slack a lot. So slack is a really used App on my so much prefer slack to email. It’s just, it’s just not true, how much better it is. It’s just fantastic. And then I’m a big sports nut. So I’ve got various sports for hand bursts. Some apps about my favorite team, who will Liverpool Football Club who won seven nil on Monday saying

Peita Diamantidis
so it hasn’t been Tottenham fan. So he was quite busy. So yeah, yeah. So very nice. I like it and slacks interesting. It hasn’t come a long way through financial advice in Australia. Of course, lots of other industries. We could not live without it infected, the business might shut down. If we couldn’t work. It is replaced we have a zero internal email policy. And so you got to communicate via slack

Nick Eatock
spot on that those those communication trails on regular email where you’ve got lots of people involved, and it goes off in different branches. And people end up responding to the wrong one. And you just think, why are we doing it this way? Go to slack for everything. I love it. I love your I love your policies are really in mail as a good internal is a good way forward.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And emails are harder to send a gift to and we will have gifts for communicating in this in the team was slick. Being a bit of humor, you know, it’s always a good thing. Absolutely. All righty, let’s dive into intelliflo, shall we? So let’s take it way up to the sort of high level and give me a sense. And for the listener who maybe is less aware of you guys as a brand or are in the Australian space, where intelliflo sits in the advice tech sort of broad spectrum, you know, what category does it sort of fall under, who were you sort of normally lined up against to give us some context here.

Nick Eatock
So I guess I mean, our technologies stack is quite wide. Now, Peter, so we two things. So so we do lots of stuff. So that’s including things like practice management, revenue management, client portals, financial modeling, and so on, all of these kinds of things sit within under the stack of a of a product we call intelliflo. Office. So it’s a pretty wide ranging product does lots of things. But it’s also open architecture, we’ve been open architecture, right since we started in 2004. So it’s an it’s a central philosophy of the business. So we’ve got an open API, you can go to the URL today, if you want to. In fact, if you want to, you can start writing an integration against our app, just by going to that URL, you can sign up and then need to talk to anyone. And that means what we’ve got is a whole bunch of partners. And those partners can be software firms, large and small. It can be product providers large and even larger. And those firms just integrate with our tech. And we think that’s really important because it gives advice businesses choice of the tech stack that they want to use. Yeah, and sometimes that’s our bits exclusively. Sometimes it’s our bits alongside other bits. And they can mold their tax that takes that together. Because everything is really tightly integrated, or open architecture approach has something in this boring, techy stuff, but it’s got like 272 endpoints, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want, in terms of integration technologies.

Peita Diamantidis
Wow. And that’s for the listener who, like you say, sort of not aware of that. The other end of that is you can you can transfer the name, the postal address, right is the other end. Yeah, yeah, we integrate is not really where it counts. So you guys really hard. So it’s a deep level of intended integration, if somebody’s willing to, you know, utilize the open API and sort of build that that bridge between your tool and whichever one they need. Exactly. Because advices have

Nick Eatock
seen enough of those. Those point integrations, which I tend to call them marketing integrations, where yeah, it’s just a single piece of data. And you can put a tick tick in the box. And yes, we’re integrated with X, Y, Zed firm, or whatever. Yeah, actually, the reality is, is that it’s the quality of that integration is actually the most important thing, because you want to use the third party solutions together, because you like them both. But you, you don’t want to rekey you don’t want to read key data, you want a seamless user experience. And that’s what, that’s what our API dev hub and and store does.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s exciting to have more and more players in the market having this view because I think to date, a lot of Australian advisor would just sort of be ignoring integration only because it was very difficult for it to be possible. So why would you even bother understanding it as an option? It’s like, yeah, good, that wonderful thing that you Can’t Have you no, absolutely right? It’s It’s really exciting to see that as sort of the new benchmark is that this is what you should be expecting.

Nick Eatock
And Peter, we’re hearing that from all the advice firms, we talked to that I mean, a desperate for a change. But also it feels like the Australian marketplace has been starved of the oxygen required to make a buoyant economy or marketplace of software businesses that can move forward and ultimately, deliver better capability to advisors, which means those advisors can deliver engaging experiences with their clients. And that’s got to be a good thing.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, exactly. And look, we’ve sort of touched on it. So I think it is worth taking just a moment, I am curious about your insights into the difference between you know, what a UK advisor wants or needs versus an Australian advisor from a tech perspective, like, what are you guys seeing in the difference? Is it look broadly, it’s the same? Or is are the markets at such different points? That it’s, it’s quite a different need or requested that you get?

Nick Eatock
I think, I mean, well, at its essence, financial advice is the same saying the world around, right, yeah, the outcome of financial advisors is exactly the same. There’s local or regional differences between the players and the park partners in that marketplace. But the actual need is just the same. So what we’re seeing more and more is advisors looking for digitized experiences, where they can engage effectively with their clients. And no matter what the age, I think there used to be this thing in the marketplace, saying, you know, digital technology and client portals and all that kind of stuff. It’s only for people who are 20s, and 30s. And what have you. And, and the reality is we look at our data, we’ve got 368,000 adults using our cloud portal today. That’s one in 101. In every 145 UK adults uses our find a job or call in portal technology. And so it’s a really big sample size. And what you see from that, is that the age group that is most engaged, that logs on most frequently, and does stuff within within the solution of people in their 50s and 60s.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and it’s an interesting, I got asked on a panel a couple of weeks ago about even older clients and our that, you know, say you your client portal was an app on their phone. But you know, they’re not going to want to do that. And and I said, Well, the thing is, though, if you get them to put that app on the phone, they probably only have six other apps. So so you’re gonna be on the front page, like, you’ll be Top of the Pops, you know, that’s probably one of the few apps they’ll ever use. Whereas with, with younger generation, that you’re going to be seven pages in, like you’re competing for real estate, as an app in that world. So I think with so many assumptions we make with this stuff, isn’t it that what will work or what won’t? Without understanding people’s behaviors in a deeper sense?

Nick Eatock
Yeah. And, and the terrible thing is, those phrases sort of all came started and originated, about 20 years ago, where we were saying, you know, it’s only for the millennials, but 20 years has passed, and not just 20 years has passed. So everyone’s a little bit older. But not just that. But we also had COVID, which was dreadful in so many ways, it’s not true. But what it did mean was a people engaged with their technology for all sorts of really good reasons. And it’s just become part of what they do. And that that applied, particularly, I think, for people in the in the sort of older age cohorts because they needed to because they wanted to, you know, keep in touch with their families with grandchildren, whatever it might be. So it’s, it’s a brave new world, for sure.

