From Adler calculators to today's AI revolution, in Ritchie Salkeld’s 53-year career he’s seen it all when it comes to financial services technology. Yet he says, it's Marloo that's genuinely transformed how he works.
Before Marloo, the Joint Managing Director of Blacktower Financial Management UK spent hours and hours writing file notes and gathering client information. Now Marloo is taking care of the fact-finding and admin and he’s already seeing how he can use it across the business too.
“I use Marloo for everything. If I'm doing a staff interview, I put it on there. If I'm doing an appraisal, I stick it on there. If I'm doing a board meeting, I stick it on there. The notes that it produces are in my opinion, infinitely superior. I've got the team to create templates that'll work for a whole host of other things.”
But it's not just about time saved, it's about opportunities seized. Recently, Ritchie had a lengthy and detailed meeting with a prospective client. They were planning to meet with multiple advisers before deciding who to go with.
Ritchie was able to send the meeting notes that afternoon and his responsiveness made all the difference.
"The client told me, ‘I was so impressed to receive your meeting notes. I had got meetings booked with other advisers, but I decided to cancel them and appoint you’," he says.
It's a competitive advantage that simply wasn't possible before. Where it used to take at least a couple of days to get substantive meeting notes back to a client, Ritchie can now often deliver them in under half an hour.
His regular clients are impressed with Marloo too.
“I use them with clients that I've had for, in some cases, over 40 years, and they're equally blown away. Even the elderly accept that this is a bit of modern technology which can work well”.
He's tried other AI note-takers, including ChatGPT, Zoom and another financial industry specific tool too, but what swayed him in favour of Marloo was the attitude and the willingness of the team to develop the tool to fit Blacktower’s needs. When he and his team see something new that Marloo could do, they don't get a polite brush-off or a vague promise. They get action.
"Whenever we ask, 'do you think we could do so and so?' they evaluate it, and lo and behold, it appears."
If I'd only had Marloo a few years ago, life would have been so much better. It is absolutely, completely mind-blowing. Marloo does exactly what it says it does at a competitive price. Plus, the possibilities are endless, what you can do with Marloo is only limited by your imagination."
I've been using it for probably five months now, and we've gradually expanded it to all the advisers in the UK. Senior para-planners think it's a godsend because they're not scratching around, looking for bits and pieces of information in files. It's all there. And they're learning how to interrogate the file as well, which again provides additional time-saving.
It isn't just that it takes notes, it's how it understands what matters in financial advice conversations. When discussing a client's attitude to risk Marloo will capture useful quotes, like "I wouldn't touch that with a barge pole" or "I can understand that, I can live with that." Those sorts of quotes are really valuable in making sure the assessment of how much risk a client is prepared to take is accurate. Marloo doesn't just transcribe; it captures the nuance. It tabulates income and expenditure automatically. It distinguishes between casual conversation and advice-critical information. It records the soft facts and client quotes that bring a fact-find to life and assists with our compliance work.
It will actually tabulate things like values of investments or income and expenditure so that it forms a very solid basis for a fact-find. When you're discussing the client's attitude to risk you acquire suitable quotes, and those sorts of quotes are really valuable. If you're dealing with people with a particular ethical bent, they're able to articulate what it is that they don't like and you don't miss it because it's in there, in writing.
We've actually spent quite a bit of time with the Marloo team talking through new ideas. One of those is being able to start to do reviews, which is one of the most time consuming jobs that any financial adviser can undertake, and any part of that which you can automate saves so much time. The review part of Marloo is basically in the testing stage now. It isn't the finished article, but it's there, and it takes the grunt work out.
