Digital wealth manager Moneyfarm has introduced a service to help financial advisers serve smaller clients so they can focus on higher value and more complex clients, while trying to drive down the advice gap.
The Moneyfarm digital wealth management service provides less affluent clients with low-cost advice and portfolio management.
This means advisers are then able to take on these new clients with lower costs and risks but can also nurture their existing relationships with higher value clients.
Research by SimplyBiz has shown it can be uneconomical for an adviser to take on a client with less than £114,000 in investable assets.
This means firms may be missing out on a generation of clients because they typically have smaller pots.
Moneyfarm's service acts as a discretionary fund manager but goes slightly further.
The service delivers the end-to-end service for the adviser: including onboarding, investor profiling and mapping to suitable portfolios - these can be Moneyfarm’s own or a third party's if preferred.
This is the automated advice element, they also have a team of investment consultants at the end of the phone to answer any queries.
The adviser refers the client to Moneyfarm which takes over until the point the adviser may want to re-engage.
The adviser can decide when to do this via a dashboard which shows the clients details or they can be alerted by email once the client has reached a particular asset under management threshold.
Daniel Giddings, head of business development UK at Moneyfarm, said: “The UK is facing an advice crisis and long-term detriment to those with smaller investable assets, more often than not the next generation of clients for an adviser.
“By enhancing their proposition, with the use of our digital solution, advisers, banks and building societies can still participate in the commercials and continue to serve those with smaller pots, but without losing control.
“The Moneyfarm solution provides a dashboard so that the adviser or other financial firm always has complete oversight, but our team is providing the service. At any point the adviser can switch the client back into their full advice service and have all the CRM information at their fingertips.”
amy.austin@ft.com
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