UK financial advice firm slashes annual review reports from three hours to 15 minutes and saves £30,000 annually with Marloo

As directors of UK financial advice firm Fidenti, founded in late 2019, Alan and his business partner Nick have built a practice that serves clients ranging from 22 to 93 years old. The relatively young firm has attracted a younger client base than average across the UK, and they're embracing technology to deliver faster, more accurate and more in-depth advice.

With annual reviews comprising 78 per cent of their work, the firm does about 300 reviews each year. Before Marloo, each review consumed up to three hours post meeting work: an hour writing notes post-meeting, then two hours crafting the annual review report. Using Marloo, that three hours is now 15 minutes in many instances.

For the firm's annual review workload, this has brought savings of up to 825 hours annually. With 300 reviews and a time reduction of 2.75 hours per review, Marloo is returning substantial capacity to the business.

"Without Marloo, we would definitely need another experienced paraplanner. An experienced paraplanner is going to be at least £30,000 a year, plus pension contributions, plus employer NI. It could be more than that in reality, and you've got the costs of recruitment and the time it takes to train somebody up."

The firm currently operates with one experienced paraplanner, one trainee paraplanner who handles mortgage and protection support, and another team member who is purely mortgage and protection support, but will develop into a paraplanning role. Marloo has now freed their experienced paraplanner to focus on complex analysis rather than report writing.

"A lot of it was report writing before. That's the bit that's not going to be quite as necessary now. The key thing is you've got to know what you're looking for when you're checking through what Marloo has generated. So you've still got to build that knowledge and experience of each case."

For the UK tax year that ends on 5 April, January to April is the firm's most intense period. New clients get in touch after the Christmas and New Year break, and existing clients are due their annual reviews.

"By April, normally my head is pounding. This year, I don't think that will be the case because I won't be looking at how many reviews I'm behind on writing up. The documenting and writing-up element of the job, it's the least fun part of the job. The most fun part is speaking to clients and seeing them achieve those retirement goals. But when you sit down at your computer and think about how much stuff you've got to write up, delving into your brain and trying to remember things, that's the least fun part. Now that bit's quite fun too."

What sets Marloo apart from other AI tools Alan experimented with is the ease of template creation and customisation. Previously he'd spent days trying to train 3 other AI tools (one of which was a financial advice specific document generation tool) to work properly, struggling to achieve even 70 per cent quality despite considerable time investment.

"One of the game changing parts is that you can just upload a document and Marloo will create its own template. When you look at that template and see how Marloo has created it for itself. If you want to make tweaks, you can."

When the firm decided to expand Marloo use to its mortgage advice, it initially expected to spend a couple of hours setting up templates. Instead, it took about 15 minutes.

"It's not like it takes hours to try and set something up and get it to work well for you, because Marloo does the heavy leg work."

Before Marloo, completing an annual review meant putting multiple tasks into the diary: time to write notes, time for a paraplanner to draft the report, time to check it. Now everything happens in the 30 minutes after the meeting.

"It can be, right: generate the report, check the report, happy with the report, save that down, send it over to the team, ask them to update our CRM system with everything, send the report to the client. It's all done."