Nick Perrett, CEO of Yarra Lane Group, explores how financial advice firms can harness AI agents and robotic process automation (RPA) to revolutionise their operations.
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In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, host Rob Pyne sits down with Nick Perrett, CEO of Yarra Lane Group, to explore how financial advice firms can harness AI agents and robotic process automation (RPA) to revolutionise their operations.
Over the past two years, Nick has been quietly transforming Yarra Lane’s multi-disciplinary practice – which spans financial planning, tax, legal, lending, insurance, and bookkeeping; by embedding “digital staff members” into everyday workflows. The result? Faster turnaround times, consistent processes, happier clients, and human advisers freed up to focus on high-value work.
Nick shares how his bots, affectionately named “Henri” and “Grace,” handle everything from preparing annual review packs and updating insurance data to valuing client properties and building presentation decks. He explains the technology behind them, how he ensures data security and compliance, the cultural shift within the team, and why automation is as much about improving client experience as it is about saving time.
Whether you’re a principal, practice manager, or adviser curious about where to start, this episode offers a practical roadmap for integrating automation into your firm, without losing the human touch clients value most.
LISTEN
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SHOW NOTES
Topics discussed
- How a simple conversation kick-started Yarra Lane’s automation journey.
- Why Nick chose not to become a tech company and instead partnered with specialists.
- How AI-powered bots operate across six professional service divisions.
- The process of turning a screen recording into a fully functional automated workflow.
- Practical examples of high-impact automation in financial advice:
- Annual review preparation
- Portfolio and insurance data updates
- Property valuations via RP Data
- Generating client-ready PowerPoint packs
- Ensuring privacy and security when deploying bots in a regulated industry.
- The unexpected cultural benefits of removing repetitive tasks from staff workloads.
- Measuring ROI through hours saved, productivity gains, and client experience improvements.
- How automation influences hiring decisions and team structure.
- Nick’s long-term vision for advice firms with “digital employees” working alongside human ones.
Quotes
- “We don’t want AI to recreate everything we’ve done, we just want our processes done really quickly.” – Nick Perrett
- “Bots don’t work eight hours a day, they work 24/7. But the real magic is redeploying your people to do higher-value, client-facing work.” – Nick Perrett
- “Automation forces standardisation. If you want consistency in client experience, this is the game changer.” – Nick Perrett
- “In five years, there’ll be agents offering the services you do faster and cheaper. The time to start is now.” – Nick Perrett
Key takeaways
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Start simple, scale fast – The first automated process takes the longest, but each subsequent build is faster.
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Target high-frequency or high-duration tasks – Daily tasks or long processes yield the biggest efficiency gains.
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Automation forces consistency – Bots ensure every process is done the same way, every time.
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Protect client data rigorously – Keep bots operating entirely within your secure environment.
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Measure ROI with precision – Track hours saved, costs offset, and capacity gained for high-value work.
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Automation doesn’t replace humans – it elevates them – Freeing staff from repetitive admin lets them focus on client relationships.
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Cultural buy-in is easier when you remove the tasks no one enjoys – Staff embrace tech that eliminates tedious work.
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SMEs are in the automation sweet spot – Big enough to have process complexity, small enough to be agile.
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 if 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. Today on the Trusted adviser, I’m joined by someone who’s not just thinking about the future of advice operations. He’s building it. Nick Perrett is the CEO at Yarra Lane group. They’re a multi-disciplinary firm that includes financial planning, tax, legal, lending, insurance and bookkeeping. And over the past two years, he’s been quietly transforming how his business runs through the use of AI agents and robot Process Automation. What started as an internal experiment has turned into a powerful and scalable approach to automating everything from client review preparation to admin workflows, and now, through a partnership with VBP, he’s making that available to other advice firms too. In this conversation, we’re going to do a deep dive into how it all works, what the bots actually do, where the biggest efficiency gains are and how this changes the way we think about team structures, client experience and the future of advice delivery. Nick Perret from Yarra lane, welcome to the Trusted Adviser.
Nick Perrett
G’day. Rob, how you doing? Thanks for having me.
