Owen joined Openwork as wealth proposition director nine months ago, having previously worked for a large strategic partner of the Quilter network. He is responsible for the products and services Openwork's advisers offer to their clients.
He advocates technology as especially helpful for advisers in the retirement income space, with products such as Voyant and Timeline helping them to plan a person's retirement over time and according to different scenarios.
An efficient business
The way Openwork tailors its retirement advice to the aspirations of individual clients does not mean it is running an inefficient business.
Openwork is keen on integrating technology where possible and uses AI-based system Zenith.one to allow it to connect its central system, planning software, and marketing packages.
"We're at this moment in time where AI machine learning is becoming really useful and available," Owen says. And it saves the firm money, as it effectively replaces administrators.
It then works with providers such as 7IM, which offers a retirement income solution, which allows advisers to use a self-invested personal pension, general investment account and an Isa and treat them as a single portfolio aligned with the client's risk profile.
It includes a bucket approach to retirement, whereby short-term income is kept secure, and funds for long-term income are put in growth products.
The solution also allows a 'secure lifetime income' to be paid into the Sipp via a link up with provider Just, which can be taken as tax-efficient income or reinvested.
Owen describes this as an "annuity which sits on an investment platform", allowing people to build "some certainty" into their plan alongside their other investments.
"Those sorts of tools are really, really useful to advisers and clients," says Owen, "you've got an aggregation of most your financial assets. You've got money market funds for cash accounts, you've got the 7IM investments on there, and then you've also got your Just SLI, which makes things more simple."
But he draws a clear line between product solutions and financial planning.
"This is where you get the conflict between what financial planning is and what products are. Financial planning is the skill set: people's needs, behavioural finance, providing great outcomes. The product set is useful tools to use," says Owen.
For Owen the hardest part of the advice process is the conversation, for everything else there are tools.
He says AI technology has evolved greatly to help advisers with those conversations. He cites products such as open data platform Moneyhub, which allows advisers to see all their clients' expenditure in one place.