Peita Diamantidis
It is. And I do think there’s been we’ve already had the tipping point where for almost every generation, it has actually made life easier. Whereas I think, to your point, prior to even COVID, some of them like Well, I do I really need to worry about technology, you know, for some of them, whereas, you know, the QR code that could let them do something quite simple. They’ve got Oh, yeah, that’s easier. And after filling my name and address and like, or whatever that is, so I do think it sort of did accelerate things, didn’t it? You know, in terms of people’s understanding or willingness, so and we’ve, we’ve sort of got to ride that wave. I think we’ve got to take advantage of that accelerated learning, and that person. Yeah.

Nick Eatock
So I mean, essentially, back to your question, Peter, the needs are the same. But what we do see about the Australian market that’s different from the UK marketplace, is the UK marketplace is much more integrated, many more players integrating across and there’s, there’s not that level that that’s happened here, for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened here. And we want to provide that we want to give advice, advisors a real a real chance to change and to have a vibrant marketplace of technology.

Peita Diamantidis
So then given given all of the elements that seating in telephone office and the pieces that it’s providing, then there isn’t really in that sense a primary user because I’m betting that the expectation is if you utilize The tool even if you don’t use everything in it that most or all members of the team should be interacting with it is that the like the general assumption is this is a core part of somebody’s tech space as opposed to an ancillary part. Is that a fair assumption? Yeah, absolutely.

Nick Eatock
So you look at the core users. And you know, core users are either advisors or power planners. That’s kind of historically where we’ve been with administrative people sitting it sitting in there too. And they tend to be in the application for about six hours a day. That’s kind of how they run their advice business. It’s how they deal with initial advice for a client taking them all the way through that advice ecosystem. So advice, the review the fact finding the advice, recommendations itself, documents, shared back dot SOA shared back with the client signing of those digitally as well, all the way through to implantation. So it covers all of that, and particularly important, or we think really important is that ongoing servicing of the client thereafter. But if you look at the people who use our technology, most it’s actually the end. Right, we’ve got far more end client users than we do have advisor and powerplant users just because that’s the that’s, you know, every advisor in the UK, at least those who use the technology, technology, well service about 220 clients on average. So there’s a 220 to one ratio of clients versus advisors for those for those firms who adopted well, so we like to see it as an ecosystem where all of the relevant parties are using the software to some extent, or other clients aren’t going to be in there six hours a day, clearly, they’re not, but they’re going to be there when they want to be in.

Peita Diamantidis
So it sounds like then, because the you know, the evolution or introduction and evolution of portals or you know, any any of those sorts of tools, clump portals, has been somewhat mixed and sporadic in some cases. So it sounds like for intelli flow, this is this is a core part of that, therefore, you would expect as you onboard things, it’s onboarding the clients as much as individuals, I mean, as opposed to just onboarding the practice, if it’s so it sounds like it truly is to get to extract that value to really get it humming. It’s taking, you know, taking the client portal is a key part of

Nick Eatock
that. Absolutely. So I mean, for it to be really intuitive as a process and a process and advice process or servicing process that engages advisors and clients alike. It’s got to be integrated. So it’s got to feel like one ecosystem. And that means it is one ecosystem, you know, you don’t think of it as separate solution. In fairness, if you want to use third party client portals, that’s fine to just use one that’s that’s also integrated by our our API stack. But the the advisors, we see that who made the best of the technology use our own client portal, because it’s better integrated than others. Yeah, that’s the reality.

Peita Diamantidis
And fair enough, if that’s also the sort of approach you’re having is this is far more embedded than it makes sense that the portal you’ve got does a lot of what they need it for that sort of that makes perfect sense. Is there a type of practice or size or approach or mentality that that you find, you know, intelliflo really works for and any others that, say, your team that are out there engaging with individual practices will go oh, if I see that, generally, they’re going to struggle to take on the system? Is there any sort of standout that way?

Nick Eatock
I’m not really I don’t think it’s about in this context, size doesn’t matter. The reality can be careful. The reality is that if I look across the firms that use our technology, you’ve got small, small advice firms, you know, just one single advice firms, right, the way up to our largest users that are 10,000, advisors, plus, you know, so you’ve got small firms and large firms. And so that doesn’t really matter. It can, it can appeal to firms of all sizes. But the thing that distinguishes it most from the successes, the successful users who really adopt the technology is a mindset, it’s not about. So it’s a mindset that says, you know, technology is going to be a differentiator for us, it’s not going to be something that we use, because we have to, they use it because they want it, they want it to make a difference in the way they operate. They want to be more effective, they want to be more efficient, they want to be more engaging with their callers, they, they want to really embrace the take the capability to make them advisors that are attractive to an end clients, you know, and they want, this doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t take away from the relationships that advisors, decent advisors, have with their clients, embellishing them, it makes them even better, even more engaged. And those are the kinds of firms that that make the most of the solution.

Peita Diamantidis
And I guess that you know, another part of that when when you’ve got a system that is like this, that sort of quite does a lot of the elements required then I’m embedding, therefore, there’s elements of practice management or even license management that would get folded into that. And that’s that’s something that difficult to balance to from a tech provider is well compliance with like this and would like that perspective, whereas the advisor user, well, they don’t need to see, I mean, it might need to be collected, but they don’t need to see that. How do you guys balance that in terms of the way the tech works? Or even what people, you know, see where they’re engaging? How do you balance those competing needs.

Nick Eatock
So So a few things. Firstly, we’re a software as a service business, so multi tenant, SAS, and forgive the technology acronym, but it’s really important to us. And that, what that means is that there is just a single version of our software that operates across three geographical regions around the world, the US, the UK, and Australia. And that means every single firm using our tech is using that same version. Okay, so that’s really important. Now is localized to each of those markets, because there’s different terminology, there are different product providers, there’s different different tax rules, and so on all of that stuff. But it’s essentially the same tech. And what that means is because we got over 2800, firms using the same version of the tech is, it has to be immensely configurable to deal with that, that that that environment, because every firm is slightly differently, they have a different approach to their documentations, their workflows, how they show up to their clients, what they say what they don’t say all of those kinds of things are entirely different. And so it has to be a configurable solution is this isn’t customizing and writing code. If there’s not a single line of code, not a single line of code written for all those 2800 different configurations, everything is configurable within the solution, that gives a great deal of power to the advice firms who use our tech, it means they can get going pretty quickly. It means they can adapt things pretty quickly. So as their their needs change, or the market needs change, or the currencies change, they can react to that really responsibly, they’re not coming back to us and say intelliflo, we don’t understand how this coding has been written or something, can you change it, because there is no coding, there’s just configuration, they can they can, they can do all of that, that kind of stuff. So that creates a real difference. And what it means is that when you’re looking at the different user types within an advice firm, so an advice practice, whether it’s compliance, or, or the, the client placing advisor or anyone between, they can configure a workflow that works differently for those different role types within the organization, but have control and visibility across everything ran that business. So that creates a real, we think that’s really different in the marketplace. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
And certainly, you know, configuration is so interesting, isn’t it, because, like you say, you need to be able to react to a specific situation. And so even just from what is what is standing out to the team, when they login, you know, even on a client’s by something that flashes out at them, you know, that really stands out, that can change over time, depending on what your focus for the team or the business is at that point of time. So just being able to, you know, shift, according to that is powerful. Because we all know, you know, most people will look at a series of information and which is generally you know, a system has a whole lot of information in it. If you just put it all in front of people, different people will notice different things. So there is some guidance, you’ve got to give to that in terms of what you want people to focus on, you know, what’s the thing you always want them to notice, right? So being able to configure that is important, because like you say each business will be different at what stage what they’re focusing on what they want their team to ignore whatever, for that business. So we’d say that’s exciting, actually. And so then you’re it’s not a small system, this is not a one little thing, either you’re doing deeply and well. So because of that, is there something that you you and your team would suggest that people do prior to, you know, shifting or taking on something like until a flow is there? Is there any work they should do to to optimize the implementation process or the speed with which they can implement?

