In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, Rob Pyne sits down with Neil Kendall, Managing Director of Tupicoffs and former Chair of the FAAA, to explore how forward-thinking advice firms can leverage technology to lift compliance, protect client data, and deliver a better client experience. Neil shares how his firm uses AI-powered tools like Theta Lake for full-spectrum compliance monitoring, MyProsperity for secure data aggregation, and Salesforce FSC to maintain live, daily balance sheets for every client. From reducing PI premiums to automating training insights and boosting cyber resilience, Neil’s approach is a blueprint for modernising financial advice.

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SHOW NOTES

Topics Discussed

AI-Driven Compliance with Theta Lake

Why auditing every client conversation is more effective than random file sampling
How Theta Lake flags compliance risks, keywords, and training opportunities
Customisable filters for terms like “complaint,” “unhappy,” and coercive behaviour
Real-world examples of dispute resolution and reduced PI insurance premiums

Client Engagement and Data Security with MyProsperity

How the portal enables secure document sharing and reduces cyber risk
Using two-factor authentication to safeguard sensitive financial data
Eliminating DocuSign costs via built-in e-signature tools
Helping clients understand the risks of emailing personal information

Real-Time Client Insights via Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

Integrating MyProsperity for daily updates on balance sheets and asset allocations
Visual dashboards for client, planner, and business-level views
Automatically flagging risk drift and account balance thresholds
Monthly archiving of visual financial snapshots for every client

Reducing Compliance Burden and Staff Costs

How AI reduced Tupicoffs’ compliance staffing costs by up to 80%
The business case: system cost vs. full-time compliance hire
Staff-friendly auditing experience with quick, pinpoint reviews

Cyber Security as a Business Imperative

Why Tupicoffs doesn’t manage in-house servers—and what they do instead
Strict access controls, device verification, and password standards
Why financial advice firms are high-value targets for hackers

Balancing Multiple Systems

Using Xplan for SOA production and comparisons only
Salesforce as the “source of truth” CRM system
Why Salesforce is easier to customise and more intuitive than Xplan
Working with a Salesforce partner to execute custom features like ID expiry alerts and live asset tracking

Quotes

“We can either get your cyber security right now—or wait until you’ve been hacked and lost $100,000.”
“No one wants to listen to 60 hours of audio a week. AI now does it for us, and better.”
“If a client disputes what was said, we just hit play. There’s no argument after that.”

Resources

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Trusted Adviser podcast, where you get a deep dive into the world of financial planning with industry leaders who share their stories of winning and learning as they charted their path to success. This podcast is for the curious. Those of you that like to dig into the detail. If that sounds like you get ready to listen and learn.

Rob Pyne

Welcome to this episode of The Trusted Adviser Podcast today. I’m joined by Neil Kendall, Managing Director of Tupicoffs, and a respected figure in the Australian financial planning profession. Neil is not only a former chair of the FPA, now the FAAA, but also a tech forward leader who’s re-imagining how advice businesses manage compliance, client data and cyber security. In this episode, Neil shares how his firm has integrated artificial intelligence into their compliance systems using a platform called Theta Lake, a tool that now reviews every recorded client meeting, email and phone call to flag risks and training opportunities with pinpoint accuracy, the result a more robust, more efficient, and more cost-effective compliance process with some surprising benefits, including a reduction in professional indemnity insurance premiums. We also unpack how Neil has combined my prosperity for client data aggregation and secure document exchange and how he’s used Salesforce financial services cloud deal with a live daily snapshot of every client’s balance sheet and risk profile systems, talk to each other, update automatically and support his team to respond in real time, something every adviser dreams of when a client calls through and expects you to remember everything about their position. This conversation is packed with practical insights on leveraging technology, not just for efficiency, but for deeper client engagement and bulletproof cyber protection. If you’ve been wondering how to future proof your practice while lifting the bar on service and compliance. This one is for you. Let’s dive in.

Rob Pyne

Welcome. Neil Kendall, to the trusted adviser podcast.

Neil Kendall

Thanks, Rob. Good to be here.

Rob Pyne

Great to have a chat to you today. Neil, we spoke a couple of weeks ago now, I initially reached out to you just before cyclone Alfred came flying through the coast of Queensland, and I said I saw you comment on a boutique financial planning principles group, which I’m a member of, but I saw you’d posted on that a couple of years back now, on a particular technology you were using to effectively use artificial intelligence and automation to better manage the compliance risks within your business. And so, I was really curious about that. I parked it into my someday folder, and that someday was a couple of weeks back. And I said, would you mind taking some time, Neil, to share a little bit of what that looks like for you? And when I saw it, I thought, wow, that’s super impressive. And then you went on to show me other very impressive things I want to talk about with you today. So, the first thing we spoke about was this tool. Is technology you’re using called Theta Lake, which, as I said, there really is about integrating your compliance processes in a systematic way, so that as part of your routine, you’re looking for areas of potential concern and training opportunities, I guess, for your team, if there are things that are being said or promised that perhaps are a little bit outside of what you would want. So, can you walk us through starting off, Neil, walk us through that Theta Lake and how it integrates with your compliance process, and how has it changed the way your team manages the risk of giving advice?

