In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, Rob Pyne speaks with Stephen Bell — former adviser, Enzumo founder, and now the driving force behind Captegra and Hivrs. They explore how financial advice firms can shift from clunky tech stacks to streamlined process-driven systems, the power of Salesforce as a source of truth, and the realistic role of AI in advice delivery. Stephen shares his vision for real-time, electronic SOA generation and how automation can free up advisers to do more of what matters — all while staying compliant. A must-listen for any firm ready to modernise their workflows.
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SHOW NOTES
Topics Discussed
From Tech Stack to Process Spine
- Why Stephen believes process should dictate the tech—not the other way around
- How designing your tech around client experience increases efficiency
- The benefits of streamlining and automating workflows across the business
Why Salesforce Became the Foundation
- What made Salesforce a better long-term choice than Xplan or Dynamics
- How “click not code” development speeds up innovation
- Leveraging the AppExchange and open APIs for fast, flexible integration
Live SOAs and the Future of Advice Meetings
- How Captegra enables live, interactive SOA presentations in-client
- Reducing admin by handling implementation and approvals during meetings
- Why digital advice delivery aligns with QAR and regulatory reforms
AI in Advice: What’s Real and What’s Not
- Why Stephen says current AI tools are overhyped for SOA generation
- The critical need for structured, accurate client data
- What AI can assist with today—and what still requires a human touch
Embedding Compliance into Process
- Why compliance shouldn’t be an afterthought or add-on
- How automation helps manage FDS, LFA, and other obligations
- The problem with outdated fact-finding and licence-holder interpretations
Driving Change Through Workflow and Reporting
- Using tools like Calendly, Box, and Basiq to reduce manual tasks
- How real-time data shows where bottlenecks and inefficiencies exist
- The role of user training, persistence, and small wins in lasting change
Quotes
- “Technology should sit into the process and try and automate as much of the process as possible, versus you trying to build a process around tech that doesn’t integrate well with everything else you’re trying to do.”
- “If you build compliance into your process, then there is no compliance issue.”
- “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Resources
- Captegra – Stephen Bell’s advice technology platform
- Enzumo
- Salesforce CRM – Foundation of Captegra’s architecture
- Calendly – Integrated appointment scheduling
- Box – Secure cloud document management
- Financial Services Reform: QAR & DBFO
- Workato
TRANSCRIPT
Rob Pyne
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 chart their path to success. This podcast is for the curious. Those of you who like to dig into the detail and that that sounds like you get ready to listen and learn, and if you’ve been here a while and you’re getting value from these conversations, I’d really appreciate you subscribing or leaving a review. It helps others discover the podcast and join the conversation.
Rob Pyne
Joining me today is someone who’s not only lived the world of financial advice but also reimagined how it could work from the ground up. Stephen Bell began as an adviser, built one of the most well-known advice production businesses in the country with Enzumo, and is now leading the charge at Captegra rethinking how technology should serve the advice process, not the other way around. Today, we’ll unpack why the traditional tech stack might be holding your firm back, and what it means to build your advice process around a process spine instead, Steve, you’ve said technology. When we spoke the other day, we chatted about this, and I was very keen to learn more of what you’re doing, because we all know in zoom, everyone has been around the x plane world for as long as we all have. We know of Enzumo, and you had a lot of practices working with you, but you’ve said technology should follow process and not the way around. You’ve talked about your idea being a process spine versus a tech stack. Can you tell me how that reframes the way advice firms should think about technology?