Nick Eatock
Often that gets done on the way so you know, so if you take things like data, data, migration, migration data from one system to another, so from whatever, there’s the incumbent technology, along along to ours, is a process that we handhold them all the way through, we’ve got teams who do this, we’ve got migration tools that have done, you know, over 2800 firms have come into the technology. So we’ve, we’ve got a huge amount of experience in this. And what we what we find most frequently is that advice, firms aren’t comfortable that the quality of the data that they’ve got at the moment in their system is as good as it could be. Yeah. So what we do is we clean it, we enhance it, we get rid of duplication, and we do all of that kind of stuff as just pulled to the process. So it means when you bring the data in, you actually end up already on day one in a better place because recovering the data is part of that. We do think that’s the right and the best place to Do it, you could, as a as an advice practice actually decide to do that in advance. And that’s not a bad thing to do either. But we’ve got capability to to help you along the way. The other thing, I guess, and it comes back to that SAS methodology means that actually, we’ve got perfect insight in every across all firms to say, this is kind of what works for advisors. And this is what doesn’t in our experience. So we’ll help them with their workflow workflows, incredibly powerful type stuff. But it’s also easy to over workflow and organization, you know, we we mandate every single step along the way. And then suddenly, you find that there are some, there are some examples and situations where it’s mandated it too much, and you need a bit more flexibility, every flows at a different point on that scale. But the reality is our customer success teams, implement and work with firms to say, right, this is what we think works for an organization of your size, your profile, that kind of thing you’re doing and we we like to apply that expertise to the software, the important things that I say frequently, I’ll probably bore people on this. But software as a service doesn’t mean just providing the software, it’s more about the service, you know, that relationship with, with, with our customers. And then with us, we see as a partnership. And that’s a partnership where, basically, we want to make sure that this works for them as well as it possibly can. And that means we should be both partners in how to make sure it’s configured well reacts to their changes as well. They don’t feel that they’re constrained, they don’t feel that they have to come back to us for everything, but they do feel they’d like to come back to us for advice. And they do and they regularly do.

Peita Diamantidis
And I do think it’s probably you’ve tapped into one of my pet peeves. Because I you know, look, I’m Tech curious, I am that person, I go out and try all sorts of things out and outside of the advice world, the thing that has done particularly well by you know, rapidly growing tech, you know, Canva, or things like this are a great example is they make it really easy to start and then really easy to learn more and become an expert, like it’s this journey they can take you on because they know their audience, and they’ve seen it over and over again. Whereas what I struggle with in the advice world here is is often there’s a lot of tools like as in resources are there, there’s a video on this already. But they’re not giving you the insights of having seen people fail at this or saying the pitfalls they always eat, or, like, we’ve only seen our practice, you guys have seen like you say, hundreds and 1000s of practices. So you know, those insights are invaluable. Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s the same step by step process, but I’m betting there’s the thing, don’t start with this, it’s unnecessary till later. Or if you don’t get that right, these things won’t work, you know, that sort of stuff is really valuable. And it’s that that insight, those those the insights from the pitfalls I think is, is such such a great leg up for a practice. And so recognizing that is exciting to me,

Nick Eatock
that that I mean, that’s great to hear. And it’s certainly what we hear from advice firms as well, you know that that that constant basis, every was slightly different than that regardless. And so you’ve got some firms, and we see this with technology outside the advice space, that there’s that sometimes we don’t want to talk to anyone, we just want to go online, and we want to browse videos or content or whatever to do something because that’s, that’s where we are at that point in time, or that’s the type of person we are. And you’ve got to create that capability. But others want to really talk through it. And they really want to understand and and learn from the sort of best practice experience from others. And there’s no right or wrong answer to that. It’s just that we’re all different. And so long as you can provide an ecosystem where you can get both of those ends of the spectrum and anywhere in between, then I think you’re doing the right thing.

Peita Diamantidis
And you’ve mentioned workflows a couple of times, and I’d love to get a bit of a clarification, I guess. So. You know, there is the workflow as in, you know, you might do something like this in the system, and then it’s going to remind you to do the next thing versus an automation where you do this thing in this system, and then it automatically sends up the follow up a follow up email, where do you guys sit in that, in terms of the way the tool can work for practice?

Nick Eatock
So it can do both? What we do find is that, that smaller advice businesses actually tend to tend to be less prescriptive on the workflows. Yep. Because, you know, the reality is you’ve got a small number of people doing the jobs and they don’t need to have sort of mission critical scalability in there where there are teams working on something. They don’t have that they had the benefit of, of not needing that. But they then they have the challenges of not getting to that that scale necessarily. And then you see firms at the other end where actually yeah, that automation is really important. So they can show things happen in exactly the same same way every time as again there’s not a right or right or wrong answer to that. Now you choose, you are the type of business you are. And you, we, we believe that we’re going to meet advice firms where they are, there’s no point trying to impose a set of principles or, or processes on them that actually just aren’t right for them at that point in time, they may change over time. But if meet them, meet them where they are in the technology should do that.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, I completely agree. Because all of us have a different team that are doing it too. So if it’s, it’s touching multiple different hands, that’s different to one person that does a huge chunk of the work as an example, you know, so it’s, you’ve got to be, you know, it’s got to reflect that. And I know for us, like, we just recently actually picked up weed over automated one particular process. And there were steps in there that were completely unnecessary. We just overcooked it, you know, and we get together frequently. Luckily, the team are at the point now, where that’s literally a team meeting topic is how we’re doing things in something that feels it feels like we’re doing that unnecessarily. Does anybody else think that and we talk that through a lot, but it’s so easy to do, I sort of view it as a wonderful symptom of the fact that you are focusing on your processes, you are thinking about them. So I just figure it’s a side effect. This is what’s going to happen.