Neil Kendall

Okay, sure, I’m happy to do that. I mean, we take compliance fairly seriously, and I guess that’s the starting point. Is that you’ve got to have a serious commitment to compliance in your business. So we record all our phone calls, we record all our meetings, but those recordings are large and onerous to work through, so they were a matter of record, but never access, never used, and it was very difficult and cumbersome to do that, so we were looking for a solution that would give us an ability to understand what happened in phone calls and meetings without us having to sit down manually and Plow through 60 hours’ worth of meetings every week. Fader like were full of big promises. They said that their software could watch our video, understand the Australian accent, because the people we were talking to were in Texas, it would understand the Australian accent, it would identify compliance risks and flag those in a way that we could then Manage going forward. That was a pretty bold sort of statement, I thought, but we came to agreement we’d do a three-month trial. I wasn’t convinced about how they’d go with Australian accents. I’ve got to say, I was gobsmacked with the results and how good they were. So, Theta Lake effectively monitors every single meeting we have with a client, whether that. Meeting be face to face, whether it be zoom, whether it be phone, that’s managed, and all our outgoing email is also managed through Theta Lake as well. So, all of that goes through this compliance filter. The big change from us was that the traditional compliance methodology, I guess, is to randomly sample a very small sample and audit that, and if you have a problem and you go looking for more, if you don’t have a problem, you don’t go looking for more. Theta Lake was a different principle, that we’re effectively auditing everything. So, it’s a completely different approach to compliance, auditing everything, looking for exceptions and leveraging AI to make that possible.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, and when you showed me, I was pretty amazed and impressed at what it does do. You were showing me, as you say, every conversation, whether it be phone, whether it be an in-person meeting that you record with the client in the room, all of that’s being run through this filter. Effectively, it’s a way of actually everything being assessed for its integrity, I guess, and the way in which things are being explained, and not that people are necessarily trying to do the wrong thing, but sometimes they might be saying things that you need to catch them out. So, you’ve created this mechanism to review everything that’s going through your advice firm and automatically identify things that are of concern and really be much more systematic, as opposed to, as you said there before, randomly sampling files, which is a really hit and miss exercise. You’ve got everything covered with this technology, which is just so impressive.

Neil Kendall

Yeah, I think Rob one of the challenges with auditing files at all is that, potentially, an adviser only puts in a file what they want to. If you’re auditing a phone call or you’re auditing a meeting, you’re getting 100% of what actually goes on. You know, what you have is an accurate record. You’ve actually got the original interaction there that you can review. And Theta Lake points you to places where you might want to review. So, one of the beauties of the Theta Lake system is it’s very adaptable. So, when we originally got it, it came with a complete set of us, detections, social security numbers, which for us aren’t relevant. So, they were flexible that we could turn those off. And we said, you know, there’s other things here that are relevant for us, and so we’ve been able to turn those detections on the keyword filters. We could tell them what keywords we wanted to identify. So, the word complaint, the word unhappy, automatic flags. If someone says that we used to have an obscenity filter on that, if there was obscene language used, it would flag. But a lot of our clients don’t really get on well with Zoom, and so by the time they get on, they’re frustrated in the first couple of comments. Sometimes trigger the obscenity filter. So, we said we don’t need this. It’s not giving us any useful hits. And we get that people are frustrated with Zoom. So, you can turn them off. You can adapt them for your business. You can say different behaviours. So, for instance, in a Zoom meeting, if somebody was putting something on a piece of paper and showing it on the screen, that didn’t reconcile with the conversation, that flags. Now, I didn’t really believe that till I tried it, but I worked with my practice manager at the time, and I put up a bit of paper that said, call me on my mobile with the number. Didn’t say it and it flagged. It identified that that was an unusual behaviour. It looks for coercive behaviour. And again, you can modify and turn those things on and off as you want to identify what’s important to your business. So, they’ve been very good in terms of doing that. The other thing that I think is really important is when it flags in an hour and a half meeting that there are two points in the conversation that require review, it flags, and I can just click on those two points, and it can literally take one minute to do both of those reviews, as opposed to listening to an hour and a half of appointment to identify those two points. So that’s very handy, the way you can very quickly access the information.

Rob Pyne

And this is what you showed me, just the ability that it bookmarks those items. So you go straight to those items that it’s flagged. You can listen to them. Takes you to say a minute or two, and you’ve actually then reviewed that entire conversation in about two minutes, instead of listening back to the whole thing.

Neil Kendall

And then it tells me why it’s been flagged. So it tells me what behaviour caused it to flag, exactly where it is in the video or the phone call or in an email, so I know what I’m looking for when I get there, and I can listen to it and go, Okay, not a problem, or it is a problem, or it’s actually something the client said, and so we can decide whether that’s relevant or not relevant.

Rob Pyne

So go back for me to pre-Theta Lake days. When did you roll that out. And what did compliance look like for you before that? And how has Theta Lake specifically kind of dealt with the challenges you were thinking, how do I solve for this?