Rob Pyne
I’m doing very well. Nick, we had a chat a couple of weeks back. You were showing me a bit of what you’re doing over there, and I thought that’s pretty impressive. Everyone’s talking artificial intelligence, and here’s someone’s actually has gone head first in and actually done something really productive and powerful with the ability of using artificial intelligence and robotic process automation. So I’m really keen to dig into it with you, Nick, and just get you to share how you started experimenting with AI driven chat bots. You’ve called a couple of them. I think you’ve got Henry and grace in operation digital team members and just how they handle repetitive admin tasks. So let’s start with what prompted you to explore robotic process automation initially, and what was the very first use case you successfully automated?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, so how I started the journey into this world was just simply becoming aware of it. So I was at a peer group function over two and a half years ago, and I was talking to another operator there, and he mentioned that he was building a bot and that, you know, set off something inside of my brain to say, God, I got to have a look at this and see what it’s about. So that it was as simple as that, just becoming aware that this was a possibility, and there was another firm out there using it, but that was it. That was the beginning of the journey. So I reached out, and then started just exploring and asking questions and seeing what was possible. And then when I began, I very quickly saw where this was heading. And, you know, I now know today that this will be a massive part of not only our business, but every business in the next short space of time, it’s happening quick. So I imagine three years this will be, you know, really implemented, always for our business.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, when you say you had someone that had built a bot or more than one. So what does it take to build a bot? Is it using a particular large language model? Just give me some sort of a sense of what it takes to actually build a bot. Is it coding? Do you need a coder to write this stuff? How does it actually
Nick Perrett
work? Yeah, you do you have, like, a coding team that sits there, and we don’t have that. You know, I’ve sort of deliberately taken an approach that we’re a financial services business. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re good at. I’ve got no desire to become a tech company and start hiring hundreds of coders. So the reason for that is I’ve spoken to a lot of peers over the journey. And look even ourselves, years ago, we went and spent money on bespoke software that we built ourselves, and, you know, we thought it was great. And I’ve got some peers that have spent millions on software that is designed to be the perfect solution for them. But the problem with that is, soon as you build it, you need to maintain it. And if you’re not a software company and you’re not maintaining and keeping up to date, you’re out of date very quickly. So just to be clear with the listeners, we don’t want to be that company, because we just don’t have the capacity and the resources and, quite frankly, the skill set, and don’t want to get into it. But is there a team of coders building it? Yes, there is. I’ll soon do it. You know, they sit there, they write code, they step by step, program in exactly what the task is. So, yeah, that’s how it’s built in the background.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, great. So tell us a bit more about Yarra Lane before we get into the actual technicals of how you’re using bots. You cover almost everything when it comes to financial services. So clearly, there’s great capacity here for automation to speed up the way all those activities are actually performed. Can you just give us a high level view of Yarra lane as a group? I mean, all those different services you offer? And client types and the markets you’re in and so on.
Nick Perrett
Yeah, we have six different professional services that we offer under Yarra lane, and we’ve evolved over time just knowing that our professional clients that we largely deal with are time poor and struggling to keep up. So what we try to do is put it all under one roof, so that you’re not having to go and find a relationship with an accountant, then a relationship with a planner, and then you’re not sure when to use who at what time, and a relationship with a mortgage broker, a relationship with an insurance broker. So it gets quite complicated. I think for people, for us in the finance world, we think it’s quite different, and they’re all different streams. But I sort of have a view that people out there that aren’t in our world just think we’re all finance guys, and, you know, I’ll talk to one of them. So that’s sort of our mantra. We try to get it all under one roof, make it really easy for clients, so that they can come in and, you know, you had a trusted adviser. And I know that’s the name of the show, that that’s what we try to pair up. There’ll be someone in that relationship that the client really likes and they get along with, and they should be able to guide them through the different services they’re going to need depending on what’s happening in their life at that time. Could
Rob Pyne
that trust adviser be a financial planner or an accountant or a lawyer in your team? It will be someone that’s relationship manager, but they’ll be the ones to kind of coordinate the third party and orchestrate things
Nick Perrett
exactly and bring in the right professional at the right time. So you know, you’re buying a house, you’re going to talk to the mortgage broker. You’ll talk to one about conveyances to help to make that smooth. And there might be a planner at that point who’s the dominant person in the relationship. Cause we do all the services, we go on the journey for quite some time with our clients. You know, we can pick them up at age 25 when they’re starting a professional job. And you know, they’re probably not a fully engaged financial planning client at that stage. Obviously they’re just starting, but they are really engaged tax and accounting client. And then they’ll need certain things, like they might get income protection, but that might be it from a planning point of view. But they will need tax services. They might buy their first investment property, so need a mortgage broker, and then you fast forward all the way through, and you know, you get into your 60s, and that client sold their business. The tax return is becoming pretty simple. That trusted adviser might have been the accounting person at that stage, but it transitions over, and what we see is the planner becomes the dominant contact at that point, if we’ve done our job right, and then the clients will naturally have a stronger relationship with the planner. So we think that you know that trusted adviser can shift depending on where the client’s at in their journey.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, great. I want to get into the digital staff members that become a part of that team structure in a second. That’s what, obviously, the conversation is going to be about. But just because I’m super curious, did your business come together by way of bringing in those third parties, acquiring accounting and legal, or just having people that you hired in to build those divisions within the team the Euroland group.
Nick Perrett
Yeah, we’ve been around for over 40 years, so we’ve done it slowly. And some of those areas, we’ve just hired a person and built out the skill set, and then, you know, having a lot of clients with the need, we’ve just slowly built it up into a proper standalone business. And then there are other areas where we’ve done acquisitions to bolster that quite quickly and get the right people in place. So bit of a combination.
