AdviceTech Podcast #6 – Iress – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the X Y advice tech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis and joining me here today to deep dive into the Iress suite of tools is a hackathon judge and an Adelaide Crows fan. Thank you so much for joining me on the show Matt Mensforth. Welcome, welcome. Welcome.

Matthew Mensforth
Thanks, Peita. Thanks for the opportunity to chat today.

Peita Diamantidis
Not at all. And I’m really keen to ask all sorts of questions about hours. I mean, we could probably be here for hours and hours and hours. There’s so much there isn’t here. Yeah, before we dive in, let’s just get to know you a little bit as a user of technology. What is your most used emoji? Do you use emojis?

Matthew Mensforth
I do. And the most my most used emoji is a pretty boring one. It’s thumbs up. But it’s just so versatile. I use it all the time. I use it in messages in Slack for work. I use it in WhatsApp everywhere. It’s my my go to that means it means yes, it means good. It’s just an all round, versatile emoji. And I use it all the time. I’m sure people are sick of saying there’s a standard response to many things.

Peita Diamantidis
It’s awesome. And I love that it’s sort of particularly Australian, my like it’s got a it’s got a bit of Ozzy thing to do, which I love. Yeah. Now in terms of our smartphones, we all live with them all the time. If you had to wipe everything off your smartphone and just keep three apps, what would be the three, you’d keep

Matthew Mensforth
the three I would keep? I think first of all, I’d say photos, just for all the memories are just great. It’s great having all of them available in your phone all the time. So I definitely keep those for something more boring banking apps, or finance type apps. It’s the if you think back to how we used to interact with with bank accounts and banking 1520 years ago, it’s so different. It’s so, so much easier, so much in efficiencies, it’s easy to keep keep track of things. So I’d say those. And then I think fine. My is another important one to me. With a 12 year old daughter and a 15 year old son it’s it’s reassuring to know that I could I can check where they are. I hated it when I was young. But it’s really it’s I like having those. And then just a fire account because that’s for but yeah, keeping a browser, you get access to so many things on your phone down to crosswords

Peita Diamantidis
and word those questions. Exactly. And all those questions you have in a moment you’d love to know the answer to you. No, we don’t have to wander anywhere. We can just find out instantly. Yeah, which I love. Awesome. Okay. Well, let’s dive into all things iris and x plan, shall we? So basically, I sort of approached these discussions as me as an advisor and owning my own practice, like hey, I want to know more. Which is a bit selfish, I guess. But it’s fabulous. They’re letting me host this pod so I can do my own advice tip digging. I’d be truly stunned if the listeners haven’t heard of iris and explain. They’d have to be living under a rock to be quite to be quite frank, particularly. You’re a dominant player here in Australia and I know all over the world. You guys have you play hard in the advice tech sort of space but in the interest of completeness, you know in the off chance And somebody doesn’t know, what is the category that you know, x plan in particular, I guess but you know, Ira sort of plays in, in the advice tech world.

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah. So I mean, we build sort of a, quite a broad range of technology that connects and powers different parts of the financial services industry across advice, trading and market data, superannuation, and even even mortgages in some markets. So we look at x plan x plan first, it’s one of our core offerings. And as you said, many listeners will be familiar with explaining what we do, we’ve got over 100,000 users globally. An X plan is our sort of our comprehensive financial planning and wealth management software for advice businesses of any size really. So from the smallest one, one person business right through to some of the really large enterprise clients with several 1000, several 1000 users. So yeah, it’s centered around a purchase a purpose built financial advice, CRM, and then we’ve got supporting modules that link to that that help you in delivering advice with modules, like x tours, wealth solver and risk research, they help you sort of come up with your strategy and product recommendations, Investment Management Administration with our portfolio module that’s sort of supported and powered by Iris net data feeds that cover a broad part of the industry sort of, for platform and insurance, data feeds. Revenue Management with the company module, we’ve got client portals, there’s integration capabilities and data insights module. So a full range of modules and their that support most things you need to do in an advice business. And then if we look sort of really briefly at some of the the near adjacent areas of what we do, then some of the things that people might not be as aware of things as the managed funds administration business where we’re the largest outsource provider of unit registry services, we administer over 700 billion in funds on the on the registry now here it used a little bit. Yeah, and in the superannuation space, we’ve been that’s that sort of a few more years in that area there but sort of provide software and services as well to more than 50 funds here in Australia. There’s over 380 billions of dollars of funds under management on the system there. And over 4 million member accounts. So those areas, so that managed funds administration, the super space where we’re seeing sort of started to see more overlap. And there’s there’s more interest for common common solutions, I guess, between that, and I see in the in the x plan world.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And I guess that was going to be one of my questions actually focusing on the global users. But let’s go to you know, let’s focus on that there. I’m I’m betting that there is lessons from one you apply to the other, you know, something that you get asked for in advice or verse vice versa, in managed funds world and you think Wait a minute, we could we could enhance, explain somehow by the lessons we’re learning over there. So is there sort of that cross pollination of ideas or feedback? Yeah,

