Regional Director, Philip Thrower has been advising clients at Throgmorton Private Capital for over 13 years as an investment specialist ,seeing them through from their first meeting, all the way to succession planning and retirement.
Unlike many advisers who delegate or outsource their paraplanning and admin work, Philip handles everything himself. Before Marloo, he'd experimented with generic AI tools to help him cut down time on document generation, but found they didn’t have enough understanding of financial services.
"The danger with generic AI is you could find that it didn't have the specialist knowledge you needed. At times, it wouldn't recognise certain things properly. Marloo is more industry specific and accurate”.
The difference was clear when Philip first used Marloo to generate an annual review letter. After feeding in all the details from a client meeting, he sat waiting, wondering how long it would take.
"When it came out, you're thinking, let's now have a look at what it's produced. It's very interesting how much information it actually extracts from your client meeting down to the information you've fed it with. You look at it and think, it's done all of those things within a couple of minutes".
Philip estimates Marloo saves him at least an hour on each one, possibly more depending on complexity. When combined with the meeting note-taking feature, that’s roughly two hours saved per client review. He usually completes about two review letters per week, depending on the time of year.
"I liken it to baking a cake. The more of each ingredient you put in there, the more you're going to get out of it. And then the system starts to learn things about you and your style as well,"
As an adviser who does his own paraplanning, Marloo’s learning capabilities have been especially valuable. After feeding Marloo documents about charging structures, the system now automatically calculates charges for client portfolios within annual review letters. When comparing funds for switches, Philip can upload performance data from a spreadsheet, and Marloo segregates it between each fund, placing it into the letter in a clear format.
"If you're doing it on a manual basis, that's quite time consuming. Some years there might not be much in the way of changes. Other years, there could be two or three fund changes that need to take place,"
He had a situation recently where a client had five funds that needed changing. That meant ten funds in total to analyse, with historical performance data on the old funds and data on the new ones. By extracting the information from his investment platform spreadsheet and uploading it to Marloo, the system automatically placed it into performance tables, comparing the funds side by side. In the past, that would have meant tedious cutting and pasting, with the ever-present risk of making a mistake.
"When you've got ten funds on there, you can quite easily cut and paste the wrong information across".
Philip’s new workflow has evolved rapidly in the four months he’s been using it. He estimates he now gets to a stage where probably 80 per cent of the letter is prepared for him, and it's just him going back over it, perhaps adding some additional information or tweaking things.
"From where it was initially to where I'm using it now, there's a definite sea change. So there are even more time savings taking place".
Part of this improvement comes from Philip learning what information to feed the system. He's also set up instructions for Marloo to provide market commentary relevant to the review period, pulling from different sources to generate viewpoints on what's happened in global markets between valuation points.
"You're not having to think, what do I put here in terms of what's happened over the last 12 months? It's finding that information for me, and it's just me assessing the output".
While Philip has always preferred doing his own paraplanning that is not a focus for some of his colleagues, who employ administrators or use outsourced admin services, spending perhaps £300 to £700 per month to handle their review work and follow-up.
"I could employ a paraplanner or somebody that would deal with the administration side of things for me. But actually with having something that is taking the information from a client meeting and doing a lot of the legwork for me, there's really no necessity. That would be time consuming for me, where I'd have to explain how I want the letter written or produced and where to find all the information. Whereas if I've got something that is learning as it goes along with how I work, then I can get smarter with it, as well as the system getting smarter".
The capacity benefits are becoming clear as well. Philip can now handle more work in the same timeframe, or finish work earlier. He estimates he could now see between one or two extra clients per week for annual reviews.
"I can come out of a client meeting, and if I'm travelling by train or car, I know that in the background that part is being dealt with for me. Marloo is going to save me time to focus on either existing clients with inquiries, or potentially new clients as well".
More from our chat with Philip Thrower:
How has the accuracy of Marloo's document generation compared to the generic AI tools you used before?
With Marloo being very much tailored to the industry, you've got more accuracy. It's not totally foolproof, but it's much better than a generic approach. I still do a sense check of any report, which I think you've always got to do with any documentation generation system; do an overall sense check, do a sampling of the data that's come across. But at the moment, I'm finding it very accurate in terms of what it will do.
How has Marloo changed the way you work?
Mondays are typically my busiest day, I often work until 8.30pm. Weekends and long holiday periods my inbox fills up as clients, reflect on their finances and send through queries. Before I would set my schedule on a Friday knowing what my work is going to be for the following week, but come Monday afternoon, that will change quite dramatically. By having those time savings, you can say to yourself, ‘I have got some extra work that I hadn't budgeted for, but because of Marloo, I've now banked some time where I can allocate that to those pieces of work now’".
What are you most excited about for the future of document generation with Marloo?
It's definitely a game changer in terms of what you can use it for and what it will do. I've been in situations where from the data I've gained from a client meeting, prior to doing a document generation for an annual review letter, I've been able to get it to summarise someone's net wealth, work out what the inheritance tax liability would be, and then I can either decide to use that within the letter or use that as my reference point. Looking ahead, within this industry, depending on the complexities of what you're dealing with can determine how many client meetings you might want to do in a day or a week. Rather than being overloaded with work on complex cases, it frees up time to refocus on what I've got to do for the rest of the week, as opposed to chasing my tail all the time.
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