Neil Kendall

Yeah, so, our compliance was very much like everyone else’s compliance. Randomly select two or three files, go through those files, see what’s in those files. Us tick a bunch of boxes and go, Yep, all the things I’m expecting are in there. We did record the meetings, but no one was going to spend the time that it took to listen to those meetings unless something flagged so if the paperwork didn’t cause alarm, then nothing else would happen. What we found, in practical sense, is that things do flag up that are training items, things you say, hey, you could have explained that better. Or when a client says they’re unhappy, that’s a complaint. And this is the complaints procedure, so different things actually come up that we wouldn’t necessarily otherwise see. You know, one of the big benefits for us was this was a mechanism to store and sort all of that information. So, every meeting we’ve had for the last seven years is recorded, and I can search for it, by participant, by date, by any of those variables. And as our software use has evolved, we’ve been able to add in different components. So originally, we started off with just zoom meetings, and it did those. Then we were able to add a zoom phone, and so it did the phone calls and the meetings. Then we just started turning the Zoom meetings on for our in-person meetings and recording. And all this is automated. So, if I do a zoom meeting, I don’t do anything. It just automatically. It’s set up to upload straight into Theta Lake, go through the analysis and either fall into the further review or successfully reviewed bucket, if it does need further review, it automatically flags to the reviewer that I’ve nominated to actually conduct that review. And within the Theta Lake application, they can record their notes as they go. So, when they identify those things, they can say, not a concern, action taken, whatever they want to put in can be noted. So, there is a record. Not only that we’ve done this sort of AI review, but the manual reviews flagged has produced a result, and you can see who did it, when and where, and what their outcome was from that. So, if ASIC were to come knocking in terms of management and supervision, I’m pretty sure we could tick that box.

Rob Pyne

How do you think about then Neil, this question of recording saving, and perhaps maybe spend a minute talking about how Theta Lake saves and archives those records. How do you think about that in terms of, do you keep those records indefinitely while they’re a client? Do you purge them after a seven-year duration? How do you manage that process of the archiving and retention of records.

Neil Kendall

We maintain all of them permanently, and Theta Lake, as part of our annual fee, just includes the retention of all of that data. So, in fact, I checked the data just before this meeting. So, we have 1.3 terabytes of data on the Theta Lake server. It is, of course, two factor authentication, because this is all private and confidential information. So of course, it’s all under two factor authentication. We have a local stored copy that we use, but all of the Theta Lake is a backup, essentially, to all of that information. But for us, the beauty of it is it’s searchable. If I know the phone number of a person I’ve had a phone call with I can just search in the database in satellite in two minutes, every phone call to that phone number or from that phone number can be identified. If I know that it was with a particular planner on a particular day, I can pull up a list of all of those. So, the search capabilities are quite significant if I’m looking for something. If we had a conversation with a superannuation fund, then I’m able to identify what day that happened, and I know the call number for the super fund. I can find that conversation. And we’ve often been able to help the super funds with those conversations. When they couldn’t find them, we could say, Well, okay, here’s actually a copy of our recording of that conversation. So, it’s interesting that we’ve got more powerful systems than some of these large super funds.

Rob Pyne

Yeah. Can you think of an example or two of where it’s proven to be super, super useful, not just in terms of the routine checking and making sure you can train and check compliance, but a couple of examples like that one, perhaps, do clients feel more secure in this process. Do they feel more okay? Well, I can’t really challenge what was said my recollection of it, because I know the guys have recorded what was said. So can you talk a bit about a couple of those really key examples of where you thought, wow, this is really helping us a lot.

Neil Kendall

Yeah. Well, I think Rob That’s always important, and that’s not so much the Theta Lake piece, but just having an accurate recording. One. As a financial adviser, I know that everything that I say to my client and everything they say to me is recorded. So, from a behavioural perspective, I want to make sure that I’m not saying anything I shouldn’t be. And the clients are certainly aware, because we ask permission every single time they’re aware it’s being recorded. So, they know they can’t come in and say, I told you this. I told you that we did have an instance of a client that gave us an instruction, or, in fact, it was me gave me an instruction, which I said I didn’t think was a very good idea. He insisted on it being done. I said, well, that’s the risk you’re taking. It’s not what I recommend you do. And in fact, I’d recommend you don’t do it. I’m surprised. Surprisingly, three months later, it all went pear shaped. He was on the phone. What have you done? That’s not what I meant. I told you, just to do a quarter. You’ve done the whole thing. And his wife was with us at the meeting, and I said to her, you know, surely you were there. And she said, oh, I’m not getting involved in this. I said, okay, well, let’s just listen to the recording that’ll tell us exactly what was said by whom. And it was very obvious, listening to that recording, exactly what he’d asked for, exactly what I’d said, my rejection of it as a good idea, my telling him it was being done as his instruction, against my advice, and he was still disgruntled, but accepted fully that he had made the decision, not us, and he’d acted against our advice, and that’s the only instance I’ve had, but worthwhile not to be in a dispute over what would have been a million dollars.