Rob Pyne
So you’re really well placed, I guess, to apply some of this automation and AI into your business to really get efficiencies at all those divisions that you’re describing. And some of those would be very admin heavy. I mean, many of them are admin. Are admin heavy, but in professional services, that’s kind of the nature of the beast. So when we spoke a couple weeks back, you said, these bots log into your system. So they log in, they move the mouse like a staff member. They can complete end to end workflows across platforms like XPlan, like SharePoint, for document storage for the tech minded listener, what AI model or framework are these bots built on? Are they powered like, open, AI, chat, CBT, or is it custom code? What’s the kind of the underbelly behind these automated bots that are processing workflow for you guys? So
Nick Perrett
it’s funny you say, just tracking back when you said something. It’s great that we’ve got all these professional services, but in some ways, I wish we had one, because if I’d been building processes for one area for over two years, I would love to be able to see where that business is going to be, whereas, because we have spread them out across all of our divisions, I feel like they’re all getting started, but they’re not saturated in any one spot. Yeah, so it’s exciting if you’ve got one, because you’ll get there probably quicker than we are, because we’re doing it across so many areas. But yeah, in terms of the language, like, it’s not AI, so we use AI Absolutely and you know, rpa, robotic process automation has been around for a long time, and it’s sort of been clunky. We experimented with it, as I hinted at earlier, where we used that and built our own software using it many years ago, but it wasn’t that great, to be honest. In fact, it was probably terrible compared to what it is today. And I think that was just because it was like, here’s a box read in that box, if anything slightly outside the box, it breaks. It was quite clunky, but now with AI and the ability to be. Read screens, words, and that has just gone to the next level. But what is important for the listener? I think certainly where we’re at. I don’t know where others are and what their views are, but I don’t want AI to go and recreate everything we’ve done. That’s not what we need. What I need is what we do really well, like our SOA. I just want that done really quickly. So I don’t want a brand new version. Because if you think about that, if we just said to AI, go and draft up an SOA, I’d have to spend forever checking it to go, Well, what’s it done? You know, because I know how AI works, it can go off on tangents. It can do its own thing. So, you know, I’d be forever checking it to make sure it does meet our licensee requirements. It’s got everything we want in it. So I don’t think that’s what we need. I think what we want is our processes that we’ve worked hard to build. We just want them done really quickly. Yeah, and then that’s a better for the client and a better client experience, because we’re turning around and so how’s it built? It’s not easy, obviously, using AI to power the robotic part, but it’s certainly rules based like we set this step happens, then when that happens, the next step happens, then the next step, then the next step. And we go all the way through a process, or we might do a part of the process, and hand to our advisers so that then they finish. There’s multiple ways you can set it up, and that’ll be different for each business based on how you want to
Rob Pyne
run it. Yeah, when you say you don’t want to change your process, you just want something to automate some of it to make it faster. Everyone’s saying, yes, please the old SOA production line. It’s a laborious and time consuming expedition each time. So yeah, so I’m really curious to see how you’re actually doing that and what you’re doing to try and make that a faster process. But before we go, there one point that really stood out here, because when everyone thinks about AI and having automation built into your environment, especially artificial intelligence, specifically security, is always the first thing people think about, how do we actually protect our clients information? And you told me that you operate entirely within your Microsoft tenancy, so meaning that no client data ever leaves your environment. And that’s a big deal in a profession like ours, where Trust is everything. It’s what we operate on as trust. So can you explain how you set that up and what it takes from a cyber security and IT governance standpoint to implement this?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, so again, we have tapped into partners that this is their bread and butter. This is what they do. And you know, you’ve got to be really selective with the types of softwares you’re going to use to build this. You know they have to be really strict with privacy and security, and so what we use to develop this is automation anywhere. I’ll read out a few teams here, but I know this will mean nothing to the listener, and certainly I’m not pretending that I’m an expert in this field, but we pass this responsibility to them to make sure they’re compliant in all of this. And that’s part of our approach, before we selected these partners, and obviously VBP, I’ll touch on them in a minute. Yeah, with how they treat privacy and security as well, but certain things with automation anywhere. Soc one, type two is a standard that you can adhere to with security. SOC two, type two, ISO two, seven, double oh one, and ISO 22301, they’re like the gold standard for security and privacy, and so we ensure that the people we’re partnering with meet those requirements. So that’s the first step. You’ve got to get the right people, and again, it’s another reason why I don’t want to get out there building this myself, because then I’ve got to make sure I’m complying with all of that. I’d rather just use a big organization that has 1000s of people, and that is their bread and butter, to make sure that they are adhering to those standards. And with VBP, we partnered with them because they’re ultimately an outsourcing business, so they totally get and understand security and privacy and how this works, like they wouldn’t have a business otherwise, if they were letting staff members in and doing the wrong thing with where things are saved, etc, yeah. So that’s certainly how we’ve approached it, but in terms of just to make it real, the way I think of it is, you’ve got an employee, that’s what you’ve got. You set up an employee called grace, in our case, and she logs into your system, so if you’ve programmed it, that she goes into Outlook, which is controlled by you on your system and then saves a document you’ve programmed there, not to save it on a local C drive, which would be a disaster, you know, and you wouldn’t let an employee do that, yeah, this is the point like you have rules around where your employees would save staff and it’s going to be on a network, shared drive that belongs to you. Well, that’s how it operates. It’s all exactly the same. So, you know, the standards you have for your employees are the standards that you have for your automation. And if you’re happy with the employees way of working, then you’re going to get it with the automation, and you probably get a little bit more robust following of the rules, because that’s one thing you know. Like when you program it, no one’s going off track when it’s automated, because they just literally follow the bouncing ball that you’ve programmed.
Rob Pyne
That’s where my mind went. Nick because no matter how you try, trying to get everyone to do things exactly the same way is difficult, but if you program a robot to do it a certain way, it’s going to do it every single time the same way every time. So there’s a real scalability that is introduced there that everyone knows what to expect, because there isn’t. Variation. If everyone’s agreed to the process steps, then everyone’s on board, which is great. And in speaking of how to build out that automation process, when we talked about it a couple of weeks back, you said someone on your team records themselves doing a task that recording kind of becomes the blueprint, and for firms considering doing this, how much time and input is actually required to go from a screen recording to a bot doing a real work for them. And what does VBP do in that process? Obviously, we’re working with you. You’ve actually helped to kind of create the bot, but VBP are the ones at the back end actually building it. So what does it take how much time and input is required from that screen recording stage right through to the real work being done?