Nick Eatock
Very much so and you also put beats, you get that bit, which is kind of not about workflow workflow in the traditional sense, which was kind of one tiles move into another and automating some stuff, you also get that bit that and we were really proud of this in our software, which is actually the user journey, and the user journeys created by UIs, and wizards and so on that take you along that workflow, without you knowing, kind of without you realizing because it’s just intuitive. Yeah. Fabulous. Yeah, it’s got to be intuitive stuff. It’s got to be integrated. We like to innovate by that. And that’s a really important watchword for the business. And so we listen to what our customers are telling us, we upgrade the software regularly, you know, every day a new sort of new capability goes in. And much of it driven by our customers, we have something called customer inspired change. And you only get that when you listen to your customers saying, Well, this works well. But it would be even better if it did this. And you know, for a number of firms to say that they you know what it’s going to do that we’re going to add that at that upgrade to the capability.

Peita Diamantidis
And it is it is such a different way to look at things I remember, I mean, I’m old enough, and a whole lot of listeners are going to be say, Peter, I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about. But I’m old enough to remember using a system in an insurance company that was DOS, so backslash, AF, backslash, C back and you, you had to know what each of those codes meant to get you to the thing you were trying to get to right. So it was like the training was was so deep, because like, it’s not like you could just work it out on the fly, there was no possibility of that. These days, what I find interesting is how many systems still feel like the user experience is designed like that, like you have to know to go to the thing, and then the thing, and then the thing to get to the final thing, you know, like it’s, it’s, it’s not intuitive at all, which doesn’t make any sense. Given how smart techies these days to me, you know, it’s it doesn’t, why do we need to understand this branching of all the things you’ve got to branch down into to get to so I agree with you, I think the more we have of that, then the thing is, the faster you can get a new team member up to scratch, for example, you know, the easier it is to have somebody just step in and take over from a team member who’s sick or like all of that just you don’t need as much of this sort of IP of all of that understanding because the system can just sort of take you through it. So yeah, I completely agree. That’s the user experience is so so important.

Nick Eatock
Yeah, and that’s a reflection, sometimes adware software was in the cycle. And when it was built, seeing the reference that piece of the dots was the reality is, there weren’t really actually any alternatives at the time. So of course, that was the way, you know, that’s just kind of how it worked. Yeah, even the early days of Windows based stuff, you know, actually was really complex. And I think, you know, very often in the old days, software was built by software engineers and software engineers in isolation, who were really good at what they do, but they aren’t necessarily user experience, people. And so now, you know, the good, the good, good software is built by a combination of people, all with different stripes and disciplines, collectively, as a team come together with something that’s truly remarkable.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, you’ve mentioned the portal, and I’m betting that’s the, I mean, that’s the manifestation of sort of what the client experience can be with the system or with the advisor. You know, how far have you guys gone down in terms of what you can do or behave in the portal? So it sounds like executing a document possible. So he signatures that sort of thing? Yep. Data Feed does that wait, so it’s reflecting something that’s within the system that might be their portfolio or things like that? Is that you know, that’s available, what other elements are there in the portal?

Nick Eatock
That’s all there’s a full game of five fat fine. So a lot of advisors use this as their factfinding approach, you know, and the reality is, we think that’s really important that traditional factfinding approach, let’s be honest, is a is a process whereby a client is asked lots of questions that they don’t necessarily know the answer to, they find it quite challenging themselves. Sometimes those clients will guess because they feel a little bit awkward about something they don’t want to, they don’t want to feel uninformed about their finances. So you won’t necessarily even get the right answers, we often call it a guest find rather than a fat burning. Yeah, if you actually provide technology, where the client themselves can fill in that fat find, then actually what they do is they fill in it in more accurately, they take their time overdoing it might take them a few few evenings at their own time and over their leisure, probably glass of wine in their hand or something when they’re doing it. But they start adding more information than would have been added before. And it’s all done on their time, the adviser has to do nothing at that point, which means the advisor can concentrate on the value add and their value add isn’t finding collection is maybe the soft facts around finding, but definitely not the hard facts. And it’s about the advice itself. So that creates a very different dynamic. We love that capability. We’ve got open banking capability as well, certainly in the in the UK, and we’re bringing that to the Australian version in the next few months as well. And that’s really interesting, because that’s another element of that factfinding approach. It gives you real data about income expenditure, where people are spending stuff, you know, what’s, what’s essential expenditure, what’s, what’s, what’s optional, and so on. So that’s a really interesting approach, we’ve got a really strong financial modeling capability, which is really, really cool. And I think one of the things I’m proudest about that, and people use use cash, our cash flow modeling capability in front of the client, yes, is it very clearly through the technology, not some dry document that is presented to a client, and they don’t understand it’s actually visual, engaging, interactive technology that shows on the left side, kind of where you are at the moment in terms of reaching either meeting your hopes, dreams and aspirations, that sort of goal setting. And then on the right hand side, what the value of the advice is to help you get there, and you can very clearly illustrate the benefit of the advice. And, and, you know, for though, for all of us in this industry, we understand the value of advice, the clients often don’t. And so it’s really important to ensure that clients do get a view actually, this is this is what they’re getting. And I think that kind of technology more more widely rolled out, is actually what’s going to solve some of the advice gap the advice gap that incidentally exists across the globe, this isn’t an Australian thing, purely this is a, you know, UK, how’s it us as it and so on.

Peita Diamantidis
And so then, presumably, the client can also serve their some documentation need or evidence of or whatever, they can upload that into the app? Is that something they can, you know, instead of using? So essentially, you know, avoiding email, this is the place where they provide that, what about, have you got to that stage where say there is a workflow that the advisor is working towards, and there’s something the client needs to do, if you get to the point where that’s sort of integrate, you know, the client gets it done, and therefore it triggers something for the advisor, is that is that there yet,