Stephen Bell
Thanks, Rob, thanks for asking me along today. I think the process spine, or the concept of that started maybe seven or eight years ago. We were actually at a conference in Sydney in and it was at the time where everyone was starting to talk about integrations and what can be done with different technologies in their tech stack. And the actual presentation was called disruptive technology, and I was sort of sitting in the room, and everyone was putting their hand up because it was hand up, because it was kind of an open session, and everyone was getting asked, you know, what are you using, and what are you using for this and that? And I was sitting there going, this is actually really disruptive, because look, the main player doesn’t really integrate with a lot of solutions. And so, everyone that was talking about this disruptive technology, that they were adding to this tech stack was just that it was a disruption, because, you know, in one system, they’ve got to enter client details into the second system, and it just causes more and more pain. So, we started thinking, and we kind of love process. To us, everything in a business needs to be a process. Otherwise, it’s just a group of people doing whatever they think is necessary, and while they might have the same successful outcome, process obviously streamlines everything and gets everyone doing the same thing. So, we started down this track of looking at technology to fit into the process, and therefore designing your process first to be your client journey, the client experience that you want to provide, and also the experience for your team and minimising the amount of work. So, we think tech should sit into the process and try and automate as much of the process as possible, versus you trying to build a process around tech that doesn’t integrate well with everything else you’re trying to do. So that sort of builds this process spine where we can plug in all sorts of different technologies, as long as they talk to each other and actually take work off humans versus just being disruptive.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, it’s a great point. In fact, when you said to me the first time a few weeks back, you reminded me of something that Sam Patterson from direct wealth said when we spoke to him. He said, People in process trump technology every day of the week. And what you’re saying is the same thing, Steve, it’s essentially, first of all, get your people in place, then get your process in good order. Technology should support your process, rather than trying to actually work your process around the technology. So, I love that concept of the process spine, as opposed to this tech stack, which kind of does, as you say, imagery, as you’re putting things on top of each other, and nothing’s kind of working seamlessly in a process fashion. Yeah, and the process will never replace people, but it should reduce the workload and the stress. And, you know, we’re all so busy these days with the amount of information and work we’ve got to deal with. It should just, you know, help alleviate that. Now you’ve invested heavily in Salesforce. It’s the foundation of your solution. What were the shortcomings you saw in other systems? I mean, you’re very familiar with x plan, you would know that Microsoft Dynamics has got a really strong CRM, and there’s a provider out there that’s using that as the basis for their offer as well. So, what were the shortcomings you saw in other systems that made Salesforce the clear choice for you?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, I think to sort of build on that process by and concept, the only way we were going to do that was finding a system that had a very open solution. We, for the record, went down the path of when we first left in Zoomer, building our own CRM, and we stopped pretty quickly, going, this is just not going to work. Work, because we can’t keep up with the big players. And so, we landed on Salesforce. We looked around at all the different solutions, like lots of different options. And we landed on Salesforce because A it’s the biggest CRM in the world, and at that point in time, it was about five times bigger than Dynamics, and I think it still is. There abouts, you know, they’ve got the biggest App Exchange in a CRM world. There’s 300,000 apps you can plug in in a matter of seconds. And so, if we were going to build our business on our technology, we had to make sure it was going to be around. So, we decided Salesforce was the better option. And I still think we’ve made the right decision, because, you know, our development speed is really, really quick on all the tools that Salesforce give us.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, development speeds a lot of challenge, isn’t it? Because you’ve got this great big ecosystem around Salesforce, you can actually build things quickly with essentially, applications that have been built with Salesforce in mind. They’ve been built from the ground up with Salesforce in mind, from the get-go.
Stephen Bell
And Salesforce has a concept of click, not code. So, a lot of what we can do now, because we’ve sort of rejigged everything we’ve been doing, we can use config versus coding. So, you know, the skills are more accessible, it’s faster. We think it’s a much better solution to provide the efficiencies and the application for the end users.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, click on code sounds good to me too, because coding has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Yeah, it sounds like when I’ve talked to people about coding, there’s good coding and there’s bad coding, and if you get it wrong, it can be horrible and very hard to unwind. So, click not coding sounds like a pretty good way forward. And certainly, software and development of software is certainly changing dramatically over the years. So, you’ve described your solution as delivering in inverted commas, real time wealth through time efficiencies. Can you give us some examples of where your system dramatically reduces the time spent a business would normally take on common tasks?
Stephen Bell
Yeah. Look there’s obviously quite a few, I think the one that I think everyone would relate to being integration and scheduling of meetings that the whole advice industry is built around, relationships with your clients, trying to book those clients in efficiently for meetings, however often you need to, is a time-consuming task, especially, you know, with the number of reviews and the requirements these days. So, one of the first integrations we did was with a tool called Calendly, and a lot of people are actually using Calendly with x plan or other solutions, but it’s all very manual that we have automated the entire process. So, invitations go out if clients book on them, you know, triggers everything else that needs to be triggered inside our solution. And we’re automating for most of our clients, about 70 to 80% of their appointment bookings with zero human involvement. And one of our clients probably 2000 meetings last year. We think it probably saved them about $40,000 of support time, because the system did everything. And that comes back to the process line we could look at using something like Microsoft bookings, which everyone uses Microsoft, but we can’t automate the entire process, so part of it would still rely on a human to do something. And our view is that if we’re going to use tech in our process, mine, it needs to do the whole thing. So, we would use Calendly. We’re now looking at another zoom scheduler to replace Calendly, because it’s part of the Zoom products. And again, we can automate the whole process, so just that one application in a handful of workflows can save hours and hours of time. Yeah, for sure, I guess another one of phase previously, FDS is a bugbear of every practice. You know, we see so many practices spending hours and days on this with the functionality we have in Salesforce, we can automate, kind of the whole generation of that. We’ve got all the calculations that do, all the future fee projections, and so the LFAs, they just come out, you know, there’s no manual input required for an LFA.