Nick Perrett
I think the magic in this a little bit is the fact that I am an adviser. I am new. You know, we’re running these businesses. So one thing I know is that none of us have got any time or interest in spending hours and weeks and months trying to develop and build a process that’s then going to be automated by somebody else. So that was the lens selfishly from me. I’m going, well, I’ve got a little time here. How can I make this as easy as possible for people to do it? That was the first sort of question I was asking. So yeah, it is literally as simple as that. Like we would sit down, there’s a bit of conversation to be had, like we did Rob, where you work out what is the best process to maybe start with within your business, and then once we pick that, and we’ll help you pick that, what we then do is say, just go and get your best person in the team who’s really good at doing that process. So that can vary. So in terms of what is the time for someone to get started, it depends on the process. But the longest I’ve had is a two hours a meeting where we literally sat there and someone went through a two hour process to complete. And then the shorter stuff adds 20 minutes where it’s like, you know, let’s just do this. And then, you know, you said, we just get the person on the screen, and we say, get a client or a dummy client you might set up. We’re sort of using dummies now to do the recording, because it’s better when we just put privacy and sharing and all that. Yep. So you’ll set up a client, and then you’ll go, right, do whatever needs to be done. So it might be, you know, annual review preparation. So you pick one client, go through, do the process, and we record it, and we stop you, and I’ll talk you through it and ask questions and stuff like that. But it might take 20 minutes. And then that’s it. You’re done. And you go back to your day job, servicing clients, which we’re all trying to keep up with. And then what we would do in the background, and this is where we use VBP. We document that. And they’re great at this because, again, they’ve got a long history of outsourcing with people and processes. So they’ll come back and, you know, we’re really tight with the timeframes. In a week, we’ll have literally every single click that your person did will be in a document for you to check and tick off on. And then once you’re happy with the approach and how that’s all working, then we get to building it. So again, that all happens in the background. So you’d come back in review and say, Yes, that’s good. And then we start building it. And again, you just go away and back to business as usual. And then we come back to you with a working version for testing.
Rob Pyne
You talked about this Nick, it’s a digital full time staff member, better than full time. They don’t work seven and a half hours a day or eight hours a day. They work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So you can actually get a huge amount of productivity. So when someone’s building that first process, naturally, I think that robot grace or Henry is going to be able to complete the task that’s been set for them initially in less time than 24/7, so you can actually, then, with that one robot, that one AI agent, if you like, is actually going to be able to do more tasks if you want to add more things to that process step. But as I think I understand it, those steps, they can’t be around concurrently. It’s sequential.
Nick Perrett
Yeah, that’s right. It’s like, you, you know, you’re sitting at a screen, you’re moving your mouse around, your opening file, you’re going into this application. Yeah, we think we’re pretty fast and good at what we do, but we can’t do two things at once. No, like, I can’t open XP and be going into insuring at exactly the same sign. Like, it’s the limitation of the computer, yeah, so you can only do that with Henry or grace. Like you can perform a task, but you schedule it out. So, you know, you might say, Go in, do this one. This takes eight hours. You know, we have processes that run eight hours every single night. It’ll go through, start to finish, go through, do a lot of the heavy lifting overnight, but then we stop that. And you know, that doesn’t mean that robot, that’s all it can do, like a lot of these AI agents will do specifically one thing, and that’s what they’re really good at doing, whereas this is sort of multiple layers of agents running via this bot. So you can then pick up another task, and it might run for five minutes, you know, because there might be no data there, but it’s going in checking. You know, we have, like I said, it varies depending on how much, but you do schedule that. We’ve got processes that we run every two weeks because they’re not that urgent. And then we’ve got process that run daily. We’ve got processes that run
Rob Pyne
monthly. So I’m keen to dig into some of those things you’re doing, but before we go there, at your business, Yarra lane, you’ve deployed bots across six business verticals. You said it’d be, would have gone amazingly if we’d had one to focus on. But we’ve got six. So he told me about some impressive savings. He said one bot was saving you about 40 hours a month on a single bookkeeping task. So across all those processes, where have you seen the biggest productivity wins, and why do you think those areas were so ripe for automation?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, there’s a few things that stand out when you want to start I do believe there’s a real power in just the simple ones as well, though. So you know, if you can just take out little tasks away from people every day, and you’re taking more of those little things that are still time consuming, then you increase productivity a lot. So it doesn’t have to be this where people can over complicate it like it doesn’t need to be the, you know, the one that’s going to totally change the game. It’s just start somewhere, like someone’s going in every week and downloading a report and then uploading it somewhere. Well, let’s get that done, and then that person doesn’t have to worry about it. They’re back to being more efficient somewhere else. But obviously, the ones that stand out, and this is when we have that initial conversation, to pick the process, what I typically talk about is what takes a long time to do. So if you’ve got something that literally takes half an hour, or, you know, something like that, to complete, then that’s obviously going to be really beneficial, especially for your clients. So you know, if you’ve got half an hour per client and you’ve got 200 clients, there’s a lot of minutes there. The other way, though, and it’s sort of the total, almost reverse of that approach is, what are you doing daily? So it might only take 10 minutes, but you’re doing it every single day. Then that’s another one that is Cherry Ripe. So that’s typically the two ends. Yeah, it’s like, what happens daily and what takes a long time, what we probably won’t do. And mind you, like I said, we will get to this, though, we just probably won’t start with it. But what we wouldn’t do is something that takes 10 minutes once a month. Yeah, sure, because there’s not enough bang for buck, if you like, but like said, we will do that at some point, because you might as well take it away. There’s no point someone sitting there doing that and forgetting to do it and then it doesn’t get done. And you know, we’ve all got those examples.