Matthew Mensforth
yeah, there is definitely and sort of you mentioned there, what we see globally, so there’s there’s definitely great ideas that come out of different regions, we look at things like case manager index plan, which is used globally now is sort of that simple way of sort of keeping and collating electronic artifacts related to a piece of advice using Yep, using the case concept, that that came out of South Africa a number of years ago, and has gradually evolved and grown is now used globally. So we do see that we see different ideas coming out of different regions. And you’re right in terms of what we see here from managed funds, administration, and also superannuation. So looking at what advice businesses in those in those segments do and how that applies and is relevant for other parts of the business. Even some recent projects we were looking at, you know, in the managed fund space, looking at digital account opening and onboarding for clients, so we invest directly into manage funds, we’re sort of looking at those capabilities. And what we need to do, in terms of whether it’s account opening through to a platform or through to another product or a superfund, there’s obviously, it’s a pretty similar set of information, you need to capture a pretty similar experience and integrations you need there to be able to open an account, whatever that might be. So we’re definitely seeing more and more reuse and the ability to build things once and leverage those capabilities across different different segments.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, certainly, now that you mentioned it with the accounting, certainly, we used to hold a mortgage license. And so interestingly, in the mortgage broking world, they got a lot further down the path of sort of one way to enter data to say apply to multiple different banks. And you know, like the integral integration between us and the product providers, they, to be honest, it felt further ahead in the sense that there was sort of a funnel you could go through it wasn’t you doing it individually with each and you didn’t have to do them manually, you know, and so, I’ve always wondered when we were going to get to that point where, you know, it could be easier to count opening or interaction because for me right now, in fact, part of the most manual part of what we Do is the follow up interaction and submission to product providers? It’s

Matthew Mensforth
yeah, I’d work yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think we will probably even slightly further ahead in the advice industry than they were and marketers go back 20 years. But we haven’t kept up and haven’t kept improving on those I still feels like what we’re doing now is not that far different, what we’re doing 20 years ago, even though there have been, there have been integrations, there have been capabilities to them to open accounts and things. But I think there’s, there’s a lot more interest in that at the moment. So we’re doing a lot of work speaking to lots of people and building some some new solutions in that space that will, will help with things like account tightening, whether it’s direct to consumer in terms of being able to go all the way through from public website through a piece of advice themselves and actually open an account or whether it’s with an advisor involved and and facilitating, facilitating that that process. And even some recent conversations, again, sort of popping up in the in the insurance base and looking at how we could, what opportunities there are there to streamline have come together to make those processes more efficient.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And I guess, in terms of the volume of data that has to get handed over the insurance is much higher, and more similar to mortgages, I guess where you’d like, yeah, that goes into the application. So you know, that would make a massive difference.

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, it is. And then lots of lots of specific questions. That’s what I think is the sort of where that tends to run into issues over the years, the need for those specific questions for for underwriting.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. And I feel like like, as you’ve been running through all the elements, I feel like maybe I should have asked, What are the things you guys don’t do? Like, is there a fire stick that you’ve intentionally stayed for?

Matthew Mensforth
focused on? No, but I’ve actually been using that example recently. And as we’ve been sort of talking a bit more about the this sort of account opening end of the process where I think we do really well sort of end to end. So right from initial onboarding of a client could be from a former public website, right through data capture, initial exploration tools, via your client via client portal, everything the adviser and advice business needs in terms of capturing data and coming up with your strategy and product recommendations, getting them into a document, presenting that to the client, making that available to the client and coming up with your portfolio recommendations feeding into that as well. So I think we do really well, up to that point. And you get to the point where the client says, Yes, I want to go ahead. And then it feels like it’s it’s it’s often a sort of switch off to other systems don’t pay for too much these days. But I think that’s the piece where there’s bigger opportunity now. And we’re seeing that, that more of the the product issuers on the on the other side, they’re more willing have better systems better API’s now than they did in years gone by so those integration fraud projects feel much more achievable now than they have had in the past. And it’s not just necessarily at initial account, I think, but what if you wanted to update a detail about a client or change a product or a switch or something like that? Could you sort of actually push those through from from our systems through to product systems as well?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and the I mean, the, what I would call simple interfaces with a product, I mean, updating some basic details, or even a switch, you know, when something’s in place, they are relatively simple, but for many of the platform’s there, I guess, maybe encumbered by a combination of their systems and the old way they’ve done it, maybe old forms, and all sorts of things, it can be so clunky, so surely, for them, there’s some benefit there, too, you know, where if we can just get this a bit smoother, it’s going to make a difference, I think I was lucky enough to go in into town and get to meet with some executives who are talking about the future of a platform. And one of the things I asked them was, please, please, please, when you’re looking at your development plan, from a tech perspective, just seriously, consider whether there’s some jumps you should be making, whether there’s some things that is still on your development path that actually have almost got old, they’ve been on there for so long, we should skip them entirely. You know, like, I mean, they were super still super excited about digital digital signatures. And I’m thinking or I feel like there’s a link they could make, you know, like, like, you’ll still be doing that in two years, maybe we could, we could skip that and go even further, you know, and maybe even more secure than signatures at all, you know. So I’m hoping that there’s more of that, because that’s clearly going to make, you know, feel for you guys, that’s going to make it easier to if they’re all just starting to be a bit more proactive about the way they can interact with tools. Jeez, it’s going to make a difference.