Rob Pyne

Wow. Well, that’s fairly significant. You’d have to say, the power of actually having an accurate recording of what was said and what was promised. Obviously, the client can be selective. When they’ve lost a significant amount of money and they want to try and find someone to blame sometimes, perhaps for that, not always looking at themselves first. And what a great protection that is for any business. So, the power of recording it. So can you talk through you mentioned the earlier customised that, obviously from Texas talk to Australia. So can you talk through some of the key triggers you’ve customised to fit the needs of a financial planning business. Specifically, you talked about complaints if they say unhappy or complaining. What other things can you point to that you’ve actually done to customise the way Theta Lake treats conversations?

Neil Kendall

Yeah,so, there’s lots of things that we’ve done here. We’ve used a lot of the standard things as well. So, it recognises when credit card numbers are either given verbally, whether they’re displayed on the screen. So that’s a trigger for us because we shouldn’t have credit card details being discussed. It recognises private financial information being displayed on the screen. It recognises different forms of screen sharing that might be inappropriate, so we don’t sort of have to worry too much about porn filters and things, but I’m guessing some businesses do, but it recognises, if it’s a financial site, and can flag that, which obviously, for us doesn’t really matter. There are different ways of screen sharing, so screen sharing where it actually shows the URL to a confidential information. So, we discovered that a lot of us were sharing a document, but it had a URL at the top into our database. Now they shouldn’t have been able to act on it anyway, but it’s bad practice. So, we said to everybody, when you’re sharing a document, make sure you’re sharing it without the URL being visible. It’s just not good practice to make that visible. Make sure you’re not sharing our in-house CRM system with clients. So just being able to look at those sorts of things, coercive behaviour is an issue now. It flags coercive behaviour often. It’s conversations between clients, rather than us, necessarily. Yes, again, always worth just checking in to go, okay, what’s happening there. It sort of even manages tone that you know an aggressive conversation will flag. So I think sometimes, you know, it can be tempting for an adviser not to perhaps recognise a complaint because the definition is so broad, this system, we found, is quite effective at recognising a complaint and flagging that the things that it flags probably 90% of the time are not issues, but 10% of the time, they are things that we think we could do better, or there’s some training involved, or even maybe we have to do a breach report or a complaint, but the ability to be 100% comprehensive across every client interaction, and, in fact, every vendor interaction. So, when we’re talking to a super fund, and we had a situation where they gave us a piece of information about what needed to happen for a client. We followed that instruction. It didn’t achieve the results, which resulted in a loss to the client. We were able to go back to the super fund and say to them, this is the conversation we had with you. Here’s the recording, here’s all the information we were given. We followed the instruction. We were given the wrong information. So, the client needs to be compensated, but not by us, by you. And so, we had that whole recording because we knew when we’d had the phone call with the super fund, we were able to supply them with the copy of the recording that they mysteriously couldn’t locate when questioned.

Rob Pyne

Well, that alone, apart from the client scenario you just mentioned that scenario was, well, we were getting incorrect information from a provider. That would have to be two of the most compelling reasons for people to really consider implementing a solution such as you have there with Theta Lake, because we do want to be better on compliance. We do want to train our team to be more careful about what they say and how they say it, but just the protection it provides you against providers making erroneous statements that we rely upon, or clients making decisions that we’ve advised them against, and then trying to hold us to account for that. So, I mean really powerful examples there, Neil, as I said when I first saw you, show me and just I thought. What a great way to defend against situations that you’ve just described. So, can you talk through what are the some of the most unexpected insights you’ve gained from using Theta Lake over the past five years?

Neil Kendall

And I think while you’re talking about compelling benefits Rob one that we didn’t expect but came up was a reduction in PI insurance costs. Wow. So, you know, that’s always been a bug bear how much money’s gone out. I mean, in 55 years, we haven’t had a PI claim, and it was always annoying how much we were paying for pi. And so, we actually organised with our broker to do a demonstration to the underwriter of how Theta Lake worked. Now, as a result of that, we managed to get a reasonably significant discount on our PI insurance when they could see that we weren’t just doing random couple of file orders, it was everything being ordered. They could see the system at work. They were a bit gobsmacked at what the AI was able to identify, and they were prepared to actually discount our PI premium based on that and on our most recent renewal, they were prepared to continue that, as long as we gave them a commitment that system was still being used, which it is. So, you know, for us, that was probably a very unexpected, handy little benefit, that some of the cost of the Theta Lake application was offset by reduction in PI premiums.

Rob Pyne

Can you speak to that for a second in terms of that? I mean, that’s brilliant, obviously, another massively compelling reason to look at it. So, there’s a cost to the solution. Are you happy to share the quantum of cost versus the saving on the pi, and perhaps even then, talk about what it’s done in terms of your compliance staffing needs as well, in terms of the cost to support the business?

Neil Kendall

Yeah, sure. It’s not just our compliance cost which is important here. It’s the ability to get someone to do the job. So, no one in the world wants to sit down and listen to 60 hours of video a week and audio a week to do that audit. So, people just aren’t interested, but to spend 30 minutes doing effectively the same thing on pinpoint accuracy. Our compliance person doesn’t object to that. They’re quite happy to do that and go, okay, well, I’ve identified these issues, or I’ve listened to this meeting, or these parts of this meeting, and I’ve picked up this tone of conversation, or whatever it might be, and identify some training opportunities out of that. So, and what we were struggling with was the cost of a compliance person, in rough terms, is about six times our annual cost for the complete system. So, I think that it reduces the need for a compliance person by 80% so essentially, we’ve got 20% of cost of the compliance person, 20% cost of the software, and the other 60% we get to keep and then we get a pi discount on top.