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, absolutely. So for our financial planning listeners. Specifically, what kinds of tasks have you automated in the advice process? I know you mentioned bots, repairing annual review packs, pulling insurance policy data, downloading portfolio statements and even valuing properties before a client walks in. What’s been the most impactful in the advice context,
Nick Perrett
not that I love was just the annual review preparation, and where we’ve started with all of this is, what were the pain points? Yep, across all the units, it was like, where’s the pain point? And then, all right, let’s see if we can help in that space. So we used to get a few comments from our advisers around the fact that annual review meetings were coming up and some of the prep work wasn’t done as consistently as they would like. So what we’ve then built is grace to be able to go in and look at the annual review date. This is explaining a process, just to be clear, of what we’ve sort of programmed for this one process. So Grace would jump in look at the annual review date in XPlan, note the annual review date. And it’s doing this all the time, obviously, so every day to make sure nothing’s missed, and then sees the clients coming up for review. So then we set the parameters around how far out from that review date we’d like a meeting to be booked. That changes per firm. Everyone’s got different approaches, and it fits into your style. You don’t need to change anything. So for us, in appropriate time, we draft an email up for mom who does all of our bookings. We’ve deliberately kept a human touch to this. We draft the email, which is a fairly you know, I’m sure you’ve all got standard emails you’d like to go out. So it’s really just drafting that email and pulling all that together, but it does then have the smarts to be able to look into the bookings calendar, check who the adviser is from, explain, note that see what’s available around that time and suggest dates for Mon. Mon will then take it over, so we let her run with it. We like the human touch where she’ll call the client, because booking meetings online for people can be a bit annoying. So that’s just again, our choice. So that first little piece of the puzzle is done by grace, and then Mon books in the time. So then what we do, we now have a date of the meeting. So grace notes the date, five days out from that meeting, she’ll jump into all the appropriate places to prepare for that meeting. So depending on the client and what they have and what their position is, but they might jump into BT download all the latest reports. So only just downloading the reports then going to SharePoint, creating the right folder with the right folder structure, with the right naming convention for those reports to be stored. It’ll also then open those reports, read those reports, go into we love Astute Wheel to present to our clients. So it’ll then update the information in astute wheel with the latest data, so that it’s all live and ready to go. But then it’s across everything. Superannuation, if they’ve got a self managed fund, we’ll get information regarding that. Insurance will get the latest premiums. We’ll update it. We’re not just updating it. And this is the exciting bit, and that the good part of this is, you know, you get to perfect one client, like if you had unlimited time. Yeah. So, yeah, insurance is a good one. I think a lot of us get the insurance details and then put into some insured and go, I don’t have time for the rest of this stuff. Whereas this, you know, you can literally put in all of the details around, you know, what’s the price, what’s the policy, what’s the date, you know, every single bit of information you can get from that that we’d love in XPlan and in our CRMs and shoot bill. You just put it all in because, you know, obviously you’ve got time to do it now. So you build it that way, as all that data goes in. But yeah, then we extended it further going. And this is, again, an exciting part of this, where you not only get to automate your processes, you get to improve them, I think, because you get an ability now to have more time to improve them. So a good example for us was the property stuff. You know, everyone’s got property in our portfolios. So we said, Well, why aren’t we doing a rough valuation of all of these properties? So we now, do? We jump into RP data, get a valuation report, and when I say we obviously, Grace, does this? Gets a valuation report, saves it in the right folder, updates the valuation, and again, we set parameters. Do we want the High, Low, medium point which the valuation often puts in? And then we have all that ready to go. Not only do we do all that, we then also, as part of our approach is, you know, we’d like to have a PowerPoint presentation that we do for annual reviews. So it will then go and create the PowerPoint presentation pack, update the slides with the information from the downloads, so it’s all done. And now advisers know that five days out, they’ve sort of got everything there ready to go, but that gives them, and this is an important part, that gives them time to go in and add their personal touch and flare to the documents and the presentation pack to be able to keep that human part in the process. So that’s one good example of process. And I think the way, in terms of what I’ve shared there, you can see what it’s doing. It’s going across everything you would normally do yourself, but it’s jumping into RP data, going to XPlan. We’re using stoop wheel, we’re using PowerPoint, we’re using email like it, can do what you’re doing effectively and just in a really step by step process. Yeah,