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, we’ll definitely and they’re the sort of conversations we’re having having at the moment that and I think there is sort of the big opportunity there is sort of the approach we’ve been taking a bit in the last couple of years, if you look at sort of what we’ve done around advice, fee consent, and even the work on ddo as well where we’ve tried to sort of build that connectivity. So between in between x plan and the various the various product issuers, whether it’s getting data in like attendees in from product issuers and making them available to to users in our software or whether it’s getting in formation back out and whether it’s reporting something or passing a form through and building that connectivity, so that so that all of these things start to become a bit easier.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then, you know, I mean, in terms of the use uses of the tool, it’s, it’s so broad. So it’s it’s not just the advisors, its support teams, it’s the licensee, you know, practice managers also. So what’s across the board? Do you ever sort of is there ever a point where it becomes a bit of a struggle to manage the conflicting demands of that, you know, so it because it’s trying to be a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people? Is that something that’s, that’s? Or do you leave that to the user in to sort of define how that sort of works that tension?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah. And I guess users will always decide how they’re going to how they’re going to use it. And everyone comes up with their own ways, in some cases, but we do spend a lot of time thinking about different personas. So what are the different types of roles within the various different types of businesses that use our software. And they can be quite different. That could be a phone based advice team, just offering a try to venture fund advice, or it could be a team that a business that’s more focused on investment management and running, managing portfolios. So there are quite a range of different personas, we’ve we’ve got a bunch of them mapped out. So we know the various different types of users and we think about who’s relevant for work in a particular area and thinking about sort of things they try and do so. Yeah, it is it is it is broad, there’s a whole range of different types of users, as you said, there’s this sort of the, the everyday users are in there all the time. And then there’s people that could be at licensees like compliance functions that aren’t in there all the time, but need to get in and access information at different times. So yeah, it is it is broad. But all the teams in different teams think about the different types of users that are sort of most relevant to

Peita Diamantidis
them. Yeah, fair enough. And tweak accordingly. Do you feel that though, perhaps, like, and you would really see this across so many types of practices, that perhaps there’s some under training with different roles, like, like advisors, I’m betting, let’s put advisors and slash power planners in a category where they probably deep dive into something like explain, because they’re in it all the time, right? And so, that always means that you, you learn quickly, even if you maybe build some bad habits with a tool, but still you do learn real it relatively quickly. But do you think there’s potentially, you know, for listeners, that maybe there’s some more training they could do for other members of the team to really take advantage of all that they can get in something like explain?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, definitely, I’ve encouraged people to sort of keep an eye on the community for training that’s available. And you know, if you haven’t done any training for a few years, whether it’s web, you know, webinar type training or looking for upcoming courses, you know, get get involved and have a look at what’s there, the community is a good source of information, as well, lots of release information and videos and how to guides. And in many cases, some of those How to Guides are written based on our interactions with with advisers and paraplanners, who do use the software a lot, but you’re coming up against particularly complex scenarios, you know, multi entity strategies, they’re trying to modeling calm, or whatever it might be, where they’re not sure how to do something, and the team will, will take it back, come up with a case study and put it on the community so people can see and sort of start to open up into different different ways that the system can be used.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think that’s, that’s always the case, with a complex tool, I’d put sort of advanced users of excel in a similar category, were often you know, the inmates running the asylum, because they’re the ones that are trying to stretch the thing and use it for all sorts of different scenarios. You guys simply can’t do that, because you aren’t interacting with the end user as much, you know, and not the volume. So it’s with the clients as much anyway, so. So it’s always going to be your users that are going to be the source of that update, because it’s, it’s where the the really unusual combination of some strange strategy that then needs to get replicated. Yeah, yeah. So I guess, you know, for the listener, you know, it’s so important to give feedback to ask that question to, you know, the team to the Irish team, so that, you know, that community can build, you know, and all of that knowledge can can sort of get layered on top of each other. And we can all sort of get better at using something like, explain, because this is not the sort of tool you need to do in isolation. I don’t think you know, I don’t, it’s, there’s so much to it, I think the more you can reach out to fellow users, I think the better off you’ll be in taking advantage of everything that’s there.

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that’s, and that’s why I’ve got the community there and sort of encourage everyone to get involved there. And people share ideas and answer each other’s questions and, and get involved and share and learn. And we learn a lot from them as well.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect, perfect, we’ll make sure to include details about the community in the show notes, folks so that you can reach out if you aren’t already part of that. Is there no looking across the business that you do deal with and recognizing that the tool is built to try and do as much as it can for lots of different types of practices? Are there any that it works particularly well for or conversely, it just doesn’t work for Jeath? Is there a pattern that you Find on either case.

