North Wales-based Chartered Planners Celtic Financial Planning has developed a new digital platform which it claims will transform the way businesses prepare suitability reports and carry out annual client reviews.
The firm said it has spent more than 18 months developing Fincate Pro.
Rob Lewis, founder of Celtic, claimed the platform could save IFAs and advice firms thousands of hours in administration every year.
He said suitability reports – documents explaining why financial recommendations are appropriate for individual clients – can take anything from several hours to days to complete, creating costly bottlenecks for firms.
He claimed his new system can reduce that process to just 30 to 45 minutes.
Mr Lewis said: “It has been a game changer for our own business. We've saved time and money, improved the way we work and made it easier to keep on top of compliance. Most importantly, it's given us more human interaction with our clients and better client reporting.”
He said the last 18 months have involved working with technical specialists, testing the process, making thousands of tweaks and ironing out problems, “because we know smaller firms simply don't have the time or resources to do it themselves.”
He added: “We're Chartered Financial Planners, not technology people trying to sell a product. This is what we do every day, and we know where the pressures are.”
He said the new service builds on the foundations of the firm’s financial education platform Fincate. It uses guided digital tools, known as 'wizards', to take users through the preparation of reports and annual reviews.
They help gather information, check for missing details and produce documents tailored to each firm's branding and requirements. The system also creates engaging one-page dashboards for clients, which Mr Lewis believes are better aligned with Consumer Duty outcomes.
He said the system is aimed particularly at small and medium-sized financial advice businesses and their Paraplanners – the specialists who carry out much of the research, technical work and report writing.
Mr Lewis added: “Financial advice is a people business and always will be. We don't want technology replacing that relationship or churning out pages of generic information. Fincate Pro is a hybrid solution. It does the heavy lifting, but the adviser remains in control of the advice and the final report.”