Nick Eatock
in some areas piece of other is one of the things we’re looking to, to improve on so that the actual workflow definition can actually then drive change behavior within the client portal. So our client portal is called Personal Finance portal. It’s just a capability that you get within Office, you don’t pay any extra for it. It’s just part part of the solution. One of the things we love about it, and certainly that I should have mentioned, because you’re right, we got all that secure messaging and document signing and sharing that that’s that’s kind of the basic capability. But what we’ve also done with the technology is just like, our core sort of practice management, intelliflo Office solution is we allow third party solutions to be built into the client portal. Okay, you could go to a third party and say, I really like what they’ve done in, I don’t know, risk profiling, for example, I really like what they’ve done there. Wouldn’t that be great thing to have with within our client portal? Because you brand the client portal, right? Yep. So is X, Y, Zed advisor firm, that is their brand, their colors, and so on. And then you can choose a third party solution, or even build one if you want to, that sits within that framework. So you can make you can have a client portal experience that is unique to your business. Utilizing that technology, we think that’s when again, we think that’s a complete game changer USB, in the marketplace, and you can configure it. So it’s different for different clients of yours. The client is going through a different journey with you and that you know, so initial client may be in that sort of early nurturing stage of a client, you might have a different set of screens and capability than for a client is gone through full advice and maybe you’re at the servicing end of the of the relationship with that client, and it can show up differently To each of those different users in their journey, so same user, but the different stages in their, in their life with you.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, that is exciting because that’s, you know, I could see that then falling out, you might have certain offers that involve partners like others that you’ve sort of, you know, other expertise you’ve factored in, then, then then if I’d imagine getting creative, you can sort of start to fold that in where some wouldn’t see, taking them off to something that’s about the other provider, but some would, because they’re the ones that are part of the, you know, the, the service that you’re offering to those clients. So, you know, be absolutely

Nick Eatock
spot on piece. And ultimately, it comes back to the point that really, you know, we, we like to think that our technology is pretty great. And we build lots of capability, and it should deal with most advisor needs. The reality is the marketplace keeps changing. And there’s some really great innovations that other businesses, often small businesses are creating, and we don’t, we want to give them the oxygen to actually deliver capability out to advisors, that’s really important. You shouldn’t feel I, in my view, as an advice practice that you are restricted by your choice of technology provider, you should feel that you are that you are freed up to do what you want to do by your choice of technology. Yeah, yes, exactly.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. And I think, you know, while there will always be some things that it makes sense, you know, sort of in terms of this sort of Gorilla system, like you guys have and the energy and the people you have that can apply attention to solve a particular problem. You can’t be all things to all people, it’s just not possible, because the minute you do, you’re the average, you know, it’s not it’s not the best solution, it’s the average. Whereas if you can fold in some, you know, narrow providers, then, you know, the end result for you. And the advice, you know, practices that work for you is heightened. I mean, a good example, you know, dive into these integrations, a good example is, so product RX, which is, you know, I mean, it’s Nic is really another NIC is a was built product, Brexit does this narrow thing, but geez, it does it well. And so, you know, I was excited to see that you guys have that as one of the integrations because it’s solved a massive problem for a lot of practices.

Nick Eatock
Yeah, no, he’s built a great, a great capability, as you say, very relatively narrow in terms of what he does, but really good. And that’s fantastic. You know, that’s, that’s the kind of partners we’d love to have. But we’re open on that, you know, whoever the partner is, that’s fine.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And so one of the other ones I saw on the list, which was timely, because I actually interviewed them last week was Oxford risk. And yeah, so and that’s relatively I mean, those Aussies were sort of relatively new to what they do. And so in terms of a tool like that, where would that get folded in? Or how would that integrate, for example, with Intel Tilly flow? Where would that turn up in the system?

Nick Eatock
So that that’s it. So the Oxford risk integration is within our sort of advice flow. And the way that advice flow within for an advisor sits within the system, which takes them through a set of steps, one bit of which obviously, is the is the risk profiling, set aside all ATR. And so that’s kind of how that sits. But in, in future, they may want to start integrating with our client portal capability. I mean, yeah, that new architecture of the client portal we actually only released in December. And it’s interesting, actually, we released it across all three regions, UK, US and Australia, at exactly the same time. So that’s the nature of having a single version offering, it means you’re not restricted by the version that you’re on, not being able to access this particular capability. Everyone can access to us because there is just a single version.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Because there’s nothing more frustrating than seeing some great press release on something and then you can’t get that version. It’s heartbreaking. I’d prefer to not know about it. You know, if that’s the case, you know, don’t tell me about this wonderful thing. I can’t do. Yeah. Okay. That’s so that’s great. I mean, that it sort of broad approach is, well, it’s just it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? It just makes sense. That it’s that easy. Is there any features or or sections in this sort of suite of tools you’ve got that you think practices or advisers don’t really take enough advantage of the thinking maybe the maybe a little unloved, but have some real gold in there, if people sort of understood what they could do? And then, you know, incorporated them into their practice. I mean,

Nick Eatock
the stuff like some of the compliance stuff, actually, compliance, often, I think is preserved. Proper compliance processing is often reserved for the larger organizations. They’re the ones who really focus on this. But the reality is, there’s some there’s some benefits to process, even for the smaller organizations to use. So they don’t and I think that’s one of these interesting areas where, as she compliance in some respects, can deliver on multiple levels. It’s don’t just think of it as compliance. Think of it as kind of ensuring that you’re Following a consistent way of delivering your advice, which actually then means you can be more scalable, which if you want to as a business means you can then take on more, more clients and more advisors and so on. And you can grow more effectively. That’s one of those things that I think sometimes sometimes gets misunderstood. I do think, if we were going back maybe six or seven years, I would say we were at a point where even just the client portal technology itself, a lot of advisors were fearful, actually, of the technology and how it was going to disintermediate in their view their relationships with their clients. And yeah, and here we are, six, six years or so later. And now 98% of the advisors who use our technology in the UK, use our color portal for allergy. So then at one point, it was 0%. And 0%, saying that they needed a client portal that that has changed immensely. So I think it’s really easy. And that’s just interest six short years, I think it’s really easy to say, this isn’t right for us. And that’s fine. But review that because the marketplace reviews.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And I think the way we ask those questions is important, too. I think it’s so easy to to, let’s say that a client base or you know, at every review meeting, I want you to ask a few things. Do you think you need a client portal? Well, of course, the clients probably going to say no, they don’t know what it is. Yeah, what are you talking about? Where he’s saying? Would it be easier if on the fly these things you could just do when you’re on the bus? And you could take something and it would authorize Oh, yeah, actually, that sounds really good. Like whatever the whatever the thing is, you’ve got to ask the right questions. Because, oh, it’s ridiculous. I mean, I feel that way a little bit about the cost of advice, you know, to the consumer now, and we’re very focused on G we need to have that scalable offering or people won’t pay for advice. And I feel like sometimes the questions wrong, I feel like the messaging we’ve got back so far is people won’t pay for the advice, the way it’s delivered now, you know, they might write a couple of $1,000 Check for it being delivered a different way, or it being packaged together a different ways. So, you know, the way we ask those questions is so important. And with tech, of course, we’re just embedded with it. Now, this is something that nobody’s questioning whether we live with technology every minute of every day. So now it’s probably a matter of you don’t have one, you’ve got to have a really good reason not to have a client portal, probably, we’re probably going to get to that point, right?