Matthew Mensforth
No, no, I don’t I don’t think so as you said, it’s it’s pretty, pretty flexible and scalable. So then we have we have businesses across the ground that the full range of sizes literally from one to several 1000 users, and they it scales. They configure it differently, though, they’ll use it differently. But the the range of capabilities there can be adapted to suit different different business, different businesses have different business types, different offering different advice channels, different scale advice, find best advice, complex advice, different different channels, different types of advice and complexity.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and I think, I think ultimately, I mean, the user experience and when I say that, I mean, the client experience has not necessarily been in financial advice generally, has not necessarily been the window we look through, when we look at even our offerings, you know, let alone the tech we use like, it’s always, it hasn’t necessarily been there, because it’s all complicated. And we need all these tools. And so I think over time, I can see, for example, the uncoupling from a licensee templating pushing down to advisors to a more well, what’s the user, you know, the client experience you want? What does that mean? You need a tool, like, explain to do you know, so I think I can see that happening over time? Well, therefore, like you say, it’ll be defined by what they’re offering is like, what the experience is, like, therefore, what is the tool need to do? What are the workflows need to do you know, that sort of thing? Yeah, yeah. As opposed to our sort of a, you know, off the shelf, just start using this, you know, from say, maybe a defined licensee defined sort of version of the system? Are you seeing less of those? The sort of, you know, the Reeboks, licensee versions of the tool?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, probably, probably, slightly. Yes, I guess there’s, at the same time, we were also sort of trying to build a more more standard content as well, standard content and configuration, because, you know, us we don’t want all of our clients to have to have to build everything from scratch. So yeah, I think we’re sort of looking to sort of help help our clients get up and running up and running faster and not spent time on configuration not to be want everything to be standardized, and cookie cutter for everyone. Let you personalize it to the extent you want. And obviously you then control how you the aspects that present out to clients, whether it’s client portal, whether it’s engagement towards your use in meetings, that sort of it’s really important to personalize and sort of fit in with your your business and how you want to present to clients. But we can sort of help in in streamlining a lot of the rest of the behind the scenes. Yeah. Okay.

Peita Diamantidis
Now, you mentioned the client portal there, you know, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s the it’s the New Black, a call. Understandably, even just from it’s just the two things for me about client portals being one channel for the client to us. Phone Email, it’s like there’s just so many if we can actually get to the point where we’re interacting with clients through one primary place, I think that will be so powerful, but also from just a cyber security perspective. I think the the reality of that the client portals to me fit that beautifully. What you know, so I know you guys have one, but I don’t know a great deal about about it. So can you tell us about where it’s at now? And maybe where it’s going from a portal perspective?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, so our client portal, the latest iteration of client portal has been out for a few years. Now. It’s a, it’s a, as you’ve seen, it’s just there to it’s a secure information portal where clients can log in and view their view their portfolios view view, things like a balance sheet and documents and share communications with with their advisor. It’s configurable. So you control which, which of those things are made available to your clients potentially, and potentially are made available at different times at different stages in the, in the client client relationship. So highly secure, great for communications, you’re not sending things via email, it’s obviously always on people can access their info 24/7 and communicate with their advisor when when they when they want to. So it’s really great from a from an engagement perspective, also from a transparency perspective, as well and sort of building trust the client, giving the client access to their information. So they sort of feel like they’re always, you know, to some extent in control and have visibility over over their, their, their financial situation and can start sort of building tracking goals and those sorts of things. Those capabilities, there’s digital signature capability, there’s things like factfinder as well. That’s one area probably sort of, you know, we’d like to see more usage. If you think of quite portal where sort of count probably in the hundreds of 1000s of logins a month, if we think of how much factfinder use it’s in the hundreds, it’s probably many hundreds now a month in terms of ones that will go through a through an onboarding factfinder journey. But we like to see we’d like to see more and more of that and that that has been growing in in recent months.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. So as part of that, the fact that potentially, you know, we’ve we’ve all got our process or the way we do things and advisors potentially have a tool they may even have turned it on, but aren’t necessarily adjusting their whole process to take advantage of it. So it’s a, maybe a nice to have, instead of making it sort of a fundamental core part of the experience, do you think that’s possibly what’s happening with the portals?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, yeah, it probably is, to some extent, and especially with something like, if you’re providing access to clients for information that that’s relatively easy and get them set up, they can log in, and they can log in instead of as a when they want that where you want them to engage in a process a bit more obviously, that requires change in in the process and workflows within your business to build it in and make it an important part of that of that process. There’s a bit a bit more work to do in terms of build it into your process and sort of promoting and getting clients to actually use it. But I think that it’s anything you can get the client to do with the advice process, I think is really useful in terms of building engagement into into advice. And whether you’re getting into do a fact finders as short or long as you want to make that whether you’re getting into explore goals, or access some educational content, whatever they do, when you meet with the client, they’ve they’ve either made the process more efficient, because they’re provided some information, you don’t have to ask them when you’re sitting down together. And and Or they’ve they’re more engaged in the process they’ve come in, they’ve started thinking about the sort of things you’ve asked about, but also potentially started thinking about goals and what might be important to them. So hopefully, they come into the process more more engaged, that have made the whole thing more efficient.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think I mean, we all think about, say something like video being high in art grade, and everybody says it’s a way to connect with the consumer. And it’s one, it’s fabulous, because you know, multiple people, you can send the same video to multiple people. But what I think gets missed is that the brain assimilates, say, a short little video from an advisor that might even be pre positioning the fact find like a little video, hey, this is what this is about, oh, it’d be great. If you could fill this out before we meet. That’s also tight. That’s trust time, because the brain sees that as you sitting in front of them. It can’t tell the difference. So you really banking some time well, before they even get to the Live Meeting. So I agree with you. I there, I think we’re probably not taking advantage of enough of that. But I think there’s some wariness about automation isn’t there? There’s certainly some awareness about making it callous or cold or, you know, my clients want to be personalized. So I guess that’s we’ve got to combat that a little bit. I think our lack of creativity, I think we just need to get a bit more creative, a bit more personal. Show a bit more of our own personality when we do it, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. So that then it does feel like a personal message.

