Matt Jenkins, a financial planner at Lifetime Financial Management and Planning, was expecting to spend roughly £24,000 annually on paraplanning services, but despite this the burden of document creation was still overwhelming. Now with Marloo, Matt's practice of about 100 families is slashing admin time and costs.
Annual review letters that used to take an hour or more, now take 30 minutes – a 50-hour annual saving across 100 letters. Suitability reports have dropped from 2-3 hours to 1-2 hours, and simple top-up letters that took 45 minutes now take only 15 minutes, cutting processing time by two-thirds.
As well as time savings, Marloo is lowering Matt's paraplanning costs. At £349 per month per adviser (£4,188 annually), Matt estimates he now saves between £5,000 and £10,000 per year on outsourced work. "The going rate for a paraplanner is roughly £50 an hour or more. In the last couple of years, I've done about 50 new business reports. Taking a conservative average saving of £100 per report, that's £5,000. Being more generous with the estimate, it could be £200 per report – so £10,000 over the course of a year."
"I think you could save the vast majority of those paraplanning costs through Marloo. There are going to be some cases that either need to go to paraplanning or you're asking a paraplanner to use Marloo, so it's still going to take them time, but less time."
Matt tested out multiple AI tools before finding Marloo, but none hit the mark.
"Some tools were very factual and nothing else. Advice isn't just the facts, it's the woolly stuff as well. Others didn't have the quality I needed. One platform was pretty good, but rigid and expensive. You had a fixed number of templates or had to pay to add more."
What made the difference with Marloo?
"Marloo is hugely customisable. You can really get into the nitty-gritty of how you want your meeting notes to look, all without additional cost. The quality of the content and formatting was also very impressive. It can produce tables that often form part of an advice report, data, fees and charges, goals. Having that ability was important."
Matt's busiest week since adopting Marloo demonstrated the platform's transformative power. With 15 meetings across four days, he didn't process his Marloo recordings until 3 PM on Friday afternoon.
"I went through everything from Monday to Friday, saved meeting summaries to client files, updated my CRM system, and got Marloo to produce follow-up emails. Ordinarily, that would have been a day's work. I got it done in two to three hours."
Without Marloo, a busy week like that would have meant working through the weekend or providing clients with less detailed documentation. Instead, Matt walked into Monday already on top of the week ahead.
Previously comfortable seeing seven to eight clients weekly, Matt says he can now handle 10 to 12 annual review meetings in a week with a clear diary – a 40-50% increase in capacity.
"Last week was a perfect demonstration. I had 15 meetings across four days. To go into Monday not being behind on meeting notes is really powerful."
Matt sees Marloo as central to Lifetime's growth strategy. "The more time saved on admin means I can spend more time in front of clients. That means I can provide a better service to existing clients, which hopefully means more referrals and looking after more families."
For Matt, the business case is strong. At £4,188 annually for software that eliminates up to £10,000 in paraplanning costs whilst dramatically increasing capacity, Marloo represents a 2.4:1 return on investment in cost savings alone – before accounting for the revenue potential of seeing 40-50% more clients.
"Advisers should be looking at using AI tools in the workplace because they will be revolutionary to the way they work, the efficiencies they create and the growth potential they provide.”
What was going through your mind the first time you saw an annual review letter being generated?
Time saving! That's a big part of what we end up doing as an adviser. If you're writing those yourself, that's quite a time-consuming process. If you can produce a client-ready document in 10 minutes rather than an hour, your eyes light up knowing the hours you're going to be saving. I was definitely excited at the prospect of some time saving, and I think that's going to have a big knock-on impact for the business in the long term.
What do you think about Marloo's branding capabilities?
You can brand the letterhead template, which looks pretty good, it looks like our letterhead with no complaints on that front at all. I'm looking forward to them adding title pages and front pages to documents, which I know is in the pipeline. That will help things feel really polished. I use Microsoft Teams predominantly when I have video calls with clients. The ability to have Marloo in the meeting with our company logo is a really nice touch – it just looks more professional
What’s your favourite Marloo feature?
Initially sceptical about the chat feature, I now use it constantly. When they first told me about chatting to Marloo like a traditional LLM, I thought it was a nice feature I probably wouldn't use much. Actually, I find myself using it all the time. Even our phone calls get recorded. Marloo doesn't join our telephone system directly, but you can create ad hoc meetings and upload recordings, then Marloo turns that into a transcript and can summarise the calls.
How accurate do you find your Marloo notes and documents?
When you provide Marloo with documents I've written, it understands how I talk to my clients, my tone of voice, and replicates it really well, to the point that it doesn't need editing, just sense checking.
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