CRM and automation for financial advisers

Where your advisers' time goes

A lot of times we see advisers don't lose time on the advice. They lose it on everything around it:

• Chasing fact-find information and documents over email, one thing at a time.
• Typing the same client details again into the CRM, the fact-find, the report and the onboarding pack.
• Booking and rebooking meetings across a few different diaries.
• Tracking annual reviews in a spreadsheet, and finding out one's overdue when the client asks.
• Pulling a file together when someone needs to see what got sent to a client, and when.

Every one of these follows rules someone could write down, and that's what makes them good jobs to automate.

What we'd build for an advice firm

Stage	What the system does	Where a person stays in charge
Enquiry	Puts every enquiry in the CRM with where it came from, books an intro call and sends a confirmation	Deciding if the firm can help
Fact-find	Sends a secure form, collects the answers and documents in one place, and chases what's missing automatically	Checking what came back
Advice	Pulls the client's information into one view for the adviser	The advice and the recommendation
Onboarding	Sends agreements to sign before anything moves forward, and sets up the internal tasks	Signing off the client
Ongoing service	Books in 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 signed off, and by who	What goes into the file

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

Keeping advice and approvals with people

In a regulated firm, the system should get decisions ready and never make them. We build sign-off points in from day one. Anything to do with advice, money or messages sent in the firm's name waits for a named person to sign it off, and that sign-off gets recorded.

The closest thing we've built is for MRM Group, a UK property development and investment company. Their system keeps a human signing off at the sensitive financial-promotion and AI decision points, makes sure agreements get signed before payment, and keeps document handling, reminders and the audit history in one place. Read the MRM Group case study. We haven't published a financial advice case study yet.

We build systems, and we don't 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 how we do it.

Where AI helps, and where it shouldn't

AI is useful for the paperwork around the advice:

• Summarising meeting notes into tasks and a draft follow-up, and the adviser checks it before anything goes out.
• Answering your team's internal questions from your own procedures and templates, and showing where the answer came from. Have a look at AI knowledge assistants.
• Checking a fact-find is complete before it gets to an adviser.

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

When a custom build is not worth it

A lot of 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 the tools you've got, makes sense when your team types information again between systems, chases documents by hand every week, or tracks reviews outside the software. Our comparison of custom software vs SaaS walks you through the sums.