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah. And I don’t think you don’t want to give the client a, here’s a fact find that 20 pages long without any positioning or context about what you’re doing and expect them to go through it. I think that was one of the recent additions. This came out of a design sprint we did a little while ago in terms of looking at how to improve a review version of a Fact Finder, what do you want clients to do coming into a meeting and one of the things that came out of that, that we added was the ability to embed a video on the first page. So your client gets a notification, jumps into the port and has a look and see. And the first thing they see is a video of you explaining why it’s important. They go through these next, these next few steps. So it’s a great example you’ve given there and something that we found as being as being sort of important in positioning.

Peita Diamantidis
And you can it’s because I know I’ve spoken over with like, Yeah, but Peter, then the advisors are seeing the same video, they don’t need to once a year, do a new one in a different location and change the template and just put the new video in it and the client will see a new video, luckily, you’re not getting them to do the fact find 12 times a year. So you know, just shedule this stuff I completely get keeping it fresh. I completely agree with that. But just schedule it, and it’ll all roll out and they’ll go wow, yeah, it’s another video from you. So it’s so it’s clearly that is one of the things that’s sort of being under utilized or, or sort of not fully expanded on. So listeners, I’d really encourage you to sort of check that out in terms of potentially new users. Is there anything you know, a practice might be considering moving across? Is there anything you’d suggest they perhaps do before or that prepares them well, like is anything you see that you go or, like it slows people down in transition or makes it particularly difficult?

Matthew Mensforth
I think with any software, it’s only going to be as useful as the data that you put into it. So whatever your whatever you’re implementing, I think that the it’s important to get your data sorted, get it in shape, get ready for sort of data to be migrated in. And then and there’s there’s tools that will help with that, you know, data feeds will help in terms of populating a lot of data platform and insurance data feeds will help with that. And even beyond that it can take time to get your data sorted but right will it will set you up and and you’ll be ready then that wherever you see value wherever you think you might want to go once you’re up and running, whether it’s you know, working on your workflows or reports or enabling client portal or even something like advice fee consent, but Maybe you want to do you’ll, you’ll be ready. If your if your data is in your client data is in is in good shape, it’s probably probably the first one. The other one I think is sort of have a, have a clear, clear idea on spend some time thinking about what you want software to, to deliver. Instead of in considering what software you’re going you’re going to use, but also then how you’re going to implement it. Don’t jump straight into to a shiny tool without thinking about how it fits into your processes, how it’s going to work with other things that you use, what problems you’re trying to solve with it really, and how it’s going to fit in and be adopted.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with you, I think, you know, particularly tools like this, this is not a you know, one thing where you’re slotting it into maybe even one step of your process, like it’s unusual that that’d be the case I would have fought for x plan. So it’s going to it’s going to hit multiple steps, multiple processes. So you really do need to give some thought to that. And you’re right, some time for that to sort of embed and get the team used to speaking of integrations, I’m betting there’s all sorts of integrations, a simple one that I saw was say with Outlook, does it integrate with Gmail as well with G Suite?

Matthew Mensforth
There is some integration there. There’s more work going on that one that one the moment? Yeah, that’s actually it’s actually being handed by by one of our teams overseas. So I’d have to check on progress on that one. That’s one one of our benefits of a global company of different teams in different places with different specializations that are looking at looking at looking at different areas. Yeah, but sort of looking more broadly in integrations, there are there are hundreds. There’s information in the game on community as well there about the various different integration types that are available. But there are, if you look at it, we’ve got integrations with engagement tools, marketing tools, fact finders and portals, document management, scanning integrations, cash flow, budgeting, PFM type tools, there’s a whole range of different systems where we have integrations that can be enabled by our clients. And then there’s sort of deeper integrations, things like we talked about Iris net for data feeds, there’s trading integrations, dress lookups, and those sort of things that are more baked into into the into the software operations, as opposed to that there are there are literally hundreds of each of these of these integrations. And, and then hundreds more that clients have built themselves for their own specific purposes.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so in terms of then, you know, your current users, and there’s quite a number of those. Is there any features, you know, maybe, you know, the development team have worked super hard on some things that they think are awesome that you just find people are under utilized? And there’s a great opportunity, are there any areas that you feel you sort of point people to to go hey, check that out, because there’s some really great value there?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, it’s a great one to probably call out at the moment is the Visualize functionality. So this is building on X tools, or x tools plus, so yeah, lots of lots of our users would use comm link to do to do their modeling. So detailed cash flow modeling tool, comes been around for a long time. And what we’ve built in recent in recent times has been a visualization tool that sort of sits over the top of that. So it lets you present scenarios and interact them real interact with them real time while sitting with clients. So instead of just getting some charts and tables from calm and merging them into your advice document, you can actually bring it up on screen and present it real time. So some new screens that have some new visuals, access to things like strategy levers, and what if tools, the ability to interact with goals to add more goals vary goals for clients, not on track, to actually actually actually meeting all their goals, do things like run Monte Carlo simulation, and present, present the outputs of that as well. And then and coming out reasonably soon as the ability to compare scenarios as well. So all the things you want to do in presenting the outputs of that modeling and compare scenarios and look at the benefits and the value of advice to your clients and how it helps them achieve their objectives be able to sort of present that and interact real time. With that one, look for the Visualize button open account scenario, look in the top right hand corner of the screen for the Visualize button, give it a click, have a look and see. Look at look at what you can do in there at the moment. And again, keep an eye out in the community for For more information on how to use it and what’s what’s available today. But it also say Keep checking back in the coming months as well. So this is this is an example of probably one of our newer bits of tech that’s built a different way in a way it’s it lets us move more quickly. I think kinds of adding adding features so keep an eye on it. It will grow based on feedback for what people are looking at and what they want to use in quiet meetings.