Rob Pyne
Something else we spoke about a couple of weeks back. You’re developing a solution that generates an SOA live in front of the client. The SOA is the other big area that people look at and go, how can we make this more efficient? How can we drive down the cost of delivering advice? And the SOA production piece is, obviously, it’s a huge part of that. And you’re really interesting take on that whole process. How does the challenge of traditional model of plan prep, and how do you overcome that challenge, and this whole idea of putting an SOA loan from the client. Are you seeing people adapt to that? And can you just explain it first, perhaps, and then what resistance are you getting from planners or compliance teams and how you’re building that solution out?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, so, for the record, hasn’t been released yet, but look, if you look at the advice journey, I mean, what was it called customer advice record back in the 80s and 90s into a financial plan, then do a statement of advice. Now we’re going back to a customer advice record. So, all of these legislative changes have come through, and it’s always been a Word document where a power planner often uses a tool like x plan or anything else, and they go through that tool as quickly as possible, and they spit out this mass. A Word document that they then spend. Who knows, because everyone says a different number, but let’s say six to eight hours editing a Word document which no one has any visibility around compliance. There’s no oversight until it’s too late and it’s presented. So, we’re just looking at changing all of that up. We think of advice can and should be delivered electronically, so that you know, the whole document preparation can be done electronically, online, presented online. Yes, it can still be downloaded and given to a client via a PDF or, however. But there’s just better ways of delivering advice these days. I mean, how many meetings are face to face versus zoom? So why can’t we deliver the advice document electronically versus a Word document, and because we can do it electronically doesn’t mean that there’s hours and hours of editing. We’ve got all the tools and AI, which I’m sure will come up in this conversation somewhere, that we can use to make the generation of advice quicker.
Rob Pyne
Yeah. I mean, there’s been obviously a big project, the FAAA sponsored there around do SOA’s Ben Marshan was heavily involved in that and promoting the idea of SOA as being much more a video recording captured and as long as the prescribed nature of the advice delivery process was captured within that video recording, it meets the compliance obligation. So, your proposal, I guess your approach, takes the to another level, even where the actual SOA is being created effectively live in front of the client. And something that your colleague, Michael Keenan spoke about was this idea that you know, when you go through the process of buying a house, it’s a big transaction. It’s a massive purchase for people. And you said that people go through the process of looking at the property and looking at the brochure and getting all the specifics of what it is they want. They’re making those risk return trade-offs. So, what are we going to spend? He said, at the very end, you get this sort of compliance document to sign to say you agree with all the terms he offered acceptance. He said, that’s really a post sort of decision execution, really, as opposed to, at the moment, we’ve got this whole idea that everything should be up the front end, and the person has to kind of go through this written document to read, understand their decision. I really like what you described there is that we can change this whole model about how that process is being created with the client, as opposed to it being a very compliance-oriented process. Now, which the SOA is, you know, the promises of perhaps some reform for DBFO. If it does come through, maybe we’ll get some change here. And I know that’d be music to our ears like it would be mine. So, I look forward to watching this space and how you adapt to that, and your model seems to be well prepared for that.
Stephen Bell
Look, delivering advice electronically means you can put videos in there. Maybe the whole advice doesn’t have to be delivered via a video, but you can explain things better in a video, so you can include that. It just gives lots more scope to do things, because you can’t do anything like that in a PDF that’s sitting on the table in front of the client.
Rob Pyne
Indeed, let’s talk about AI. You said that’s probably going to come up. Well, here it is. So, I’ve looked at a couple of things where people have talked about AI doing some pretty amazing parts of the plan production. And I’m keen to get your perspective, Steve of how do you envision the role of AI in the future? Advice generation. We’ve heard some magic trick claims both of us in recent times. What’s realistic in your view and what’s hype?