Nick Eatock
Yeah, yeah, I think I think we’re pretty much there already in my in my VPC, because I don’t see how you can operate. You know, in 2023, I don’t see how you can operate a business without understanding that most of your clients, maybe not all of them, but most of your clients will want some form of digital engagement. When we look at the stats of those of clients using the client portal technology in the UK, we see that a decent percentage just under 40% of it is used outside office hours. Right. Okay, so how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that engage with that interest, that updating of information, that clarification of information, if you don’t have a client portal? And the honest answer is you either work 24/7, and you’re always online? And you know, some some some people are that’s okay. Or you have a client portal? Yeah, one of the two.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. And I think the whole convenience thing for the client, we probably don’t take enough and get well make enough allowance for, I don’t know about you, but I love you know, when I go onto something, any sort of tool that I’m going to have, you know, a website, and I’m trying to dig into something, if I can go onto a chat and just get some clarification while I’m there. You know, it’s such a relief, you know, the whole, you know, if I’ve got to send an email to a generic email address and wonder if they’re going to reply, like, now that works. But it’s a different experience. You know, and so recognizing that people are doing this, like you say, in their own time, it could be 2am, because they’re finally got a moment to themselves, and they’re going through all their financial stuff. And they think or something, oh, I forgot to ask Peter this, or whatever it is. We need to, you know, really think about that more carefully. I think, you know, and I think the other thing I’d scan, you mentioned scale, you know, and, I mean, it’s an interesting environment now where, particularly, maybe new entrants to the advice market in terms of advisors or practices. They probably, you know, some of them resist, you know, growth for growth’s sake. They’re, they’re sort of building a lifestyle, business. And so often when they see things that are about scale, they think it doesn’t apply to them. And, and the thing is, you can build some processes and some efficiency and some workflows, like you say, into your practice, and you might be able to have your whole team only work four days a week, like you could become an employer of choice because you shut down Fridays every week, you know, so it doesn’t have to be You go from one to 20 advisors, right? It’s about the way you use that time.

Nick Eatock
That’s a really good point, Peter. And it also talks to understanding that you’re not just choosing your technology, you’re not just choosing it for the advisors, and you’re not just choosing it for your clients, you’re also choosing it for your staff and your colleagues, you know, they want to have technology that actually frees them up, does away with some of the things that are challenging or boring or dull to do and means that they can provide a value and, and if you choose to use that, to scale your business, that’s fine. That’s great if you want to if you want to grow, but you don’t have to, you can choose to do that to free up time in in, in other ways.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. Is there in terms of then you know, what’s coming down the track what you guys have in the pipeline, what’s what’s on the radar, or what’s, you know, soon to be released into the future for inteliphone.

Nick Eatock
Quite a bit of stuff I mentioned, the the open banking stuff that we’re that we bring into the client portal, personal balance portal, in just in a few months here in Australia, we’re also going to be bringing in some capability around joining up the financial modeling capability with that client portal capability. So actually, you can share financial modeling scenarios, directly with the client in an interactive format that they can continue to live and breathe through, or, incidentally, vice versa. So the client can start with it. And I think that’s a really interesting dynamic. So that’s going to be that’s going to be something we’re bringing to bring into the marketplace this year. And a host of other things. There’s there’s, we innovation is really important to us. And actually, if you’ve got a soft, if you’ve got a Software as a Service backbone, you have to innovate, because you’ve got all the ingredients to allow innovation to happen. You’ve got all the code in one place everywhere on the same version, it means you can evolve and innovate. If you don’t, it’s really difficult because you’ve got software in different branches, different versions, people who haven’t upgraded people who have upgraded, how do you support all of that? That’s, you know, that’s really, really challenging?

Peita Diamantidis
And for you in terms of I mean, because you’ve been there from the beginning, of course, then, is there anything a little further down the track? That’s the all, I’ll be excited when we get to this point, like, is there any of that, that you’re sort of looking ahead, and, and, you know, hoping wishing, pushing the team, ultimately, to get to down the line,

Nick Eatock
I always, I always want the next new thing is from a rich, it’s probably a floor and by my makeup? I don’t know, we need a support group. I think people like yes, absolutely. You always want to continue to innovate and continue. And actually, there is an important point there, I think, you know, a well grounded software vendor, and we think we’re one as she does recognize that. And she, yes, it there’s lots of stuff that’s important about the shiny new thing. But you’ve also got to make sure that customers use the technology that’s there today, and not just build the new things. And that means you want to continually enhance in all the small things as well, right? And you only get that by listening to customers who might say, I like this capability. But I have to do five clicks, is there a way I could do two clicks and said, and that doesn’t sound like very much. But if I’m doing that 1000 times a day, that’s really impactful for me. And you need to listen to your customers to understand that stuff. Sometimes that’s actually quite trivial to build. And so you know, it’s a win win for absolutely everyone. And that’s. So it’s not just the big, shiny new things. Sometimes it’s even the small stuff as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Look in the multiple click things is I’m obsessed with that. Because you’re right, it’s the multiple things you do multiple, multiple times a day, but also, it’s a training issue, then because I’ve got to know how to get through the click throughs. You know, and it’s one of the biggest issues with the product provider sites is you’ve got to know where that thing leaves. So I completely agree with you on that front. Is there. I’m curious about your view, too. You know, I’m a big fan of where data or the way we represent, it could go. The industry is notoriously bad at getting to the point of infographics or real imagery to capture, we sort of, we can’t let go of a graph. You know, it’s very hard for us to do anything aside from some sort of golem based or duck based graph. Do you see that changing over time where we can get a bit cleverer, a bit more artistic about the way we are representing some of this data? So it’s, it’s a bit more beautiful, maybe than it is now?