Peita Diamantidis
And look, I’d say to when you’re doing these visualise sort of exercises, we need to start looking to the world outside of Finance to see how they you know treat data and Are they sort of presented to people because, look, all of us love XY graphs. But lots of consumers have no idea what that is or what it says. So I think over time, as, as we all, you know, get a bit more creative and, and a bit more confident with these things, we can start to actually get really clever with the way we represent some things so that it’s just like the, the impact of the message can be so significant and so quick for a client, then, you know, so give the feedback, send it back to the team to the, to the iris team and say, Hey, I saw this great thing. Could we do something like this in visualize for that particular bit of data? You know, so because they only they kind of think of all those things, right? So keep your eyes peeled. And if you see something great, I mean, some magazines like Time Magazine, in these other places often have these data houses where they’re trying to, you know, use population data and show it to us all differently, start watching that stuff. Now, and let’s see what we can come up with. Because, yeah, that’s where the magic is, I think

Matthew Mensforth
it is. And we’ve got this, there’s an infographic page in there at the moment, which has got some limited infographics, sort of, you know, images supplemented with the values from the projections. But we want to do more in that space, again, to help those clients who don’t glaze over when they see a line chart. How can we present the information in different ways that that’s more engaging to them?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that’s exciting. Now, you mentioned case manager. And that brings up an interesting point, there’s a lot of historical in terms of the way we either store or, or curate the information we have on clients or the process. You know, a lot of people might have a folder, you know, we’re cloud to another folder with the clients information, it didn’t they might have your whole SOA is going here fact finds go and hit like, that’s not an unusual structure. Right. And the challenge with that is it’s very hard to find and find things. I’m betting what the case manager idea is, is that, you know, this is a an activity, it’s a group activity that occurred in this timeframe, say to review or whatever, everything for that sits under that case, is that correct? Am I interpreting that correctly?

Matthew Mensforth
It is yes, percent. So he sort of he can, you can link the workflows to it. So it still can drive the process of the things you need to do. But then everything over the all have the electronic artifacts that are generated as you move through that process. So it could be a diary appointment, or factfinder file note or an external scenario, an email, all of those different, different electronic records can be linked to the case, they all obviously exist still out where they would normally board in terms of dock nodes, and Scenario lists and things. So you can still find the way you normally would. But you can go into one spot. And all of those link records are available there. So you can have that sort of picture of everything that’s happened about a particular case. That’s right, perfect,

Peita Diamantidis
perfect. And I mean, that’s a wonderful for handover, you know, when you got multiple tech people touching something, that sort of grouping is so powerful. So yeah, I love that I was I was unaware of that myself. Is there any other sort of ninja stuff that you’d get people to look out for? Or anything else that you know, they’re not using? Well?

Matthew Mensforth
No, I think the probably the most important is a bit quiet portal and the visualized the visualized item, I’d say take take a look at both of those. The first priorities, and then yeah, keep an eye on community for the next, the next most interesting things that are coming out.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. And so then, you know, let’s look forward, you know, what’s on the radar? What are you guys taking a look at is sort of the next iterations or the next things you might unfold in?

Matthew Mensforth
Yes, yeah, I think so the there’s a, there’s a few, there’s a few big ones. The there’s a big focus moment, sort of working through workflow and task management. So that one, we’ve did a big research piece last year, lots of design work coming out and building out the first the first stages of a rethink of how we deal with sort of task management so that that’s a really important one there. And then moving on starting soon on document management as well. Both of those are some of the highest use areas of the system, yet, they’re used literally millions of times a month. So they lots of users spend lots of time in those screens. And there’s big opportunities to improve, improve user experience and efficiency as we work through those so that they’re sort of a big focus. Beyond that. There’s a few things advice, vi consent, I think that’s probably one where the industry is looking to try and solve, solve it better. With working with the industry working with the FSC and lots of platforms in terms of what a more standardized solution could look like. Both in terms of making it, we can make it a more automated solution, but also simplify implementation as well by not having to deal with lots of different forms and all that that complexity. And we’ll see what comes out of the quality advice review process that might change that going forward. That will be interesting.