Stephen Bell
Look, I probably against most people’s view. I think today there’s still a lot of hype in AI. I don’t think any AI today could write a statement of advice for a client. I mean, we had a client actually this morning say that the AI summary from zooms are not accurate. So, they’re saying that on one hand, but on the other hand, they’re saying but why can’t we use AI to write a statement of advice? So, I think it will get there, and we’ll certainly get closer to being able to write a statement of advice, but you still need the conversation and the understanding of a client that I think only humans can get to really fine tune and deliver good advice. So yes, I think AI will make it faster, but it’s certainly not going to be a click of a button, and the SOA comes out. I think the precursor to all of this is that AI is also based on data, and if you don’t have your data right, then the AI is never going to have a chance of doing anything for you. And I think in the industry, there’s been a lack of visibility on data, a lack of accuracy of data. It’s been a bug bear the fact finding anything you just got to do, because compliance people want you to do it, but unless you do all of that, and you have a format and a structure and everyone does it the same way, AI is useless anyway. So, it’s a journey to get to a point of using AI, and I think practices and software and technology, you know, a lot of groups will get there, but it’s just not there today.
Rob Pyne
So, in your view, what would a completely reimagined advice meeting look like from start to finish? Using your system, can you walk us through that vision of what that whole advice meeting process from start to finish would look like?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, well, there’s obviously still a lot to do before the actual advice meeting. We won’t be generating the whole SOA in front of a client and how. Especially with QAR, it becomes simpler to generate advice. You don’t have to have all the compliance, you know, 50 pages of disclaimers in there that we’ve been used to. So, there’ll still be preparation before the meeting. But actually, inside Salesforce, we built a presentation app where you can present all sorts of different things to the client. Inside your solution, you can update data. It updates the system straight away. And so, our concept is the SOA, we still be prepared before the meeting. You present it electronically inside the system, but if you want to, and if the adviser or the associate, you know, often there’s two people coming into the meetings. Now if, for example, things need to be changed, then, because it’s all electronic document, potentially it can be changed in front of the client. So maybe insurances get reduced because the premiums are too much because you’ve recommended what the client should have versus what they can afford. And so hopefully, our view is that inside the meeting, if documents and advice are presented electronically, then they can all be signed during the meeting. And of course, this requires information to be sent to the client before the meeting, because we still need to tick off same day sales and all the legislation that’s been around for years. But if we deliver the documents before the client, potentially, we can get them all signed electronically through the presentation app. Your ATPs are done, the implementation is kicked off. We straight through process to the platforms, potentially, the bulk of the work that is done in follow up administration from a meeting can actually be done in front of the client, and that would be a massive time saver, because if you look at all across our clients, the implementation tasks are the killers. Because you’re following up clients, you’re chasing them. They don’t return documents. You’re constantly chasing your tail trying to get an implementation completed. So, if we can do the bulk of that in a meeting, then efficiency just goes through the roof.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, indeed. The other thing that we spoke about the other day, talking about efficiencies, and everyone tends to go here straight away, talking about technology, which is integrations. Does it integrate? Does it integrates? The first thing people think about we talked about tools like basic which is the banking feeds provider we talked about box, which we use for document storage and Doc generation as well. Now automate that fact finding process and the data input so that potentially a document gets uploaded into box, and the AI inside box can read that. It knows what a text string looks like. It knows what a super statement looks like. It knows where the data belongs. In the CRM how far along from your experience are firms in adopting these practices of using tools such as box and basic and the like, getting their business more efficient using those sorts of tools? And what’s still holding some businesses back from what you’ve seen,
Stephen Bell
I think the biggest thing holding practices back is the compliance overlay. So, an AFSL might say you can’t use box because it’s stored offshore. An AFSL might say you can’t use this particular AI because it doesn’t meet our cyber policy. And probably the bulk of the issue is still compliance groups saying, hey, you need to fill out this paper document being a 40-page fact find, and until we can get that sort of changed, then we’re still going to be filling out paper documents.
Rob Pyne
Yeah. So, is it regulation, or is it licenses interpretation of regulation, or both?