Rob Pyne

That’s a really positive way to look at it because it’s reality, isn’t it? In reality, to try and get the same level of scrutiny that you’re getting through a system, you’d have to pay a lot more to someone who would actually be doing a really challenging role and try and keep them in their seat would be difficult. So now you’ve got a complete package where someone’s doing very pinpoint, accurate checking, and it’s saving you an enormous amount of their time and being more effective in the process. So more effective and lower cost. So yeah, it’s certainly a compelling proposition, but this business, like ours, or any other business that’s listening was considering implementing Theta Lake. What would be your number one piece of advice,

Neil Kendall

Honestly, Rob, get on with it. Look, I think, as a business, you have to decide on your commitment to compliance. So, if you are committed to a compliant, best practice business, this is a fantastic tool for helping you to do that. You need to make sure that you are doing the basics, because if you don’t record any of your meetings, if you don’t record your phone calls, then you’ve obviously got to get those processes set up. Theta Lake is effectively platform agnostic. So, it doesn’t matter if you do Google meet or zoom or Microsoft Teams, it all feeds in. So, you can do all of that. So, you know, from that perspective, when you’ve got your basic tech right, we obviously use Zoom phone. So that’s dead easy, but other phone systems can also be integrated in so I would say, get in contact with Theta Lake. Talk to them. We were their first Australian customer. They set up an Australian data centre so that our data wasn’t going into the US or Europe. Very responsive. They spent a lot of time in the first year coaching us through how to improve the system. We wanted our client service audits to be done by the head of client service. We wanted our financial planner audits to be done by our compliance person. Our other staff in the office were audited by our manager. So, we actually wanted the system to be able to say, okay, who was in that meeting? So, if it was Neil, it should go to the compliance manager. If it was Jenny, then it should go to the head of client service. So, you got to build that configuration up. But essentially, we sat with them on a couple of video calls for probably spent a total of three hours over six months, just to fine tune that the way we wanted it. They did it all for us, and it just runs seamlessly in the background.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, fantastic. So, I definitely don’t want to put the contact details of Theta Lake in the show notes for this episode, because I’m sure there’ll be people listening thinking that sounds pretty impressive, to say the least, and they’ll want to reach out us included. But Theta Lake isn’t the only piece of tech you’ve employed into your business near when we spoke a couple of weeks back, you showed me a number of other things which were equally impressive. So, you’re very focused around compliance, but also data security, so you’re trying to cover all bases here. And one of the things you’ve rolled out at Tupicoffs, and you’ve been around for a long time, you mentioned the history of the firm, and you’re well known as being a former FPA chair now the FAAA, so you’re a person that has been around a long time and has seen a lot of things, and obviously employing the best practices of businesses in the country. So, you have rolled out the My prosperity option for your clients, as well as a client portal. You talked about that with me, and you know about just the role it plays in your client engagement process. Can you talk a bit about that and how you see my prosperity being a really important technology and tool for your business?

