The advantage for newcomers in any market is that they do not have to service legacy customers or meet niche needs. My Monzo account does not do a fraction of the things my traditional bank account does, so I still use that one for a lot of the heavy lifting. Day to day, though? I hardly use it.
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The threat is similar in the advice world. The incumbents are better equipped to deal with the messiness of real people’s lives. They have the data feeds for complex processes, and they have their client bases in place, with no need to lure people to whizzy new platforms.
But the risk is that the juicy bits of the operation get creamed off. If a client receives a big bonus, for example, do they go to their adviser with that? These days it is not difficult to go online and invest £100,000.
Advice businesses cannot compete on investment, so they need to lead with financial planning, which is a much more challenging piece of the pie for tech-driven newcomers to steal. That means building great relationships – and great design has an important role to play.
Thinking about how clients feel and using every touchpoint to make them feel good about you and the service you are providing is a powerful way to cement and elevate the client relationship.
In a hybrid world, where most advisers are dealing with clients both face-to-face and through online interactions and tools, that is about people skills, of course, but it is also about design that goes beyond the merely functional to connect on an emotional level.
Good design is still too often an afterthought. People build something and then think about how to make it look pretty. But the exhibition we saw in Lisbon – and the success of beautifully designed apps across industries – is a reminder of what can be achieved when you put design at the core.
Ben Goss is chief executive of Dynamic Planner