Peita Diamantidis
Certainly, is there anything further out anything that you sort of you’re curious about where it could take, you know, advice tech or what, you know, what advisors might be able to do anything that’s on my VR, any of those were things that are further out app that you’re you’re interested in that clearly and on the Millburn path as much as you just keeping an eye on?

Matthew Mensforth
Yeah, we do. We do try and spend time thinking about thinking about those things. You mentioned hackathon earlier. That is a great example where we’re developers, and all of our teams that get involved in hackathon now can think about what they might want to build or play around with. And we always get out of hackathons, we always we always get some, some really good ideas that are really close and things that people need now and then literally end up within the product within weeks after after a hackathon. And then there’s always a few ideas that are a good year or two out and are going to work and that don’t necessarily work on the day. But a great attempts at looking at how you know, whether it’s voice interaction, or or AI and those sort of things where we always learn a lot from those that it might not come into the product as quickly. But it sort of sets us down the path of investigating exploring different things that that might be interesting. Another one is probably the sort of what we’re learning from our cloud migration over the last couple of years. So we’ve moved, we’ve moved almost all of our services to the cloud now. And there’s, there’s huge benefits as delivered already in terms of scalability, security, and even things like automated upgrades. So if you look back, it wasn’t that long ago that we were had lots of different versions of our software in use by different clients and all these manual upgrade processes. Whereas now almost all of our of our clients are on weekly auto upgrades, they’re much faster upgrades, and it means that new features are available and in client’s hands, you know, within a week or two of them being released. So when I said before about cash flow visualized, and saying keep check on it regularly, we know now that if we add in if we add in compare scenarios in a few weeks time, we know that there’ll be the vast majority of users will be able to access that within a week, not what might have been several months in the past. So yeah, there’s all the benefits there, we’ve already we’ve already seen. But there’s also it’s opened up different opportunities. So there’s, there’s different capabilities that are available in some of these cloud services, that mean that we can do things that either we hadn’t thought of, in the past or with thought of but just weren’t physically possible before. So things like Monte Carlo simulation, and yeah, we could have done it before, but it would have been really slow, and users would have been annoyed. So they’re things like that, that we can open up that are now possible. And you know, whether it’s things like that in terms of processing power, whether it’s looking into documents, and being able to search within text within documents, and then ultimately being able to read from those documents and get structured data out of unstructured data, all those sort of things that are starting to become not quite plug and play, but their capabilities, and much, much more available to us to start to incorporate over time.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s exciting. And I think it must also be exciting for your teams. Because I mean, in the old environment, you know, work work, work, work, release, and even feedback would be like six months later, you’d be getting feedback rather than sort of any feedback. So it must be better for your development teams as well. Because, you know, they can instantly get some feedback and start to tweak and adjust. So it must, you know, we all like sort of instant, you know, recognition or response. So it must sort of, you know, rev them up a bit more on imagine on the work they do.

Matthew Mensforth
It does definitely and you’re 100% right about getting the feedback sooner. But you know, it’s just after they’re finished working on something not not not many months later that that is really important. And being able to see that, you know, looking at usage analytics and seeing that people are using things within days of them being released is that’s, that’s really exciting and really exciting for for all of our all of our teams.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Is there anything else that we’ve missed? Anything we haven’t covered? I mean, we didn’t particularly deep dive into the individual sort of tools. But I think that comes down to each of you know, the listener, and what they access, it sounds like the RSA explain community would be a good idea to really sort of spend some time in and, you know, interact and absorb. But is there anything else that we should cover off on? Do you think?

Matthew Mensforth
No, I think as you said, we could spend, we could spend hours going through the detail and talk in detail about you know, individual modules properly, but it’s probably probably too much to go go into today. So yeah, keep an eye on community, ask questions there. And then look for more information.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Look, all right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find out more about iris and x plan, then you know, they will have all sorts of links in the episode shownotes along with Matt’s LinkedIn details, so feel free to you know, ping him for your ideas to maybe not there’s probably a formal way to give feedback. That’s the appropriate way. But thank you so much for joining us, Matt. I’m really looking forward to witnessing where Iris goes. I think you’ve probably been lumbered with a bit of a slow elephant view from the market for a while, which is unfair. It was very big, but I can I mean, everything you’re describing today is so exciting. And you know, the excitement for your team but also for the users to be You know, there’s shifting and changing and so much work going on. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with. I think we’re all gonna have to run to keep up.