Stephen Bell
I think it’s licensees’ interpretation of the regulation. The rules are, know your client. Now, how you know your client are, I think, up to you, as long as you know your client, then why does it have to be scribble on a piece of paper? Why can’t it be us getting the bank transactions through the basic integration and understanding that you’re doing X amount of super contributions, which is probably more accurate than asking the question anyway, in a meeting, yeah, and getting all of that data, which might be 40, 50% of fact finds, but at least it’s half of the data and it’s live and up to date.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, I’m amazed that people are still relying on paper fact finds. When you said that to me the day, I thought, really people still doing paper fact finds, and it’s the antiquated process these days, because the client’s recollection of what they’ve really got anyway, it’s going to be, I mean, yes, they can give you their name and date of birth and their children’s names and so on. But when it comes to their income, their balances and the like, you really want the source of truth, which is the documentation, anyway. So, the fact find process to my mind, seems logically done by way of getting the source docs. And then you build the fact find on the back of the documentation, not through the client’s conversation, yeah, the goals conversation has to be with the client, the bit about what do they want to achieve in their life, and what’s important to them and their values. All that stuff is definitely always the client conversation, but the quant stuff has to be done by way of source documentation. To my mind, it seems just so logical.
Stephen Bell
I agree. But there’s still groups out there that require a wet signature on a Fact Finder from a meeting, but, you know, it’s probably only got 20% of the data. So, what are we actually signing? What’s the compliance that that is actually ticking?
Rob Pyne
Yeah, when you said that, as I said the other day, I thought, wow, people still doing that. Licensees are obviously holding them back in that regard, and really not moving with what’s modern day process? Really? To get more accurate data and do it in a more logical way. But speaking of data, your x plan knowledge would be right up there amongst all the people in the country and probably beyond, because I know they’re in the UK as well, but your x plan knowledge would be very, very high compared to most people that operate in this world. You push data into x plan for advice generation, only using your software based on Salesforce. Why do you think Salesforce is the better suited place for the source of truth, for client data, as opposed to x plan? For those that are out there using Xplan as their source of truth.
Stephen Bell
I think that comes down to connectivity. Xplan has an API. It’s somewhat limited, so we can only get or push data into certain fields. Now that certain fields, when you add up, we’ve probably got 6000 data points we can collect. The Xplan API maybe gives us access to 2% of those. So, but Salesforce, we have a connection to every single field we’ve created. And if we create a new field this afternoon, the API is there instantly, which means we can push and pull data to any system that accepts that same data. So that’s a very different ball game. To be a source of truth when you think of that process spy, and if we pushing and pulling data from all sorts of different tools, the source of truth has to be a tool that will accept it, because if it’s not, if we want to go and collect or push a piece of data and our tool won’t allow that, then we’re kind of the whole thing falls over. So, Salesforce API is state of the art. It’s instant it’s updated. It’s reverse compatible, so they never release a new version, and everything breaks. So, it’s just there at all times.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, it’s a compelling proposition, isn’t it? In contrast, anyone hearing that would have to think, like, wow, okay, like, it gives you that moment of truth, isn’t it? To say, where is that source of truth? Where should it be? And I think it’s a very compelling argument that you make,
Stephen Bell
if you follow the process, fine. And if you don’t want to be entering data into all the different applications you’re using, your source of truth can’t be something that doesn’t connect. Yeah, and you fall over before you even open the door.
Rob Pyne
I mean, you’ve had a front row seat to the rise and fall of many advice tech players. Why do you think so many fail? And what differentiates the sustainable solution in this space?
Stephen Bell
There’s obviously different scenarios. I think this industry is full of acronyms. There’s lots to know, there’s lots to understand, there’s, well, it’s not brain surgery. There’s a lot of compliance, so you got to make sure you’re ticking off along the way. And we’ve seen providers come with absolutely no financial planning knowledge at all, and that hasn’t gone well. We’ve seen institutions try, and we all know why that hasn’t gone well, and then you’ve got VCs that expect a small check to be able to write an advice solution, which is not a small thing either. So, there’s a myriad of reasons as to why some of these groups have fallen over. I don’t think you can pinpoint one thing, but if we had to pinpoint one thing, I think it would be lack of knowledge,
Rob Pyne
yeah, lack of industry specific knowledge, lack of understanding of the advice business. They’ve come from a tech background. They haven’t lived the advice world like you have, like I have. They don’t have that intimate understanding of the business they’re in, because software is just a solution. But after I’ve said the business, don’t they?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, you’ve got to understand the business, especially from our side, we really like to partner with our clients and create efficiencies. If we don’t understand the business, then what are we trying to do? We just don’t want to sell a tech solution. That’s not what we’re doing. So, you’ve got to understand the industry. So that’s the big one. I think,
Rob Pyne
yeah, you’re definitely on point there. And when we spoke about this question of rising fall of tech players and who’s going to survive and who’s not, and you’re very well placed to have a perspective on this. And obviously it’s, it’s an opinion, you know, factual proof to prove to be the case over time, but you mentioned in five years, it may just be your solution. Fin 365, annex plan left standing. What makes you confident that your model will be one of the survivors?
