Managing Director
OMNIMax Software Solutions
OMNIMax Managing Director, Jonathan Taylor and Pauline Davis, Head of Technology for the BNZ Wealth Business, have a quality conversation about OMNIMax OMNIEngage – the digital solution keeping advisers and clients on the same page…
There has been a lot of talk around the code of conduct focusing on good customer outcomes and meeting customer expectations. Surely this can only happen if expectations are realistic which means educating customers right from the beginning of the advice process. Suitability is another variable that needs to be assessed and the question is how do you produce a consistent outcome throughout your whole team?
Around five years ago, OMNIMax software began on a journey bringing about a new way of working, “we began the journey with our OMNIEngage solution as we saw an opportunity to help our clients better convey their advice, to their customers, in a visually engaging way that was easy to understand” Jonathan Taylor, OMNIMax Managing Director, talks about the origin of the financial planning and projection tool. “You can be sure you are going to meet customer expectations by setting them at the start, making sure that you have a plan to meet their goals and match their risk appetite, you can then be sure of good customer outcomes. This is what the OMNIEngage tool helps with.”
The solution has been built to be used alongside a customer in order to model goal-based scenarios so you can work with your customer to quickly find a favourable financial outcome and educate your customer along the way. BNZ’s Pauline Davis talks about their version of the solutions the ‘Navigator’, “the purpose of the tool was to allow frontline bankers to have quality conversations about KiwiSaver with everyday people coming into the bank”, she states that their bankers were sometimes wary of having conversations about wealth products and KiwiSaver because there can be a fine line between advice and information for some bankers. “We wanted to allow everybody, from our frontline bankers all the way through to the branch managers, to have a really good conversation about Kiwisaver without being concerned about heading off track. So, it’s a really guided conversation and they can slice and dice, they can change funds, they can add contributions, and make all sorts of adjustments to the scenario.” Davis is the Head of Technology for the BNZ wealth business and it’s her job to work with internal and external partners to deliver systems and solutions to support their products with their customers.
When asked what was driving their decisions to implement these tools Davis comments “we are focused on improving the financial capability of our customers and we know that’s also something that is very important for our regulators… it’s about supporting kiwis to be more ready for retirement. These tools help us to have these conversations, when you’re trying to explain the difference between conservative and growth and what a fund is… it can be hard to get these messages across, so we use these tools to educate customers. They are really important for us.”
The tools can either be product agnostic or linked to a series of products which are matched to a customer and determined by the selections and risk profile result within the tool. The prefabricated process, determined in the development of the tool, ensures the consistency of information given however, also allows an adviser to override predetermined selections with appropriate rationale recording. “Prior to using these tools we used a variety of laminated projection spreadsheets, and everyone was different. We can now record these conversations because the output is now saved against the customer’s file. This helps with compliance. We can demonstrate that we had this conversation, and that this is where we landed, and this is where the customer landed”. At review time, 6 months, 12 months on, the scenario modelling can be revisited to reassess a customer’s situation and progress.
The customers scenarios can also be used to build a full financial plan with the information flowing through to a templated statement of advice. This greatly reduces the time needed to prepare such documents. Taylor on the future of the tool “on this front we’re looking to build even more into these front-end projections in order to support the planning process, make it more intuitive to allow for life stages and changes. We’ve just added the ability to model property and multiple assets/portfolios or add cash in hand. We’re currently building a version that’s a little easier to navigate and can be driven by the customer, kind of like a roboadvice process.”
For more on this solution and the supporting advice workflows visit OMNIMaxsoftware.com