For Dominic Cruickshank, paraplanner at Aequus Wealth Management, the appeal of financial services has always been investigative work. Researching investment strategies, analysing market conditions, and uncovering the best solutions for clients. The less appealing part? Churning out the lengthy suitability letters that follow.
"You're producing a 15 or 20 page document. "It's heavy going."
Now, with Marloo handling the heavy lifting of letter production, he’s free to focus on the analytical work he genuinely enjoys.
His workflow hasn't completely changed. He still needs to gather compliance documentation and conduct research before any letter can be written. What has changed is what happens once that information is compiled. Previously, he would spend hours manually crafting suitability letters. Now, he feeds the information into Marloo and watches it generate the bulk of the document in minutes.
"It's almost like you're putting tickets into a machine. You press a button or pull a lever, and something comes out. You have to make sure you're getting the right information that goes in, which is not necessarily saving time. But when it comes out, that's where it saves time."
Dominic estimates Marloo currently handles about 60 percent of the work. What once took five to six hours now takes roughly three.
"The 60 per cent is Marloo doing the work, and the 40 per cent is me checking it, tidying it up."
The time savings extend beyond individual letters. Annual review letters that typically required two hours can now be completed in about one.
For Aequus director and financial adviser Neil Loton, who oversees about 180 clients, with funds under management just shy of £60 million, it means more time to nurture ongoing client relationships.
"It's suggested that to be an efficient adviser, you probably should only have about 60 or 80 clients so you can look after them well. Obviously I've got about 180 of them. We’ve only just started using Marloo and I'm hoping it will allow me to contact clients more regularly, so the relationship is much stronger and they will be retained as clients and generate more referrals."
Neil handles a lot of meeting notes for annual reviews and ad hoc meetings, and says Marloo’s ability to capture all of the less formal conversation is an asset.
"Marloo is picking up more soft facts from a client's feedback and puts it in quotations. It's an excellent form of protection for me in terms of giving advice. If a client says they said something different, I have a record of our conversation to show them what was discussed".
Neil estimates his meeting notes, which previously took between an hour and an hour and a half when undisturbed, could be reduced to half an hour once the system is fully implemented across the business.
"Marloo is excellent for summarising and cutting out the dross. I'll talk for half an hour and it condenses it to about a couple of paragraphs quite quickly."
The plan now is to attract younger clients to sustain growth, says Neil.
"I need to get some 40 to 50 year olds as clients, basically to keep the business thriving. If I can save time by processing cases, I can spend time on other parts of the business. To find new clients takes a lot of effort and time, and I don't really have that time. With Marloo, Dominic and I can go to more events or create events like inheritance tax presentations and attract new clients."
More from our chat with Dominic Cruickshank and Neil Loton of Aequus Wealth Management:
How are you finding Marloo's templates and how are you using them?
Dominic: I've uploaded about six or seven templates in total to Marloo. The one I use most is what I've called an investment letter. It's a big, long letter that has various things in it. It can recommend A or B or C or D, or it can recommend A, B, C and D. I'm so impressed by how you can upload a template to Marloo, and five minutes later, there it is. What I've enjoyed with Marloo is experimenting with it, testing it out. I've gone into the template itself and asked Marloo questions. ‘What do you think of this? Do you think the advice here is good? Do you think the tax is correct?' And it's giving me recommendations on that. I'm really enjoying that side of it. I'm hoping it will free up certain things whereby I can get involved in other areas of the business, like helping Neil with some of his advice.
Neil, how has Marloo affected your day-to-day work beyond the immediate time savings?
Neil: Ultimately, if Dominic has more time, I'll find loads of work to give him. If we take the stress off his letter writing, then he can learn other things. And I won’t have to work as many Sundays!
What are your plans for using Marloo as it continues to develop?
Dominic: I want to ask Marloo more. I want to be able to say to Marloo, so Marloo, what can you do with this template now, in a new tax year? So I'm looking forward to April when I can test out some more of it’s capabilities. I was initially nervous about AI. You hear horror stories that it's going to come in and take away paraplanning. I'm confident now that it's not, but what it is going to do is help the paraplanners and the advisers and administrators. I'm trying to embrace it, and I'm pleased that it's going well.
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