Stephen Bell
Obviously, a lot of bias.
Rob Pyne
But I’m keen to hear from you know, your perspective on it. You’ve obviously got real strong belief in what you’re doing, like all technology has, but you’ve got that unique industry perspective. You’re bringing understanding of the business to the table when you’re building technology. So, you are well placed to make a judgment call this?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, I think a lot of it’s got to do with your base technology. I mean, x plan is huge for the incumbent. They’re going to be around forever. They do a great job. They’re the best in advice. You know, right now, I think unless you’re building on a platform like Salesforce or dynamics, the Australian industry is just not big enough to fund $100 million check for someone to build something that big. I mean, we have 1000s of developers working for us that we don’t have to pay, and that’s a godsend, because every quarter we get a release that we haven’t had to put any money into, that we can deliver to all of our clients. And yes, we build on top of that. With our team, but you can’t compete with that in this industry, I don’t think, unless you’ve got very deep pockets, which no one really does anymore.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, makes a lot of sense, because it’s kind of the same reason we’ve got a Salesforce based solution now with Practifi, but with the same logic that you just applied there, Steve, it’s like to go with a proprietary, built solution that isn’t built on one of those major two providers in the CRM space. You’re really relying on them to have very, very deep pockets, very competitively priced, potentially, or just something that other people can’t replicate. And it seems to me like inevitability is that one of those two players, and fin 365 is built on rocket Dynamics CRM Practifi, and your solution built on Salesforce, it’s got to be these players that are built on these really robust platforms that have got huge amounts of you, say, 1000 developers working on them, building improvements that you can leverage as they roll them out in upgrades. So that makes so much sense to me, too.
Stephen Bell
And I think it comes back to an earlier question about why a lot of groups have failed. I think as soon as you go out and get VC money of any description, you’ve got someone breathing over your neck with either an open check book or a closed check book. Obviously, the sooner it closes, the more pain you’re in. And you know, you see it. They some groups have hired 10, 2050, 100 developers because they think they’re going to build this amazing solution. And everyone is instantly going to jump from one to the next, and that’s just not the way the industry works. You know, no one’s going to jump out of their solution right now, until they know that you’re around for a long time and you know what you’re doing, etc. So, the VCs start breathing down. There’s more pressure. The check book closes, and then it’s all over. Yeah, very different.
Rob Pyne
How do you balance the innovation versus compliance question, particularly in light of QAR and what promises to be further reform with the DBFO bill, we’ve got expectations of changes there. How are you balancing that innovation and compliance question? Because compliance the landscape is shifting.
Stephen Bell
I actually, think that’s the easiest question you’ve asked today. If you build compliance into your process, then there is no compliance issue.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, rather than being prescriptive compliance, it’s like, if you just do things in a way that is functionally compliant, then you don’t need to think about compliance as an overlay. It’s actually an embedded part of the process,
Stephen Bell
Exactly. And there’s always things that compliance groups pick up, you know, in an audit or a review, it doesn’t matter, and you just build that into the process, being mindful that you don’t want to build a process that is so clunky and cumbersome because it’s had years of compliance overlay thrown at it, so it’s a balance, but compliance is just making sure something’s ticked off in a process.
Rob Pyne
Many firms still are clinging to outdated ways of working. We’ve spoken about it with licensees being potentially part of that problem. What’s the most common mental model of behaviour that firms need to unlearn if they truly want to modernise their business?
Stephen Bell
That’s another good question. And again, I don’t think there’s one answer to that. I mean, change is hard, and we see it all the time, and a lot of people think that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Like I’ve been sending my text messages manually on my personal mobile phone for 10 years. Why do I have to change it? That’s probably the biggest one we come across, that they just don’t feel there is a need to change. Because maybe we’ve been presenting, you know, our solution, to the business owners, the stakeholders, and by the time it gets delivered down to the end users. They’re like, but hang on, I’ve been doing it this way for 20 years. Why is your way any better? And I’m not saying our way is any better. I’m just saying it’s probably going to save you 30 seconds, five minutes, 10 minutes, and if it’s the same outcome, then isn’t that a win? Because you get to go home 20 minutes earlier. You’re not as stressed because there’s so much to do. So, it’s just taking these users on a journey, which we tell every one of our clients, this is a 12-month journey. If you come with us, we’re going to work with you for 12 months, full on, and we have to take your users and your team on a journey to understand that there’s better ways of doing things, and yes, it’s changed, and yes, it’s hard, and yes, you’re not going to like it, but at the end of the day, you’ll be a lot happier because we’ve saved you all of this time in your job.
