St. James’s Place - Advice Assistant: Using AI to Support Face to Face Advice

Advice Assistant:

Using AI to support face to face advice

Advice Assistant: Using AI to support face to face advice

St. James’s Place’s Divisional Director, James Frew, talks about the part technology can play in supporting face to face financial advice.

ithin SJP, James is working on leveraging the next generations of technology to support Advisers.

The key to SJP’s development of their Advice Assistant is the drive to make it easier for their advisers to do business with SJP through embracing technology.

SJP, working with SS&C and Intellect Design Arena, has developed a tool called the ‘Advice Assistant’, aimed at supporting their advice and reducing the time is takes for advisers to create end to end advice documentation. It combines automation and

James Frew Divisional Director for Operational Strategy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help advisers document and track their advice more efficiently, in line with SJP best practice.

James explains, “AI and Machine Learning (ML) are not well understood as yet, so part of my role is to understand and communicate how these technologies can contribute successfully to the continued growth of our business. This includes helping to build insight into the differences between often competing technologies in the market, including Artificial Intelligence.”

In the year 2000, there were around 100,000 financial advisers in the UK. Today, it stands at around 35,000 active advisers, with SJP having around 4,600. James elaborates, “SJP is the leading player in the market for face-to-face financial advice. Our challenge is to give our advisers more time to see their

clients whilst freeing up their office teams to support them with other services. The face-to-face element is key to achieving good outcomes. Greater technological support with the underlying process is an important addition when it comes to supporting those advisers.”

“While SJP is, and always will be a people business, there is space to innovate with the technology available in the wealth management industry. Our business model will not change. However, advisers want to provide services to their clients, with the checking, administration and process being as efficient as possible. Good financial advice is all about getting to know the client. A fully developed Advice Assistant will offer the opportunity for our advisers to spend more time with their clients and less on administration and waiting for checks to be done, so it is a win for both the adviser and their clients.

James continues, “The Advice Assistant streamlines the production of advice documentation. While ‘the plumbing’ takes care of the majority of the process we are starting to use AI to understand and assess the context of the notes

the adviser has made to help tailor the advice.

SJP has grown rapidly in its 30 years, with the demand for financial advice continuing to increase. This is where technology can assist. James explains, “We have built our AI system to go beyond the simple automation of existing processes. We’re at the early stages of combining the power of face-to-face advice with

“Our

““By reducing the time that advisers and their teams will be able to see more clients whilst continuing level of support, which will help facilitate our strategy

teams spend on admin, they

continuing to provide the same strategy for growth”

our technology to support the adviser, built on years of data about what good advice looks like. It is designed to reflect on key parts of the Partner’s interaction with the client - to analyse the notes, fact find information, CRM data, for example – to help build the most comprehensive picture.

You cannot simply input all this information into an app; the client needs to have a conversation with a qualified person and an adviser must be able to take their own notes and record them into our CRM system. A tick box approach will not do. Having a human relationship with the adviser is key, with the AI working in the background to help reduce the admin overhead for the adviser. According to those SJP Partners who have been involved in our early-stage testing, the Advice Assistant is able to reduce a 60-90-minute process down to as little as five minutes, which is a significant time saving.”

James says SJP’s Advice Assistant is currently being piloted for ISAs, but there is a plan to develop it for other

SS&C Partners with Wealth Management Clients to Drive Innovation for Advisors and Investors

SS&C, a global provider of technologypowered solutions and services for the financial services industry is expanding its presence in the wealth management sector. More than 2,000 wealth management firms worldwide rely on SS&C to administer around US$2.4 trillion (£2.12T) in client assets. Over 10,000 advisors leverage SS&C platforms to service some 7 million investor accounts.

Key to SS&C’s rapid growth in wealth management is its ability to plough a significant percentage of annual revenue back into continual innovation – the company invests an average of US$400 million (£353M) in R&D each year. Moreover, SS&C often engages clients in technology initiatives. Earlier this year, Sanlam Insurance Limited, Africa’s largest non-bank financial group, selected SS&C to collaborate in the digital transformation of its subsidiary, Glacier Financial Solutions, an investment platform with more than R400 billion (£19.51Bn) in assets under administration.

In 2022, SS&C added the innovative multiasset, multi-product and multi-currency wealth platform - Hubwise Securities Limitedin the UK to further expand its market coverage and to enable wealth managers to focus their capital spend on serving their individual investors and growing their businesses.