Matthew Mensforth
It sounds like yeah, thank you very much for the opportunity to catch up. And and it is definitely exciting times ahead, and lots of new stuff coming out in the coming months.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Thank you so much. So are you a current user of x plan and all the tools, IRAs hands? Do you agree or disagree of our discussion of the suite of apps that are a supplies, look, please share your insights on the XY community platform, as I know, there are people on there who would love to hear your take. And please, please, please, please pretty please share any tips you have with other advisors on using and really taking advantage of x plan and all of those tools. Now, in terms of sort of my thoughts for you, you know, if you are a current user of ex plan, I definitely encourage you to really take the time to understand all the functionality that you have available to you, you know, maybe shedule some time, that’s not when you’re in and out of it for client work, but almost offside almost and do some digging. You know, invariably, we get so focused on the tools we’ve learned and the ones we use a lot, we often then ignore what else is available, you know, refresh your training, just because you’re going to know a whole lot of things that you go through doesn’t mean you won’t learn something that can just elevate the way you’re using the tool, and look, perhaps send, you know, a newer member of the team on some training, or to watch some videos or to take part, you know, and then get them to come back and update the whole group, all the users in your team on what they discovered and what they think you could be maybe changed in the practice of how you use the tool. So definitely do that I absolutely, I’m with Matt here, you know, check out the visualized tool and start to suggest different things of the ways that data can be represented ways you can, you know, utilize the data to present a thought or concept to clients, the more we do that, the better we all are. And secondly, if you’re if you are using a sort of really core and quite thorough, you know, advice tool like x plan, but you just find another tool that does something really narrow and specific, really well. And it really suits either you’re offering or the way you do things that happens, right, we come across something like, oh, that sounds really great. But then when you do some digging, maybe it doesn’t integrate fully with x plan. Now, what often happens is that, we then start to either doubt the quarter we have maybe an X plan or the one we’re looking at. And I’d get you to take a breath in that instance, because when I see something like that we’ve got a core tool, and I see this other thing that does this narrow thing really well, then I always consider whether we can actually take advantage of a different type of API or integration, something I call human API for these situations, which is just my name for humans taking data from one source and enter it into the other now, people think this is clinically clunky. But you know, particularly if this can be done by a support team member or a VA, then this could mean that you can use the tool you’ve got, but then you have access to a great resource. And you aren’t pained by the double data entry, you can check it when you use the tool, but you don’t pain by it, you know, and the thing is, you know, often down the track, the tools will actually be integrated, right? If it’s really popular, then businesses like Rs, they see that you know, and they’re going to start to consider the integrations down the track. But the thing that I always look for is if using human API, and the use case works, then of course, down the track when transfer data is possible in the use case looks even better. So please just don’t discount a tool that you come across this this narrow, specific, wonderful thing. And also, don’t doubt the tool you’re using just because you’ve discovered that other thing, think about how you could use them alongside each other. Consider human API’s as an option and see how you go, we actually made this decision on one particular piece of software. And we found that this niche tool had such a positive impact on our effectiveness, it more than makes up for the little bit of data reentry required. In fact, I’d say by a multiple of 10, it makes up for it. So it was well worth us making things you know a little bit hard with the data entry but the impact aside from that is massive.

Now, if you’ve been following along for the ride on our advice tech pod, you know that one of my missions is to help you build your curiosity muscle, which is a core requirement for advice explorers and bionic advisors alike. Today’s curiosity corner app that caught my eye is called in notion, you can find it@notion.com. This is a tool that sort of connects your team’s projects and project documents. And it sort of has the feel of, I guess, a wiki. It has the organizational capability of a database and sort of the note taking and data archiving ability of a network notepad. In the digging I’ve done, it’s one of those tools that once you understand it, you know, it’s really powerful, it’s super easy to set up. But people do sometimes have a bit of a challenge getting their sort of heads and arms around the thing, you know, it can be a bit hard to grasp initially, you know, this is one of those tools that regular users love. But it can take some time to get your head around. So this is the sort of thing you might have your how tos, you might have all your internal processes, you might have your meeting notes, team meeting notes in. So this is less client facing more internal projects, you know, that sort of thing. So it’s something to consider there’s a lot of alternatives will flag on the pod down the track. But I did want to just mention it. Also, I did want to flag something is a bit of a learning exercise, because this will give us a good learning exercise for new apps that we consider. The company clearly owned notion.com. So that’s the website they tell you to go to. But what’s interesting is when you enter that into your browser, you’re redirected to notion dot S O. Now, what’s interesting about that is dot S O is actually a Somalian extension. Now granted them using DOD, so is merely sort of a vanity top level domain, right? It’s just a, it’s a top level thing. Even so, the fact that it’s an unexpected web address of where you end up for a region that Somalia that our our government currently has a, you know, a no travel warning on it due to armed conflict and high threat of terrorist attack. And kidnapping probably means you should run the app past your resident cyber expert to be on the safe side. So I did some digging right. Now the fact is notion is located in San Francisco. And it looks like all of this data is on Amazon Web Services. So that’s an initial, okay. Yeah, it sounds better. And it turns out when they launched the app, someone else already owned the website, or the web, domain notion.com. But you know, the optics of that.so associate Association could still be problematic. So it’s worth if this is the sort of thing you check with your licensee. And I believe it’s another example of where we simply need to ask more questions of the technology we use in all facets of our daily lives. dig further, notice where we link sends you notice the details of the domain and let’s just start getting, you know, keeping our eyes open for these sorts of things will help Whew, that was a bit of a long one, folks. But that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker at your next event to brief your audience on the seven habits of bionic advisors, and the secrets to tech powered human centric advice, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn forward slash Peita md that’s PEITA, MD. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember, advice explores Stay curious.