CRM and automation for financial advisers

Where adviser time goes

Advisers rarely lose time on advice. They lose it around it:

• Chasing fact-find information and documents over email, one item at a time.
• Re-typing the same client details into the CRM, the fact-find, the report and the onboarding pack.
• Booking and rebooking meetings across several diaries.
• Tracking annual reviews in a spreadsheet, and finding out one is overdue when the client asks.
• Pulling a file together when someone needs to see what was sent to a client, and when.

Each of these follows rules someone could write down, which is what makes them good candidates for automation.

What we would build for an advice firm

Stage	What the system does	Where a person stays in charge
Enquiry	Captures every enquiry in the CRM with its source, books an introductory call and sends a confirmation	Deciding whether the firm can help
Fact-find	Sends a secure form, collects answers and documents in one place, and chases missing items automatically	Reviewing what came back
Advice	Assembles the client's information in one view for the adviser	The advice and the recommendation
Onboarding	Sends agreements for signature before anything moves forward, and creates the internal tasks	Approving the client
Ongoing service	Schedules annual reviews, reminds clients to update their details, and flags anything overdue	Every review conversation
Records	Keeps a history of what was sent, signed and approved, and by whom	What goes into the file

Clients can have their own secure area to upload documents, sign agreements and see what is waiting on them, the same idea as a client portal. Each client sees only their own information.

Keeping advice and approvals with people

In a regulated firm, the system should prepare decisions and never make them. We build approval points in from the start: anything involving advice, money or communications sent in the firm's name waits for a named person to approve it, and the approval is recorded.

The closest thing we have built is for MRM Group, a UK property development and investment company. Their system keeps human approval at sensitive financial-promotion and AI decision points, requires agreements to be signed before payment, and keeps document handling, reminders and audit history in one place. Read the MRM Group case study. We have not published a financial advice case study yet.

We build systems; we do not give compliance advice. Your compliance team or adviser network should confirm how any new system fits your obligations before it goes live. Our guide to the decisions to keep human in an AI workflow explains the approach.

Where AI helps, and where it should not

AI is useful for the paperwork around advice:

• Summarising meeting notes into tasks and a draft follow-up for the adviser to check before anything is sent.
• Answering your team's internal questions from your own procedures and templates, with the source shown. See AI knowledge assistants.
• Checking a fact-find is complete before it reaches an adviser.

It should not give clients advice, suggest products, or send anything in the firm's name without a person approving it. If a client-facing assistant says something wrong, the firm is responsible for it, as a Canadian tribunal found in Moffatt v Air Canada (2024).

When a custom build is not worth it

Many advice firms already use sector software for client records and reporting. If yours covers your process without workarounds, keep it. A custom build, or custom automation around your existing tools, makes sense when your team re-types information between systems, chases documents by hand every week, or tracks reviews outside the software. Our comparison of custom software vs SaaS walks through the sums.