Nick Eatock
Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m glad you asked me that, Peter. Because there’s one thing I did forget forget to mention about stuff that’s coming coming coming this year, is capability we call business intelligence. And essentially one of the things we did last year was we migrated all of our systems globally onto a single AWS infrastructure. So everything is in Amazon AWS, which is kind of you know, if you’re a small vendor today, just starting up, that’s where you go anyway. Yeah, but for us long established vendors, it’s actually quite a job to migrate all of that and move across that we have 80 million lines code that we had to rewrite to do it. So it wasn’t a small, there wasn’t a small job at all. Yeah, one of the benefits of being been there, aside from scale, and performance and all that kind of stuff, is that it gives us access to capability that we never had access to before. Right. So we’ve been working with Amazon as a sort of a prestigious partner of theirs on a global basis to bring their Amazon QuickSight capability, which is business intelligence, with the infographic capability along to all of our data to all of our users as just a core part of the solution. So he’s going to visualize the data in a way that you’ve never seen before, what I don’t think the advice sector has seen before, either here or in the UK and said this, you know, this is, this is groundbreaking for the UK, as well. So we’re really excited to do that. One of the bits we’re doing as part of that is ensuring that the data itself and I don’t just mean select bits of our data, but all the data can be shared in the snowflake account for firms as well. So they can integrate it with whatever other data they’ve got, just by signing signing up to that. So it creates a real democracy over the data, like to think that most people will use just the the, the standard sort of dashboards and infamous insights, infographics that will have within the solution. And I think for many firms that will be that will be brilliant, and the game changing enough for them. So there’ll be some firms and particularly at the larger end of town, who say yes, you know, we want actually want the data itself. And so we can we can empower both of those with that same best in class technology.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And look at isn’t it’s it’s a mindset shift. That is, it’s difficult for lots of people to understand, because they don’t know the difference. So So you know, there’s raw data, there’s representation of data, ie graph or similar thing, and then there’s something that’s pure insight, right? So it’s literally giving you the answer that you need to conclude. And what we do generally sits very firmly in the middle of where you need to interpret the data and the graph to get the insights. Right. And I think that’s the shift that I’m going to be excited about is when it’s easier when you don’t need to translate every graph, you know, you don’t. And I mean, you just got to go to a fund manager session and, and watch some of those, when they’ve got it, it takes them 10 minutes to talk you through the graph. And I’m like, this is this is the difference. This is not what we should be providing, you know, then we do that as advisors to you. No, no, no, where’s the infographic that just gives the insight?

Nick Eatock
Exactly, you, you want the infographic to be understandable in itself, you want it to be interactive. So you can drill down into a point and get more information as you drill down. So that’s about interactivity. And it shouldn’t just be a static graph, it should be something you can actually actually power down into. And then the third thing, and again, we’re doing this with the Amazon QuickSight stuff, is having a layer of machine learning on top of it, which rephrase what it does, actually, the technology looks for patterns, and displays them to you in English. In just words, this is what we’ve noticed from this data. That’s, that’s incredible. Because not everyone actually. And you know, not everyone looks at graphs in a load and charts in the same way. You know, we all spoke slightly different things. And some people actually don’t react well to that some people would prefer a sentence

Peita Diamantidis
to destroy it. Correct. And in fact, I would argue most don’t react well, because they’ve got scarring that has to do with school maths. And, like all of these, like most of them aren’t nerds like me, you know, like that, that actually woohoo, a graph, you know, but that’s not how most people react. So I think you know, adjusting for that is exciting. And I was learned this lesson, taught this lesson, sorry, by actually, it was a graphic designer who pointed out to me that the only data or graphical representation of data that’s ever gone viral, are those, you know, Time magazine, or what, you know, there’s infographics that are capturing something over time, interactive, blobs, they blobs, they’re not charts in the tropical sense. They’re blobs, and size and color, and they’re interactive, and they like and you can instantly get the point. Like, you don’t need to be a rocket science to get it. I’m like, oh, okay, now I’m seeing the difference. You know, that’s a level of understanding that’s quite different to communicate. So and fingers crossed yet. We will keep our fingers crossed, we can get to that sooner rather than later. Is there? Well, there is something I can think we’ve missed, actually, before I say, is there anything we’ve missed? You’ve got the community. So that’s the community of users. I’m presuming that can all interact, talk me through what’s involved in that and what value that can deliver for our practice?

Nick Eatock
Yeah, it’s a capability that essentially captures a lot of information. So standard stuff like trading materials, we talked about training materials, help guys all have that kind of kind of capability. But it’s also a community where users can come together to answer commonly held questions that they might each have, right so this is been running in the UK for for years now. And it’s fantastic. Because you get the engagement of advisors helping each other out. And we’re there to write. So we’re there to help. But it’s actually really nice often for, for an advisor from Firm A to hear from other firms about how they’ve done something, you know how they are, they’ve achieved a particular a particular outcome. And so that’s, we really like that it’s a fantastic way forward, we’re going to continue to power and improve what we do within that. And see that very much as kind of like the first step to allowing advisors to help themselves, but also to gain access to other advisors. If your firm wants to enable you to do that, you know, some, some firms, particularly large firms sometimes turn off that capability. And that’s fine. But it’s up to you, you know, if you want to have that, if you want to have that, that access to information, then you can do.

Peita Diamantidis
And look, the truth is that there isn’t a developer out there who will manage to shortcut or five steps in a system that didn’t get anywhere near as quick as a user will. And particularly, I think, admin users, like always hand something to the admin team. And within seconds, they’ve worked out ways to shortcut that, essentially break it to but also, you know, like, those shortcuts, and so being able to share those, you know, collectively and I guess, do you guys do that by region? Or can it be sort of, you know, so could we be talking to advisors in the UK about how they use it?

Nick Eatock
It’s regional specific at the moment. So you know, so there’s, there’s, you’re either in Australia, and you’re soaking with just Australian people, or you’re, or you’re in the UK, and you’re just talking with UK users. And some of that is because the regional differences of the localization mean, that actually some things aren’t aren’t appropriate from from one capability to another. So we think that’s the right approach. That may change over time. We appeaser, you know, as I use our user base grows in all three territories, we might see that there’s some really healthy crossover areas. So the capability, the technology that we that we used to power that is capable of sharing that we just decided not to, because we think that’s the right approach at this point in time.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, of course. And I guess, you know, it probably depends on elements of the system, some beats you right? It just wouldn’t be relevant. Whereas others are just, you know, probably similar. situation. So yeah, I can see that making sense. Anything else we’ve skipped over or missed? Can you think,

Nick Eatock
Oh, we’ve covered quite a lot, I think, fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed it,

Peita Diamantidis
we have well, then it feels like it’s a bit of long as a piece of string too. So I think that at some point, there’s been a lot of focus and interest in client portals. So at some point, we may even even have a church’s going a bit deeper on the portal itself. into the future, I think I’ll get asked a lot about each of the portals. So we can consider that folks down the track. But all right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more about intelliflo, then the website link is in the episode show notes, along with next LinkedIn details now that Nick will need to point you in the right direction of the local people to handle that. So perhaps, you know, if you’d like to give him a big high five for the for the episode, feel free, but perhaps use the website to connect with the Australian team. As the CEO, I’d imagine he doesn’t necessarily handle that sells queries that much. But thank you so much for joining us. And I guess for bringing a large scale competitor to the Australian market. You know, I love anybody that can keep the other other heavyweights on their toes. That’s a good thing for everybody. So, so thank you for bringing that out here and giving us more options.

Nick Eatock
Good stuff, pitch. No, thank you. And you know, people absolutely can reach out to me on LinkedIn. But we also do have we have a fantastic team here in Australia, who are all great people passionate about what we do, here to help.