Neil Kendall

Yeah, sure. I’m happy to look our original motivation was trying to get data from disparate sources. You know, we’re trying to give comprehensive financial advice. We want information from investment platforms, from brokers, from banks trying to get all that information. And every client comes with their own set of these things, and now acting in their best interests, we still end up dealing with 456, different investment platforms, so we needed a system that would capture that data so that we would understand a client’s position. You know, we provide a fairly bespoke service. Clients expect to ring up and just launch into their conversation without any background. They expect me to have at my fingertips their super fund, the current balance, their bank account, balances, their level of debt, where they live, their investment property values. And that’s time consuming to manually update. So, we were spending a lot of time preparing for meetings, effectively collating this information manually and preparing it. And so, the original motivation with my prosperity was it was a cross-platform data aggregation tool. Clients were sort of 5050 on that, and they saw the value of it. Some of them weren’t interested. Some of them were quite happy to do it. It’s migrated a long way from there. So, for us, we are very conscious about cyber security. We have extensive cyber security measures in our office. What we don’t have is any control over the client’s cyber security. And we have done seminars for them, and we’ve encouraged them not to all use the same password with a limited degree of success. But what really concerned us was clients would say, well, can you send me my statement of position? And our statement of position is quite comprehensive, names, addresses, dates of birth, current investments, account numbers, balances. It would be the perfect tool for someone that wanted to do identity fraud to have in their fingertips. So, we got to the point where we said to clients, we’re just not going to email this out, because we’re not convinced that at your end, the security is good enough, and so we’re going to use my prosperity Secure Client Portal. And so that’s been fantastic. You know, the only benefit of a hack like Medicare or the super funds recently is there is an increased level of consumer awareness about cyber security. So, we have the portal now for any confidential information that goes between us and the client goes through that portal, it must have two factor authentication on it. So, we’ve now got clients taking reasonable steps to protect the data at their end, whereas previously it was a username and a password. And I don’t want to tell you how many of the passwords were partners, name, last two digits of the year of birth, exclamation mark, and you could literally guess and say, Is your password? Rosie, 48 exclamation mark. And they go “How could you know that?” and you go oh it’s not that hard. So that client portal has been fabulous from our perspective. The other thing was, we actually saved a heap of money on DocuSign. So, we were paying for DocuSign. My prosperity has now done the leg work to actually get the DocuSign equivalents inside there at no cost. So, from that perspective, we’ve still got electronic signing but inside that secure document portal, and one of the dangers of a portal is that no one can remember their password because they don’t use it often enough. But now, when they’re getting secure data from us, when they’re signing a document electronically, they’re in and out of that portal quite regularly. So that familiarity means that they remember their passwords, they know how to get in and out of it. So that’s really worked fabulously well. The other thing that’s been amazing for us, my prosperity is about individual record keeping and the reporting across the entire. A client base for us is non-existent, but the ability to export that data into our internal systems that gives us a total holding we can, in literally two minutes, identify every client that has bhp, whether it’s in Macquarie wrap, in a self-managed super fund, in a broker account issue was sponsored. It doesn’t matter. We can find everyone who owns bhp in less than two minutes. So that ability to aggregate and dissect the data, which our internal systems do, means we have an asset allocation for every client every day that is up to date. It’s given us a real ability to chop and change the data, dissect what’s going on, identify variances from our risk tolerance to say, hey, the investments you’ve got have drifted north in levels of risk. And so, we think there’s something that needs to be done there. So that’s been fabulous. And our internal systems will also run min max across accounts that we set up. So, if I want to make sure that a cash management account always has $10,000 every day it’s checked. And if it’s not $10,000 if it’s not at whatever level I set, minimum or maximum, then essentially, I’ll get a reminder to say you need to have a look at this, because it’s outside the tolerance that you’ve set. So, getting that feed of data into your systems every day is just so powerful in terms of understanding your clients delivering service, I can tell them when they’re going to run out of money in their cash account before they know, and that’s always nice, rather than a month later when they haven’t been paid.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, I want to come to that because you showed me what you’re doing there with Salesforce, financial services cloud, and I’ll ask you that question in a second, but I just want to spend another second here on my prosperity, so you are using it for data aggregation. So, you have a full balance sheet from the clients automatically data feed, including platform data feeds, because normally people will be piping that through their financial planning software and then getting it from there. But you’re getting them directly from platforms. All bar Asgard I think was the only one you said to me that you don’t get direct from Asgard through my prosperity. But by and large, they’re coming direct from platforms. So that’s a massive win. You’re getting no bills around DocuSign anymore, because you’re now dealing with that through my prosperity in the in the portal, and you’ve got that secure environment for clients to transfer information now on a spin a second on that, because you said something when I spoke to you, which I felt was a really good way to sum up this concept that clients have about better data security. So, role play here with me for a second, Neil, I’m a client. You’ve said My prosperity. I’m going to use this for you because I protect you. And I say, oh, come on, Neil, do I have to use another software system? Can’t I just email you my data? You know, what’s wrong with that? I mean, how risky is it really? So, give me the answer you gave me when I spoke to you a couple of weeks ago.

Neil Kendall

Okay, and look, my answer is always the same to this. We can either get your cyber security right or we can wait until you’ve been hacked and lost $100,000 and then we can fix it. But given we’ve got a choice right now, why wouldn’t we fix it now, rather than waiting to be hacked and losing money? And I think the more hacks that occur, the more people just go, Yeah, you’re right. I just need to do it. So, there is an inevitability to being hacked if you don’t take reasonable precautions.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, no, absolutely. And as you say, the awareness that’s coming out from these recent cyber security breaches is just making clients more cognizant of just the risks that they are facing and the costs potentially they might be one of the clients on the end of that if they don’t get their affairs in good order. So, let’s turn to Salesforce FSC, because you showed me a demonstration of what you’re doing there. You’ve got all that data pulling through from my prosperity. So, you get a full balance sheet you do risk tolerances around their asset position. So, what are some of the key modifications you’ve made to your instance of Salesforce FSC that have made the biggest impact on the way you give advice and the way you manage just the client phoning in and expecting you to know everything.

