Mitchell Lodge, an associate at Tallowwood Wealth Advice, used to spend an hour on file notes after every client meeting, another hour preparing strategy documents, and countless more hours on the compliance paperwork that comes with advising clients approaching retirement.
Now those tasks take minutes instead of hours. He's saving roughly 14 hours per week on file notes, strategy documents, client emails, para-planning submissions, and implementation schedules and can see further time savings on the horizon.
“On a post-SOA client email Marloo saves me an hour, the first five pages of the strategy paper saves an hour, and the strategy meeting file note saves another hour. We're doing around four strategy meetings per week, so that's 12 hours saved right there. Then we've got paraplanning requests, where Marloo saves about 30 minutes per request, and we're doing anywhere from two to five of those per week. That's another one to two and a half hours saved. So across the board, we're looking at somewhere between 13 and 14 and a half hours saved per week. And that's just what we're seeing now – as Marloo gets integrated into more parts of the process, those savings will only increase."
Mitchell is already seeing the time saving building up as Marloo gets integrated into more parts of his workflow. “The more you use it the more time you save”. When you see more clients, because you've got more capacity, you save even more time per week. The hours add up.
"The time saving is only just the beginning. As we are bringing it into more areas of the advice process, that can be optimised further. With Marloo saving time compounds and time is one of those things that's impossible to save in this job".
For Mitchell, the real benefit isn't just efficiency, it’s freedom from the parts of financial planning he least enjoys. “I love this job. I love financial planning. The one thing that is not fun about it is compliance. Sometimes justified, sometimes not”.
While necessary, he says, “compliance is a huge part of what we do and it's easily the worst part of what we do. The financial planning industry is regulated very closely by Canberra. We are probably the only industry that has changes to it every single year, sometimes more than once”.
Marloo taking on that burden means Mitchell can focus on what he loves: seeing clients and developing strategies.
"On a typical day now I’ll have a strategy meeting with a client. I'll use Marloo to speed up the process of preparing that strategy paper. Marloo would sit in on the meeting with me. Marloo would transcribe that meeting and create the file note for me. It will also transcribe the meeting and create the email that we send off to the client afterwards that includes the strategy paper".
"If we are preparing a strategy document, the part that Marloo prepares would usually take an hour, now it's only taking 20 minutes. That's 40 minutes saved. It means that not only am I able to see more people and develop more strategies, I'm also able to enjoy my job more, which is huge". For Mitchell what sets Marloo apart from generic AI tools is how well it understands the Australian financial planning context. He found that ChatGPT and similar tools would default to American regulations, forget they were working in Australian English, and lose their training as conversations grew longer.
"Our laws and compliance burden is completely different to American financial planning. Marloo does a much better job of actually retaining what you want it to do. It not only reduces time on compliance and file notes, it also reduces time in how it receives training, because it understands it better and it's more involved in your process".
Mitchell says training capability saves time and frustration because when you create templates in Marloo, the instructions stick. “You don't have to retrain it every time, and you can keep improving templates as you notice areas for refinement”.
Mitchell's clients haven't noticed the technology working in the background, but they have noticed the improvement in service.
"They're just happy with the level of depth we're able to provide, because we're less time-poor, we're able to give sufficient depth on our strategies and our emails. They feel like they're getting value for money".
Your favourite part of your work is producing strategies for your clients, how has Marloo improved this process for you?
I've been working with different AI software for years now, but I was pleasantly surprised the first time I created a strategy with Marloo. It essentially allows me to speed up the process, because a big part of the strategy document is summarising where a client is at now and what goals we would like to achieve for them. So when we receive data from a client that can quite often be very scattered and in bits and pieces. Marloo does a great job of bringing that all together in a succinct one-pager that can allow the clients to quickly and easily read. Showing their financial situation summarised to a T. We can now proceed to the advice piece, knowing that the information they provided us is correct, which is a huge compliance part of financial planning, knowing that the information that they've provided us is correct. So that way that advice can be accurate.
How do you see the time savings evolving as you use Marloo more?
It'll improve in the sense of saving additional time with each of those tasks already established. Because we can further train Marloo with the templates we create, we can just put in further instructions - say, 'Hey, instead of going into too much depth here, just simplify it and do one line.' You can keep improving the template as you go. Then as Marloo learns more about what we need it to do, we can bring it into more areas of the advice process. That can save another half hour or one hour on tasks we already do, and then that compounds as well.
What role will Marloo play in Tallowwood Wealth Advice's future workflow strategy?
It's going to be one of our main software pieces. As all financial advisers know, you have to use some software - you can't operate without it. If I'm only using three types of software to get all of my workflow done during the week, Marloo will be one of them. It'll be saved on my desktop as one of the main software pieces that I go to every single day. We're working with Marloo on being able to do Statements of Advice, There's definitely a path forward there.
If a fellow financial adviser asked whether they should try Marloo, what would you say?
I'd tell them, ‘ just give it a go’, especially if they’re already using artificial intelligence in their advice process. It's not a disconnected piece of software. It's encompassed into your advice process. It already has the data, and you just need to give it instructions on what you want it to do.
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