Tallowwood Wealth adviser saves 14 hours a week with Marloo's document generation that understands Australian financial planning

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 consistent use leads to compounding benefits—when capacity expands to accommodate more clients due to efficiency gains, additional time savings accumulate weekly.

"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 extends beyond efficiency metrics. Freedom from compliance-heavy administrative tasks allows focus on aspects of financial planning he genuinely 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 for regulatory adherence, he notes that compliance obligations represent a significant burden within the financial planning sector. Australia's regulatory framework, overseen by Canberra, undergoes frequent changes—sometimes multiple modifications annually.

"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."

By delegating compliance and administrative responsibilities to Marloo, Mitchell redirects energy toward client engagement and strategic development.

"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."

Mitchell distinguishes Marloo from generic AI tools through its contextual understanding of Australian financial planning regulations and practices. He found that alternative solutions like ChatGPT defaulted to American regulatory frameworks, inconsistently applied Australian English conventions, and degraded performance as conversation length increased.

"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 emphasizes that template training capability reduces iteration cycles and frustration. Once instructions are established within Marloo templates, they persist without requiring repetitive retraining, enabling continuous refinement as workflows are optimized.

"You don't have to retrain it every time, and you can keep improving templates as you notice areas for refinement."

Client responses have been notably positive, though the technology's role remains invisible. The observable improvement centers on service quality and strategic depth.

"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."