Rob Pyne
it occurs to me that the role there of a client service officer or a client service associate, we call them, so essentially, it’s a large part of that function, which is very manual in nature. You’ve actually got that automated now, and you’re elevating the client service person to be doing the touch points, doing the personal things that actually make it most meaningful for the client, so they feel connected to the human being still, but the humans got now more time to provide that personal touch without having to be caught up in doing data entry and pulling data reports together and so on, yeah,
Nick Perrett
or worse, scrambling because the information is not there and you’re trying To do it half an hour before a meeting or whatever, or doing a meeting without information, you know, which is even worse again. So all of this, the way we look at it is, we just say, how do we improve the client experience? That’s how we’ve done it. And then we will be a time where we pivot, because we’ll have done a lot in that space. And then we’ll say, how do we improve different areas might be internal reporting and stuff like that, but right now, we really just focus on the client experience. And if we can get all of that information every single time the adviser is happy. And you know, if you think about what clients really want, they want time with the adviser. Yeah, they want to speak to the person, and not have to wait because the adviser is busy updating all of this stuff, and they can’t return a phone call, or they can’t get on the phone proactively. So the whole angle here is to free up the advisers time so that they can do what we believe the clients want, which is interact and engage with them and build a relationship.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, well, starting with the client experience seems a good place to start, doesn’t it, when you’re doing this stuff. So I mean, you made a great point there earlier about automation forcing standardization. I love that. Every firm has advisers who tweak things their own way, which fragments workflows, and you get different client service associates saying, Oh, my guy likes it this way, or my adviser likes it this way. And there’s a bit of personal preference that creeps into the way things are done, so you can’t get that sort of consistency through your business. You said automation was a catalyst to bring consistency back for you guys. How did you manage that shift culturally? And what advice would you give to other firms wrestling with this issue?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, I think this is a big one, definitely, because it’s funny. Now we’re going through a process with a broader group where we’re looking at all processes, we’re going to see how we’re doing it, and then we’re going to come up with one way, and it’s this great, big project, and it’s great, but as I said, Yeah, this is great, and you’re going to spend a lot of time, and we’ll all agree on one process, but I can guarantee you, in three years time, you’ll be back, or you’ll need to be back, because everyone will be doing a slightly different way. That’s just normal in business, because what happens is, you’re going to go and hire someone in six months? Well, they weren’t on this meeting. They don’t know, and they’ve come from another firm that thinks it’s better, or someone actually might come up with a better way to do it, but they don’t want to go, hey guys, everyone’s doing it my way. I’ve come up with a better way. So they just go, Look, I’m going to do it this way. It’s a bit faster. But they don’t share that in the. Knowledge back to the team, and everyone doesn’t benefit. So I just think it’s natural that you’re going to end up with fragmented processes if you’re leaving it for people to do it their own way. In an ideal world, everyone just follows it, but we don’t live in an ideal world. So yeah, this is now sort of a game changer, because you obviously can set a process up for the firm. And if you do want to change that process, you can change it for everybody, and your culture can change a little bit. And we’re starting to see this where we’re trying to encourage, can you improve the process for everybody and come up with suggestions and present it, and then if we love it, we can implement it quickly for everybody. That’s a bit of a shift. But in terms of culturally, like with the people, what we found is that we’re automating the tasks they don’t want to do, yeah, and they hate doing it. So it hasn’t been difficult to go to, hey, look, you know, all this stuff that you have to do before the meeting that you dread doing, and it’s not as repetitive and it’s not stimulating. If we can automate that for you, there’s very little pushback. I can tell you now they’re all going, thank God. So yeah, I think culturally it’s been fine, but obviously you need to explain because there is that initial fear of the robot’s going to do everything, yeah, but if you explain your strategy, what you’re about, why you’re trying to automate tasks, to free them up to talk to people, to do the jobs they don’t want to do, then you quickly get by.
Rob Pyne
Yeah. I mean, that’s the key, obvious next question, isn’t it, that certainly you would have faced internally. So, you know, bots have replaced the need for you, perhaps, to hire or retain additional staff that you might have had or planning to hire. I think you talked about one example was where a super admin role, it took 38 hours a month. It’s now being done in two days by a bot. Has the implementation of robotic process automation. How do you rethink your head count and hiring plans, or the types of people that you want in your business going forward?