Peita Diamantidis
Lovely, thank you so much for your time. So I you are a current user of intelliflo. I know they haven’t been around the OSI market for a super long time, but they certainly are practices that are successfully using it out there. Maybe you’ve already embarked on a transition from another tool to intelli flow. Do you agree with what we covered? Do you have some other insights? Please share your any lessons you’ve learned or any experiences you’ve had on the ensemble platform, as we’d all love to hear your take? Certainly any tips, tricks, you know, insights, pitfalls to be wary of any of those things for any of these tech tools we should absolutely share on the community. Now, as for my thoughts, look as more of the bigger tech players and by big I mean tools that cover a lot of the advice elements, right? So the sort of bigger gorilla systems. As more of those bigger ones have open architecture at their core, then the flexibility available to our practices is going to improve by leaps and bounds or this is just going to accelerate the rate at which we can implement different things and really calm pull them together in our own tech stack. So what this is saying is, this will mean we can combine more tools together than we ever have been able to ever have been able to before. Now, this is great, right. But it also means that there will be loads of different combinations businesses will come up with. And you know, this can leave for for, you know, those of you out there who are still in the early stages of building its tech stack, then it can result in overwhelm, right? Because you’re looking around and everybody’s got different combinations. And it all seems very complicated. So you know, what should you do? And how should you build it for your practice. And when you reach this sort of state of confusion, it’s natural. First of all, you know, welcome to the State we’re holding. But you know, whenever I see people, right sort of reading, reaching that stage of confusion, I always encourage them to get the team together and really step back from the nitty gritty and brainstorm the main challenges the team are facing. And this is across all the roles. This is not just from an advisors perspective, this is across the whole team, let everyone sort of vote on the priority or the impact of every idea everybody comes up with what are all the things that we’re facing, we put them all up on the wall, everybody votes, and you ideally want to identify the top, say, three, that are these big things that we could, if we improved it, it really make a difference across the team and across the business. And only then consider how tech may be a part of the solution for those three big challenges. You know, generally, this is when the next best tech choice becomes clear. Yes, so. So don’t start with the tech, start with the challenge, start with something that you’re trying to solve, and then find the solution. Secondly, as you will have noticed, with that discussion with Nick, we should all be demanding a lot more of our tech providers. And what I mean by that is in terms of our onboarding experience, and how we get to know the tool, be sure they can answer where the best place to start might be for your practice, you know, what should we do first? What should we do? Second, what should we leave too much later? Yeah. What are the pitfalls to avoid? Right? Where are the areas that most firms can get the most initial value? Now, of course, we’re all different, right? And, and that makes sense. But they have, they should have seen lots of businesses use their tool, right. And they should have been watching how they went with that. And hence, can come up with some really wonderful insights for you, you know, don’t make the same mistake, as all the other practice, make your own mistakes, right, so. So I would be wary of any tool, particularly the bigger ones that doesn’t want to engage in the onboarding process that doesn’t want to provide you with those insights, or merely doesn’t have them write, they should be trying to make this as easy as possible, it shouldn’t feel too big, it should feel like you’ve got a trusted guide with you, that can step you through how you’re going to implement this in the practice, particularly for the Big Core systems. So just keep that in mind. Let’s demand more of them, and ensure that they really are using all that insight they’ll have from their perspective of implementations of their tool. Now, as you know, there is only one skill, we need to become bionic advisors. And that’s every curiosity and to help you with that habit. Today’s curiosity corner app that caught my eye is called circle. Now you can find it at circle dot S O. And their tagline is creating a thriving community you can be proud of. So this is an online community platform. In a very simple sense. Think your own Facebook, right? So Facebook has a community platform where we all get together to integrate, sorry to interact on the ensemble platform, that’s a community platform, right? And circle is another one of these now, if you’re not sure, you know whether Peter is that something I would ever need? Well, this can be people use this sort of thing. I mean, across all sorts of industries. So these examples I’m using across all sorts of industries. And they can be customer community. So it could be a way that your customers can interact with with each other, right? So if you’re the niche advisor for people that do marathons, you could get all your your customers together and let them have their own community, right. It might be that you’ve got a course that you take clients through and so this is a community can step them through the course as they progress. Maybe you’ve got a membership program that they’re a part of. This can help you run the membership program, maybe providing a combination of broader content, but one on one coaching this can help you manage that. So it’s a tool really, that sort of brought together a whole lot of things that people had to have separate tools for. And it’s now in the one place. So, you know, it’s sort of it looks a lot like Facebook in that sense. So when you log in these groups down the left hand side, there’s content you can go in and out of, and then there’s your feed. Based on where you are and what you’ve registered for or follow. You can have a member directory, you could have content delivered all of those basics, you can then live stream into circle, so that you can be offering content ongoing, that’s then of course, recorded and saved within there that somebody can go back and look at. You can have live events. You can have digests, you know, so you newsletter, and that’s within could be distributed via circle. And it can have of course, it’s got a paywall, so it’s got paid memberships, it can have section of the community that requires payment, whereas others can be free. You can have upsells, from one to the other free trials, coupons, discounts, recurring subscriptions, all and sundry. So, and there’s 1000s of integrations. So I mentioned this before, because while a lot of people may not be doing I don’t know, cash flow programs, or things like that, you might use drip fed content or something that steps them through an experience with some learnings, you might be trying to do that. And this is a place that can live. And so it has a lot of support. There’s a huge community behind it, of course, so you know, it’s a community tool, of course, they’re gonna have a great community. And they have lots of examples of communities out there that you can learn from, it’s very intuitive, the tool you know, encourages gifts and emojis all sorts of things that make it feel really engaging. And it’s super quick and easy to get started. So if that I bring it up merely because it’s something that may make something unique experience for you for your clients. It is not ludicrously expensive for what it is at all. And it may just solve that little problem that you were trying to work out yourself. I’d love to hear if you do utilize it. If you check it out and you think it’s interesting, then I have actually run a program on this
I’d be happy to give you some feedback, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. Welp, that’s all we’ve got for this week, folks, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fixed automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker to help your audience debate the business case for client portals, including a step by step process to work out if you need one and how to implement it in the practice. Then I can either provide perhaps an initial web webinar on the topic, or even a full blown in person masterclass. It just depends on what your group of advisors will be best served by. We’ll also be covering this in our niche down and scale up masterclass next week, along with helping you work out exactly who you want to serve in 2023. If any of that is of interest, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn. That’s LinkedIn forward slash Peita M D PEITA M D. But as for the niche demonstrator that must class or get in fast as there’s actually a prep session early next week for those taking part. And you wouldn’t want to want to miss out on that. Otherwise, I look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.