Neil Kendall

Yeah, so, there’s a couple of things that we’ve done there. I guess. The first thing was hooking it up to my prosperity, which was a surprisingly easy and seamless process and relatively cheap process to do. So, we were able to just hook up the pipe from my prosperity, and that data feeds through every night, and it’s been, as I say, surprisingly easy to do, and it’s quite reliable these days. I mean, our first year was a little frustrating. I don’t think a lot of people do that with my prosperity, but it’s a much more robust system these days, and so it’s been pretty good that feeds into a visual diagram and populates all the values on it, so the updated values come through every day onto that it feeds an asset allocation model that tells us what the client’s allocation to equities, global, local equities, property, direct property, listed property, cash, fixed interest is, and produces a nice little graph so we can see What that is all of it’s clicked through. So, if I had an example yesterday, I had a client wanting to talk about cash, I could very quickly just identify as defensive assets. Click on that and see a listing of all the cash holdings the client had in different entities. Literally a one second exercise across all entities. We can also buy. Up that up in terms of, I can look at a client level, I can look at a planner level, and I can look at a business level. So, I can see if planners have got a different approach by the way the money is allocated. We can see every investment that every client holds, and we can see that again, aggregated at client level, planner level, business level, we know what our total business exposure is to BHP. We know what it is to the Vanguard international share fund. We can see each one of those, and so we can make decisions if there are announcements, and we can identify which clients might be in that regardless of how they hold those individual assets. It also feeds into our risk tool that effectively enables us to establish a daily risk level against the target that’s been set, and identify variances and say, well, you’re under risk compared to what you were targeting, or you’re over risked, and we can then take action to deal with that as well.

Rob Pyne

Okay, so, what was the biggest challenge in getting Salesforce, financial services cloud to work exactly the way you needed it for financial planning, because it’s an out of the box solution, but it doesn’t always deliver a customised version that you can use. Tell me how that rollout went for you in terms of implementation, and what was the biggest challenge in getting it to work exactly the way you wanted.

Neil Kendall

The implementation for us was relatively straightforward. We had a system, an old, archaic system called gold mine that we used, we exported all that data, and we got, effectively, a Salesforce version of the gold mine data. The thing for us was expanding our horizon and going well, what else could we be doing? Because it was literally a record keeping system. There was no interactivity, there was no ability to manage and manipulate data. So, it was about having a vision of what we wanted, and we have a Salesforce partner who we will work with to say, hey, we’d like to be able to see a client’s asset allocation visually. We’d like a traffic light on our dashboard that tells us when a client’s identity document is about to expire. We’d like a warning if their fee is unpaid, so we can have a conversation with them about that. We’d like to be able to have a link on that page where we can just click on the link, and the identity document will be produced, and I can see it live, whatever we thought of they could deliver. And that’s an ongoing process that we go, hey, you know, we’d like to be able to do this. How could we do that? And they will come up with solutions as to how we can do any particular task, whatever we think of, they’ve been able to come up with a solution to,

Rob Pyne

yeah, it’s great, isn’t. If you’ve got a wish list that you as you think of things, you’ve got someone that can help you execute on and everything you’ve asked for, they’ve been able to deliver. And that’s just a gift, because most people get very limited use out of their software, often because they just don’t have the means to get the best out of it. It’s got more capability than what people are using, and you’ve got a partner that you’re working with to really drive great efficiency and capability through your software.

Neil Kendall

Yeah, now we’ve been very pleased. I mean, we had these visual documents that get produced each day. We said to them, hey, we’d love to have an end of month copy of those for every month, and they’ve automated a system that literally produces a PDF copy, puts it into the client’s folder, and we’ve got a record of every end of month position for a client. So, if we have an issue about something that happened three years ago, we can go back and actually see visually their position every month and identify where an issue might have occurred. So, it’s great tool for that sort of thing as well, and all of it literally limited by your imagination,

Rob Pyne

for sure. So, in terms of technology, Salesforce is your primary CRM. My prosperity is a data aggregation and client portal system for you Theta Lake is there monitoring traffic in and out every conversation to check on compliance, but you also still use x plan. And can you share with me a little bit where does one system end and the other begin in your workflow between x plan and Salesforce?

Neil Kendall

Yeah, look, it’s a great question. Rob, look, I’m on a mission to reduce the amount of technology vendors in our business, because every vendor that you attach in is a weak point. If that attachment or linkage is a weak point, we use x plan to write financial plans. So as unfortunately, from all of our research, there is no better tool. There are much better tools, in our view, to manage your client records, your workflow, reporting things much better tools, but in terms of statements of advice, some of the abilities to do fee comparisons and other things that are quick and easy and automatic in x plan, we’ve not found anything else. So, I’m a reluctant x plan user, but you know, every para planner uses it. No one else in the business does. Everybody uses Salesforce as their core system, the Source Truth. But we haven’t found a better way of producing a statement of advice than x plane.

Rob Pyne

Okay, so well, solver for product comparisons, for comparisons, use x tools, plus for cash flow modelling. So, Scenario analysis and IPs for data feeds. Or are you sort of not really using IPS much anymore?

Neil Kendall

We do use IPs, but to a limited extent, most of that we do in Salesforce now. Yeah, sure.

Rob Pyne

And ultimately, for plant production, do you have a plug in from a third party for plant production, we use FinTech, which was an innovation that was developed by a former Iris x plan employee, Matt McGinty. We’re using that for our templates. What are you using there to make X plans? SOA templates work for you.