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, it has to be honest. Let me explain that story that we keep referring to the 38 hours, because it’s a really good one on the power of this. So we had a lady Joey who a VP staff member. So an outsourced staff member. Her job was to go in download a set of reports every single month we did payroll for hundreds of clients. So very time consuming, you have to filter different reports, one with proprietors, one without, etc, etc. And you know, you’re limited by how quickly the software refreshes those reports. Then you got to save them in and SharePoint etc, etc. So she did that every single month. She’s brilliant, very, very switched on operator, and that was her job. We now know the time it takes because we measured it. And it does take about 38 hours. So if you break that down, Jodie works eight hours a day, five days a week, that’s 40. But like I mentioned to you, Rob people don’t work eight hours flat out, and that’s not a criticism of people. That’s just life. They’ve got emails, they’ve got meetings, they’ve got coffee breaks they’ve got, yeah, so you’re not literally clicking around doing the task for eight hours a day. You know, you might get four or five out of people, I think is probably more realistic. So this task was taking about two weeks. That’s in line with that thinking. But there’s a bigger problem here, because it was causing tension across the teams, because if you’re client 95 you’re having to wait two weeks to get these reports. Now we need these reports to go and do other tasks. So we have other people wanting these reports to then be able to go and complete other tasks, and a client might complain, going, well, I want mine five days in. Why is it taking two weeks? So then Joey gets harassed. All right? I got to stop everything. I got to get out of my routine. I got to go to this client on the list, and then I got to go back, remember where I was, so you can see after slows her up and there’s a problem. So we were able to get that task down to two days because we built the process. We started it, we press go, and then two days later, every single client has their report, and it’s just all of those problems, like overnight goal. And the best bit then is Joey, who she’s brilliant, like I said, she was underutilized. It was total waste, thinking back now, yeah, having her, that was all she did for nearly two years, and she did amazingly well. But that was basically the job. There was other stuff at the end of the two weeks, but, you know, not as significant it was really get ready for that. We’ve now been able to upskill her to be able to sit there and be processing payrolls and doing way more value add stuff and more important stuff for the client. Because of all of this got automated. So I honestly think if we had to sat there and let Jodie do that for another one two years, she probably would have resigned. It’s a boring job just to be doing that all the time. So you’re actually freeing your people up from this stuff that is quite boring and repetitive, and that’s a good thing, and that has meant now we get to repurpose Joey and use her, and she’s a great contributor. And for her, her career sort of progressed further up from. Where she was. And yeah, I think it’s just a great story on what it can do. And yes, that’s probably meant we haven’t hired somewhere, somewhere in that chain. But it’s not only getting rid of people. You really just saying, Let’s Let’s reuse them. Yep, and and often answer this question when we can sit there and for all the listeners, everyone but hand on, how say we are doing absolutely everything we can possibly do for our clients, like, until we get to that point, yeah, you’re always going to have a chance to go, well, let’s do this now. Like, we should be doing this better. Can we do more here? So we’re so far from that? I believe that you know to get your staff member back, who’s a really good staff member, to be able to get them to do something else is the key of this. I
Rob Pyne
couldn’t agree more. I was actually listening to a mock kits podcast. Actually, it was the Kitsis and Carl podcast a few weeks back, talking about, well, AI take our jobs. And kit says commented, and he said, when the Internet became a thing in the late 90s, early 2000s and what we now take for granted was a new technology, and it was an amazing game changing technology for efficiency, but productivity increased, but margins didn’t increase, but just because you do more, you start to do things better than you could do before, because you’ve now got the capability of doing them. So your point is well made there. Nick, it’s not like you can’t redeploy staff then that don’t do the menial tasks on other things you really wanted to do but never had the capacity to do, or capability of doing. That’s
Nick Perrett
right? And if you fast forward that and play that out like if we just cut everything down and got to a point where you’re running it 80% margins, what do you think is going to happen a competitor is going to come in and go, Well, I’ll do it at 30 Yeah, and then all of a sudden you’re out of business anyway. So you know, you can’t get greedy and do that. It’s just not going to work. Yeah, because you know, you’re doing the bare minimum for your client, but running it at 80 with no people, well, that’s not sustainable. Someone’s going to come in and do a lot for that client and charge the right fee by offering more services. So yeah, I think there is a bit of a natural evening out of this stuff where you’ll get to the right figure.
Rob Pyne
There’s always a competitive tension, isn’t there? Now, you showed us a Power BI dashboard that tracks each bots output in hours, saved cost offsets and even the opportunity cost have freed up time for high value work. How important has that visibility been in demonstrating the ROI to your team and justifying further investment in automation?
Nick Perrett
That’s probably the accountant in me, coming out, you know, chartered accountant previously, and still am. But yeah, that like, I just like to measure it. Know, what is the output here? So, you know, again, I always look at this from a lens of people are going to come in and have exactly the same questions I’ve got. So let’s be proactive and build this dashboard so you can see all the benefits that it’s creating. And you know, as I said, Rob, you’ve seen the dashboard, you know, we highlight the four key benefits that we believe you’re getting out of automation, and track it. And it’s easy to do because we know exactly when it starts and when it ends, and we have tracking every minute that it’s working and what it’s doing and how many transactions it’s posting, and how many clients is working on. So we are really far up with that audit trail around what it’s doing and how long so you can get a dashboard to measure it, yeah, and also help you design your next
Rob Pyne
process. Yeah? Certainly, it’s an exciting prospect for people who are listening to this, I’m sure so for listeners wondering what it costs. You mentioned when we spoke, $5,000 a month is what it costs to get a bot license, if you like, then there’s an upfront, sort of $5,000 fee per major process to be automated. That’s how you guys price that service. Can you break down what a firm actually gets for that investment, and how to think about that cost relative to a human hire?
