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Planners want more help with technology adoption

Research insights from FPA Professional Practices indicate they have a healthy appetite for technology adoption. The trouble is, they’re not getting the support they need to make the right decisions.

In the last few months, the FPA has launched its new online practice management tool to help FPA Professional Practices benchmark their businesses against other practices.

The FPA READY Index was developed in response to a need by practice principals to help them understand the success drivers of the future. The index benchmarks five key areas that are important drivers of practice readiness – Risk and compliance, Efficiency and technology adoption, Aspirations, Differentiation to meet client needs, and Yield. These five elements make up the READY acronym.

Best of intentions

According to the responses of participating FPA Professional Practices, around half the firms embrace technology and invest in it willingly. Around two in five also set a technology budget and invest intentionally.

But despite these intentions, it’s clear planners require more help with executing their technology plans. Decades after some industries have digitised, most financial planning practices still use a combination of paper and digital records for their client files.

Looking for clues

According to CoreData’s Licensee research, that’s probably because they’re not getting the support they require from their licensee. Only 45% of respondents said they were satisfied with the technological support their licensee provides.

And that support is important to them, second only to compliance support. In fact, it’s one of the key switching triggers causing planners to change licensees. Around two in five planners say they would switch to another licensee for better technology support. That’s about twice as many who would switch to get better marketing or business planning assistance.

Four principles of technology adoption

There’s a reason that planners feel unsupported. Technology transformations are hard. They can be a distraction from the core operations, and without strong direction can take twice as long as expected, cost twice as much and deliver half the benefits.

But technology adoption doesn’t have to be risky for a financial planning practice. Here are our four tips for successful technology decisions:

  1. Start (and end) with the client – how do they measure utility when it comes to your services? What is it you offer that your clients think is important, and can that be delivered better with technology?
  2. Keep the technology stack simple – anchor on some core software packages and plugin where you can
  3. Don’t customise – stick with off-the-shelf functionality or you’ll just create complexity
  4. Fast is better than perfect – just keep evolving.

Jason Andriessen is managing director at CoreData