Rob Pyne
Yeah. How do you get them to overcome that sort of status quo bias? Do you sort of focus on, you know, look at the business. You can see the problems that you can solve for. How do you get them to see those things as problems when they maybe don’t see them as that, because they’ve kind of been doing it this way, and it’s working. Okay? Do you try and use other firms who’ve adopted technology and how they’ve demonstrably changed their business because of the technology they’ve embedded with, process obviously being the core part of that? So how do you get people to kind of overcome that sort of status quo bias and see the problems they really have they don’t even know they recognise.
Stephen Bell
Yeah, to be honest, it’s just persistence, and it’s training, and it’s effort to make us educate the users. It’s tough, like we have clients that just don’t want to change, you know, users that don’t want to change. So, we’ve just got to keep training them. We’ve got to be persistent. We try and guide them. Their leaders, their team managers, whoever it might be, to try and educate them that there is a different way of doing things and just persistence.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, do you have champion firms in your cohort of clients?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, definitely have some firms that love what we do, and we actually love working with them. And I think those are the groups that come to us and say, hey, we’ve got a bottleneck. We found this issue in the business today. They just give us the problem, then we’ll go away with our team, and we’ll try and come up with a solution for that problem. There are other clients, of course, that come to us with a problem, and they tell us the solution, and then we try and squeeze that into the technology, because that’s what they want. They’ve already got this predetermined idea of the solution. And those are the groups that are maybe not as far along as their journey, because they haven’t accepted the, you know, the trust and that we know what we’re doing, and we think we’re good at what we do. So again, it’s persistence.
Rob Pyne
Before I finish up, I want one more question I would like you to sort of touch on here. Stephen, when I first heard about your business, I heard it as a different name. I heard it from Matt at Almans, and he talked about a thing called Hivrs, H, I V, R, S, and was about a process tool that reminded me a little bit of what I heard Pat Gardner say on a different episode when he was talking about Workato. Can you spend a second telling us a bit about Hivrs and what that does for your software, and then maybe how it all ties into how you aggregate data through one source of truth platform, which is Salesforce.
Stephen Bell
Yeah, so, we’ve got two businesses, Captegra and Hivrs. Hivrs we’ve separated because we think there’s a bigger opportunity outside of just financial planning. And we actually started with Hivrs building kind of an automation Well, it is an automation platform like Workato, but specifically built for financial planning industry and just integrating all those applications. And we spent a lot of time, and that’s something that back when we first decided to use Salesforce, they had this tool called process builder, which was really old and ancient, really didn’t do too much. So, we thought Salesforce is a CRM, let’s build this automation engine inside and on top of Salesforce. So that’s where it started. Of course, Salesforce came out with their billions of dollars of research and launched something called flows, which is their version of automation. And of course, I think they spent $8 billion on this last year, which we could never imagine of spending. So, we’ve actually re-engineered our hives platform, because Salesforce flows awesome, but they’re meant to be instant workflows. But in reality, workflows aren’t instant. So, hives still has this place in the ecosystem process spine that any integrations that Salesforce don’t do, or that take time, like Salesforce won’t integrate with other AI platforms, because AI takes, you know, one minute, two minutes, to give a response. So, we use this integration engine over the top, called Hivrs, to integrate with everything that Salesforce won’t do, which is really good because, again, it allows me to use the Salesforce tools to do all the stuff that they’re going to do, but just build this little, tiny piece over the top to do all the extra stuff that we want to do. And that’s actually worked out really well some of the things we’ve built and integrated with since we’ve integrated with the new flows from Salesforce. It’s really, really powerful.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, you’ve touched on something there that reminded me, we complete the adviser benchmarking study that dimensional fund advisers does every year, and the results came out literally only two weeks ago. And first all around the world, many firms in Australia, New Zealand as well, participate in that, including online partners as an example, the number one issue that was listed for firms that were $2 million revenue or above. The number one issue that they were grappling with and trying to improve upon was implementing workflow. It’s actually the top result. So, what you’re talking about, it’s just to me, that it is almost the number one issue people are facing. How to actually get more efficient workflow, such that you don’t need no people, but you need less people, because they aren’t having to kind of just figure things out as they go. They follow a process. The workflows Follow the bouncing ball, if you like. That ultimately, is the engine of the business, isn’t it really having great process and having workflows to really make sure people can follow that track and stay on that track, so that you don’t have to teach a new person walking the door based on your preferences and your style, only to find the guy the next cubicle is actually doing a different thing altogether. So, there’s one way of doing things, and everyone’s following that way, and that’s how you get real efficiencies, isn’t it?