Neil Kendall

So, we’ve actually contracted within zoom to sort of manage our x plane installation, not unlike Salesforce, I guess, although not, I don’t think, to the same level of sophistication of Salesforce, but it’s very powerful beast, but you have to know how to use it, and you have to tailor it to work for your business. We’ve used in zoom because the tech in x plan is not easy to work with. It’s very specialised. The joy of Salesforce is that you can do a two-week course and actually make useful amendments and changes, and where we need to there’s a global workforce who can help us with Salesforce at a reasonable price.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, for sure, your technology and the way you’ve implemented it was just so impressive when I saw it, when I was really just checking in with you to ask about Theta Lake initially, because I was really curious about this question of how to better manage compliance risk in your business, in our business, that was just amazing to witness. And then you demonstrated how you’ve got my prosperity working, and how it brings in that client, full position, that balance sheet position, into Salesforce. It really did inspire me to think there’s more we can do for our business. And so, I couldn’t help but want to have this conversation with you and just share with our listeners a little bit more of what’s possible, because it’s an example of what’s available there, if you can just dig in and find the right tools to work together to give you a better way of communicating with clients. And as you said there during our chat, when a client rings, they expect you to know instantly everything about their situation. And every adviser that sits there in front of clients can relate to that scenario where the phone rings. Scenario where the phone rings and they say, hey, Neil, and they start to rattle off all these things, and they expect you to remember everything that was said in the last conversation, their whole balance sheet. Position you’ve got as close as anyone I’ve seen to that position where you can instantly get that. Is there anything else you want to share about how that’s all come together to make you a far more efficient and effective business.

Neil Kendall

Look, I think Rob the big thing that we haven’t talked about is cyber security, and I think that’s an important part. When you have all this data on your systems, we decided that we were not an IT business, and so we don’t have servers sort of managed by a local guy down the street. We’re using global players to store data. We have two factor authentication on everything. We have password management with enforced standards. We monitor passwords for reuse, for weak passwords. We take it pretty seriously. We have two factor authentication just to log on to your computer, but we also have it set up so that only our computers can log into our data sources. So, I think that’s still underrated by planners. For me, the number one risk to our business is a cyber breach that’s enough to put you out of business when you have to tell every client that their personal, private financial information is public, you’re not going to come back out of that with a good feeling. You’re not probably going to come back from that with most of your clients. So, you really need to make sure that that is super robust the other stuff behind it, when you can do lots once you’ve got it in there. But I do think that’s something that people are still not serious enough about, is the information we hold. The Personal Information wills are an incredibly personal document, financial information, all that sort of stuff, having that stolen would be, I think, for most businesses, the end of them, some of the global businesses survive, but with their reputation in tatters. So I think that’s something, whilst we haven’t discussed it here today, and unfortunately, we don’t discuss exactly how we do it, because that’d be giving away the game, and we don’t want anyone to know how our cyber security is structured so that they don’t have an opportunity to penetrate it, but it is something that people really need to focus on as financial planners.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, and perhaps we’ll finish there by me saying that I actually captured verbatim the things you said when we spoke about it a couple of weeks back, and I’m going to repeat it back to you because I thought it was so good I shared with my entire team. There’ll be nothing in here that you won’t agree with because you came out of your mouth a few weeks back and said, when talking to a client, and they are, oh, come on, Neil, really do I have to use this My prosperity system? Can’t I just email you and you said, we’re not going to email out this amount of sensitive personal information to your unsecured email address. My email secure. I’ve got two factor authentication, and it’s only available from certified devices, but I’m guessing that your email at home doesn’t have two factor authentication. It can be accessed anywhere in the world by anybody that’s got your username and password and that you’ve used that password in more than just your email. I’ve got your name, your date of birth, I’ve got your address and your account. Number and the current balance, I can convince pretty much any institution that I’m you with that information. You know, you don’t want that in the wrong hands. So, we’re going to use the client portal, but I’m happy to email it to you, if you like, yeah, and sort of, I thought that was so brilliant I captured it that I got a shit with my team that really just hits the nail on the head, and the client’s response was, okay, that’s fine. We’ll use the client portal.

Neil Kendall

Well, I mean, nobody takes it seriously. It’s an old saying from where I used to work, nobody takes you seriously till there’s a body on the tarmac, and I think until there’s a hack, it’s all just theoretical. And you know, we’ve had clients who’ve been hacked, and once they’ve been hacked, there’s nothing they won’t do to secure the defences. So, they’ve got to suddenly realise it’s real. But I think as a business, we have to realise we are very rich pickings. We are a concentration of high wealth people, and sometimes in a low SECURE IT environment, that’s a hacker’s delight. So, we really have to make sure that we’re not the easy target.

Rob Pyne

A timely reminder, given the recent cyber reaches we’ve seen with some of our big superannuation funds. Neil, I really appreciate you taking the time today to stop and have a chat again and just to share this with the listeners of our podcast, because it was just so impressive what you’re doing there. And I just had to have a chat again for my own benefit, but also for everyone that tunes in. So, thank you again. Neil Kendall, for joining me on The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Neil Kendall

Been a pleasure. Rob,

Thanks for tuning in to the trusted adviser. Hope today’s conversation brought you new insights and inspiration for growing your business. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favourite podcast platform, leave a review, and share it with others in the industry, and don’t forget to connect with us on LinkedIn for updates on future episodes until next time, keep building trust, embracing innovation, and driving success in your practice.