I have been working in wealth management since the early 2000s mainly running large IT implementation programmes. More recently I have been a CTO for a platform and a consultant helping clients with their acquisitions/integrations and improving their operational efficiency. Small to medium-sized IFA practices are pretty inefficient and typically support between 50 and 150 clients per adviser with the average number around 110. Whenever I meet IFAs I always ask two questions:
Could you support more clients?
If so what would it take?
The rest of this post outlines how client meeting efficiency can be dramatically improved by adopting meeting recording solutions combined with post-meeting editing so that what may seem an impossible ask — running three client meetings a day — becomes easy.
So imagine you are running a small practice with no CRM system. Your client book is very sticky and you seldom lose clients and most of your meetings are general updates with very few new investments. So there are several decisions to be made upfront:
Whether they are face-to-face or virtual?
The meeting rhythms in your practice – spread out or clustered.
I have been with my IFA for almost 20 years and I will typically meet him and his team once a year for a drink and a catch-up but I prefer that our regular review meetings are virtual. I find them far more convenient and time efficient and I guess that the majority of clients fall into this category. This makes the target of 3 meetings a day much less daunting.
The other consideration is meeting rhythms. The IT community that has adopted Agile working practices runs on meeting rhythms that are daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and at fixed intervals (between 8-10 weeks) aligned to major release cycles. The objective here is to set time aside when the team focus is meetings leaving the rest of the time free for uninterrupted activities that require focused delivery-oriented teamwork. So I am a big fan of clustering meetings into specific days where the entire team can focus on running meetings that are efficient and engaging for clients.
Now let's talk about applications that support effective client meetings that don't break the bank and are super easy to use. After a very brief search, I decided to try out Otter.ai because it looked easy to use with high transcription accuracy, and with a free version that allowed up to 300 minutes of transcription a month. This is one of many note-taking and transcription tools that record meetings and use artificial intelligence to transcribe spoken words into written text. What I liked about it was:
The diary integration with Outlook and Google making meeting invites a doddle.
How easy it was to get started and give it a go. I tried it out with YouTube videos and was impressed with the transcription accuracy.
The editing ability to add comments, create action items, allocate them to a specific person, and diarise due dates for completion (a very rudimentary but effective workflow).
Finally real-time transcription offers the ability to complete post-meeting notes, create action items, and forward them to your team and clients within say 15 minutes of the meeting concluding. This feature requires a bit of discipline but does mean that each meeting can be completed one-and-done without the drag of completing post-meeting summaries – it's all done within the ecosystem of the tool.
This isn't meant to be an advert for Otter.ai – I am sure many tools are equally as effective – but rather to demonstrate how easy it is to use modern tools to dramatically improve meeting efficiency and as a by-product, provide an in-built audit trail for compliance purposes.
Finally, I would like to thank Ashton from Ifamax Technology Limited who was the motivation for this post. We spent a lunchtime just before Christmas discussing what it would take for an adviser to handle 200 clients, without creating loads of extra work or hiring additional staff. His first response was to improve client meeting efficiency using AI-assisted transcription. Using AI transcription services means that a meeting can be completed with no subsequent effort in writing up notes or creating action items. This can all be accomplished with a bit of discipline within say 15 minutes of the meeting ending.
I will cover other disciplines, tools, and techniques in subsequent posts that are complementary. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on barriers that limit client numbers per adviser. Thanks for reading.