A more recent example of a successful innovation partnership is Advice Assistant, an AI-powered solution developed in concert with St. James’s Place (SJP), SS&C’s largest wealth management client in the European

market. Advice Assistant leverages machine learning to help advisors confirm that their advice to a client is in keeping with best practices while automating the related documentation.

“There was a problem we needed to solve together,” explains Nick Wright, SS&C’s Head of Global Investor and Distribution Solutions. “That’s what you do in a true strategic technology partnership. With the AI and machine learning technologies available today, and the historic case data held by SJP, we created a solution that uses SJP’s best practices and intelligently learns from past cases. We have reduced the time of the process including the production of documentation from 90 to just 30 minutes, a significant saving for advisors.”

There are plans to expand this solution into more complex areas such as retirement planning, applying the same machine learning principles to eliminate laborious manual case checking.

SS&C’s deep relationship with St. James‘s Place includes the administration of £150 billion in AUM on SS&C’s wealth platform. SS&C also provides comprehensive, omnichannel contact centre operations directly in support of over 1000 advisers. SS&C fields around 40,000 calls and 20,000 online chats for SJP on average each month.

SS&C sees further opportunities for innovation with the company’s recent acquisition of Blue Prism Group, a developer of intelligent automation

solutions that help reduce repetitive backoffice tasks. “We are really excited to bring Blue Prism’s RPA expertise to our clients,” Wright says. “As platform fees continue to compress, back-office automation becomes critical to a firm’s survival. We can help clients thrive in the new digital advice world.”

The front office, too, is ripe for automation. SS&C’s Advent Genesis is a cloud-based portfolio construction and rebalancing solution for portfolio managers. It enables portfolio teams to build and manage bespoke client portfolios at scale, automating key tasks while dramatically accelerating the process from portfolio decisions to trading, and freeing managers from time-consuming manual workarounds.

SS&C can help wealth managers shrink their IT footprint, consolidate systems and streamline operations. Our solutions deliver the agility and scale for firms to adapt rapidly to changes in the regulatory and business environment, and to expand their offerings to be more competitive –all while dramatically reducing the total cost of operations. Contact us to learn more about the benefits of automation for wealth management.

Contact us through our website and speak to one of our experts.

www.ssctech.com

areas in the company’s portfolio within the next few years. He adds, “By reducing the time that advisers and their teams spend on admin, they will be able to see more clients whilst continuing to provide the same level of support, which will help facilitate our strategy for growth.”

There are two key processes at work. Natural language processing is used to interpret the notes taken by the adviser in a few key areas. The data is then passed into the Advice Assistant tool, where SS&C algorithms take the natural language and fact-find data and build up an understanding of whether what is being recommended is consistent with SJP’s advice policy. The tool then collates the adviser input with system logic for personalised documentation and downstream STP processing. James adds, “Our extensive testing has given us confidence

that the advice delivered meets our own high standards and is suitably documented.”

SJP outsources almost all its technology to trusted partners, allowing it to focus on what it does best – supporting its advisers to provide face-to-face financial advice. James explains, “We need those partners to be able to develop technologies that fit with our long-term strategy. We work with SS&C and Intellect Design Arena, whose shared focus on emerging technologies ensures we stay ahead.”

James highlights the fact that SJP is lucky to have an executive board that is interested in innovation. He says, “We have a growth mindset, we are open to new ideas and the challenges of proving its worth in the business.”

SJP prides itself on building technology solutions that benefit

“We work with SS&C and Intellect Design

Arena, whose shared focus on emerging technologies ensures we stay ahead”

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advisers and their clients, not isolated projects. James elaborates, “It is very easy to have an AI project, but it is not useful unless that solves a business problem. We consulted our Partners throughout the design and build process and worked with them to come up with ideas. From my perspective, the applications for the Advice Assistant will grow and grow and become more

“From my perspective, the applications for the Advice Assistant will grow and grow and become more sophisticated”

sophisticated. It will be built out to deal with different advice scenarios and different investment types. We would look to expand to cover more areas, so we need more data and the ability to build algorithms that can cope with more complex scenarios. This will take time and expertise.

So, what are SJP’s plans for the future? James answers, “The key for us is to continue to support our advisers. We can do this partly through technology, working alongside them to make sure we are building solutions in areas that make a difference. We should be

key for us is to continue to support our advisers”

aiming to use our data in a constructive way to support our Partners in advising clients and get better outcomes for people faster, more easily, and by using single input systems. The Partners’ skills are not in admin but in advice, so they want to spend their time meeting clients and building those relationships.”

For further information on SJP, visit www.sjp.co.uk

“The

www.sjp.co.uk