Stephen Bell
Yeah, I agree, and I think something I forgot to mention with one of your earlier questions about how we help with the change management. One thing that this industry has lacked forever is reporting. Not many solutions have visibility on data and reporting and especially down to the point of seeing how long each task takes. So, with our solution, we can see exactly down to the second how long everything is taking. So, we can actually come into all of our clients and say, right, let’s look at this month, because that’s your bottleneck. But we can’t do that. We don’t know what. You’re a passport or next where, because there’s zero reporting, there’s zero visibility, and so that’s a big part of having the knowledge to know, right? Where are the issues in my business? What process do I need to work on? What team or member do I need to work on? Because we can see that process one is taking user one twice as long as user two. So, what is user one doing that we can help with, from a training or a perception or whatever it might be, that can actually bring that time down to the same as the other users, so you just don’t have any visibility like that in any other system.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, and Salesforce is such a powerful tool for that, isn’t it, to be able to report on and analyse what’s going on, because we happen to be in the business of financial planning, but it’s a business, and if you actually can follow the evidence of what’s going on in your business by getting data reports, you know, analytics of what’s happening, it just puts you in such a more powerful position to make informed choices about what you’re going to do to improve the way your business is operating. And I couldn’t agree more, it’s, in fact, the reason that we moved to a CRM that was built on Salesforce back in 2017 for that very reason, I just didn’t feel I could get visibility out of the business. How you going to run a business if you don’t know what’s going on? And you’d sit there with a client, and you get a full fact find from them, in whatever form you still do that, yep, you actually then make informed choices with all the data and evidence you’ve got, we were trying to make informed decisions about our business without that visibility over what was going on our business in the first place. So couldn’t agree more, it’s crucial that you get good metrics on your business, and you can actually pinpoint where there are pain points for you to kind of clean up. So-
Stephen Bell
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, totally. Any final words you want to add, Steve, about what you see the future of technology in the financial planning space in Australia looking like we talked about the main players, what you’re building? Any final thoughts before we wrap up today?
Stephen Bell
Hadn’t thought of anything until just then, but I think you know, for those listening, everyone’s constantly looking for new technologies, new ways of doing things. I actually don’t think that’s necessary. If you break down a tech stack of a practice, there’s probably only 678, pieces of technology that you really need to use. So just pick whatever you’re going to use, embed it as you know, depending on whether it’s going to integrate with everything else you’re using, of course, but just stop looking for the next thing, like everyone’s looking for the bright and sparkly solution that’s going to write the SOA in 10 seconds, but it’s just not going to happen. So, you just got to chip away at these things gradually, like integrate Calendly. Save $40,000 a year, then free up some time to do the next one, but don’t keep changing from one thing to the next. And I think that’s where we certainly see a lot of clients that are always looking at the next silver bullet, but there just isn’t one.
Rob Pyne
I love that it’s actually speaks a lot to the way we think, as well as this idea of the aggregation of marginal gains, it’s actually the compounding effect of improvement over time that actually builds strong businesses. And it’s not trying to go from zero to hero in one fell swoop. So exactly agree more. I really appreciate Steve. Did you have anything you want to add there before I wrap up?
Stephen Bell
I was just going to say Garth from our office, he loves the 1% rule. If we can improve 1% a day, then at the end of the year, we’re 365% better than we were without the compounding effect.
Rob Pyne
Yeah. No, I love it. Couldn’t agree more, and this is the true message, really about technologies, don’t try and go all the way in one magic solution, but look for ways you can constantly improve everything you’re doing, and let that compound over time. But Steve, I’ve really enjoyed our chat today. I enjoyed it a couple of weeks ago when we had a preliminary chat, but you’ve offered up some great insights on how we can rethink the advice process with technology that actually makes a real difference. I really appreciate you taking the time today to join me on the Trusted Adviser Podcast.
Stephen Bell
Likewise, Thanks Rob.
Rob Pyne
Thanks for tuning into 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.