Similarly, he cautioned against assuming that age dictates how one would want to receive financial advice.
“We did some analysis on our own portal. We found that the older client was spending more time using the client portal, which kind of flipped our thinking because we just assumed that the younger clients would use the tech more.”
Darren Bilkey, financial adviser at TFA Trusted Financial Advice, also emphasised the potential for hybrid advice to make the financial planning journey more interactive for clients, underlining the prospect of a “great middle ground” that allows those planning their finances to access greater value, while seeking advice directly from the adviser on more fundamental issues such as longer-term saving goals and objectives.
Moreover, McKenna highlighted the fundamental strength of hybrid advice, which he said was also the fundamental flaw of robo-advice: "Human beings are complicated and they need to speak to other human beings at some point.
"Hybrid is people scaling back from the idea of robo[-advice].”
He stressed the potential for hybrid advice to free up time and resources, asking “why couldn’t a more junior qualified adviser step in and support more people and increase the capacity to serve more organisations?”
In fact, McKenna said a new type of adviser could emerge from this proposition.
“You could easily see a new role, or a new type of advice role, where a qualified adviser cuts their teeth servicing clients in this way, where perhaps they don’t always engage from end to end, where they come in at the appropriate point in the process and approve or authenticate or get to the point where they engage with the client.”
Are we there yet?
The flexibility, optimisation and interactivity offered by hybrid advice all sounds great, but are we there yet?
EV’s Storey said: “All the building blocks are there. There isn’t anything that’s missing in terms of the tech.
"The challenge is how to connect them all up in the most seamless way possible”.
Elaborating on this point, he highlighted that providers would further develop the integration if users show there is a demand for it.
Speaking about preparing to adopt a hybrid advice proposition, Thompson-Rye said firms needed to ask key questions such as:
- Are you going to offer a range of advice deliveries for different client segments or keep your proposition more consistent across the board?
- How are you going to meet all your regulatory requirements and ensure that policy is adhered to when you are transitioning to a hybrid advice proposition?
- Have you thoroughly reviewed your proposition as a whole?
“It’s not going anywhere…”
When asked for key takeaways for advice firms, McKenna urged those thinking about adopting a hybrid advice proposition to have a really clear idea about why they are doing it.
"That’s the key message. Some firms do it because they want operational efficiency, others because they want to expose themselves to a new set of clients.