Nick Perrett
Yeah, I think you’ve really nailed it. You just think about it relative to a human hire, that is it. It’s like you’re spending 60,000 for an employee that is going to work, as you said, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and be quite quick and efficient at it. If you fill it up, it’s no different to an employee. If you hire an employee and don’t give them anything to do, they sit there twiddling their thumbs, and, you know, are very satisfied. So it’s the same idea. You’re getting a time in a day where you can fill it up and you get the bot doing those tasks. Yeah. So that pricing as well. I’m sort of, again, putting my owner lens on. You don’t pay until it’s working. And I say that should qualify that with you pay for the build, so that there’s sort of a 50% upfront, two and a half grand to get your first process going. Once it’s built, you pay the final two and a half, and that’s when you start paying the five per month, because, again, you never charge someone for services they’re not using because you’re taking three months to build it like that’s just not fair. Yeah, sure,
Rob Pyne
that makes sense. So a lot of our audience will be small to mid sized firms. They’ll be intrigued, but maybe be daunted by the tech. What’s your advice to a principal or a practice manager who wants to get started with it? Started with it with AI automation, and where should they begin, and what should they avoid doing? Because you’ve obviously been through this
Nick Perrett
journey, my advice would be, start. Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious now, like you need to start this, because if you don’t, in five years time, there’ll be agents. Just offering the services you’re doing faster than you can do it, and it won’t be a little bit faster, it will be a lot faster. And if you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs, I think it’s going to be really hard to be competitive. But I also think there’s a really good opportunity for us, because whilst I think that will definitely happen, and what time frame you know, who knows what you can’t do is have a human element to it. And I actually believe, still believe, that’s what people want. They want that human connection, and they want that trust that they can build with the person to help them navigate, especially as they get older and so much scanners and stuff like that around, you know, and it’s getting more sophisticated and difficult. So I think people are always still going to want the human connection and the relationship with an adviser. Having said that, the advisers got to be up to speed. This is why I’m saying, Get Started. You got to be quick enough. If people are offering five meetings a year, six meetings a year, or because they’ve got more time to be able to do that, and you’re still offering one and taking forever to do an SOA, there’s probably a point where they’re like, Oh, guys, I may as well go somewhere else. So my advice would be, start, you just need to have the conversation to go, what’s the first process to start with? I often say to people when we’re having these meetings, to set that up for them, you don’t have to overthink that too, you know, because by the time you build the first process which takes the longest, because we have to get all the security right, the it right, set up, right. So there’s a big chunk of work in getting all of that established for you. But then once it’s established, you’ve done all that heavy lifting. So future processes are quicker, but by the time you build that first one, which might take, say, three months to be up and going, you’ve probably thought of another four or five and learned a lot, and you’re going to do, like, my view is you’ll end up doing about 50 odd processes in your business, if you’ve got one business. Yeah? So one, number one is on the list of 50. Who cares? Just start with one, and then you’ll pick two and three after that, once you get familiar with it.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, great. No doubt you’ve gone through a bit of a journey that probably hasn’t been all smooth sailing along the way. What’s been the biggest role? Been the biggest roadblocks you face, whether they be technical ones, cultural doesn’t sound like there’s been many cultural issues, operational issues, and how did you work around the roadblocks that you’ve encountered? The
Nick Perrett
big thing, I won’t share too much, because not sure how many listeners are on the end of this, but I will give a little bit of insight. One thing you know, we learned the hard way would be just make sure that your testing environment is really well full for it. So you might have a process that you’re building where in the fullness of time, it might be able to send an email to a client, for instance. But when you’re testing and building it, we would never do it where it’s going to send an email to the client. So you would stop that process in the building phase, maybe three or four steps for the send button, you know, is actually pressed. And even then, anything that goes to the client, I don’t really love that, you know, still, and we’ve been doing it for two years. I sort of prefer the draft to be drafted for our advisers to review and send to the client, as opposed to, you know, it being sent directly. So it’s just that sort of stuff that we’ve learned where it’s like, just make sure you’re stopping it early enough in the testing phase, because we did on a couple of clients, you know, have where it sort of went out multiple times in the very early days, and we quickly learned, but that’s also why you tested on one or two clients at the beginning until you’ve nailed it. So that was an embarrassing learning that we had.
Rob Pyne
It’s a good bit of advice. I’m sure so many advisers are going to ask, What does my licensee think? And you’ve reassured us that bots operate like a separate user and their actions are fully auditable. Have you encountered any compliance pushback or hurdles from either your licensee or you probably maybe self licensed, I’m not sure. Or other people who are using these bots and their licensees perspective on them?
Nick Perrett
No, haven’t yet. And, you know, I think we’re in total control. We don’t get it to pretend it’s someone else or do anything like that. You know, it’s literally logging in. You’ve got full transparency, full audit trail. Like I said, it’s the same as an employee. I get asked this question, what if we wanted to turn it off, or, you know, whatever, and we weren’t happy with it. It’s like the simple answer is, well, what if an employee resigned and left a business? What would you do? You know, you’ve got an off boarding process, you’d make them inactive and they can’t log into it. They got no access to any information. So it’s exactly the same, like they had their own setup, own license, own email, own everything, so that you can track everything they’ve done, and if they’re not there, you just switch it off, and then they can’t get access to any of your systems.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, you’ve described this when we spoke previously and again today. It’s just the beginning. Everyone’s just beginning to explore this, even though you’ve already automated a dozen workflows in your business. What’s your longer term vision for agentic technology in your business, and you think every advice firm will eventually have a few digital employees working in the background, silently,
Speaker 3
definitely, I think there’s no question that that will happen.
Rob Pyne
Do you have a vision for your business? Nick, where do you think? Let’s say we’re all forward three years from now? You’ve been at this for two years. So three years, a big number of years, given the pace at which this. Moving. Where do you think your business will be in three years from now?
Nick Perrett
I think we’ll be able to do a much better job for our clients and much, much better job for our clients than we’re doing today in terms of accounting, doing financial statements. Potentially three years time, we’ll get all of the financials done in the first quarter of the year, whereas you know, you’re scrambling in March, April, May, to get them done by the May deadline, I think that’s absolutely going to happen and be very possible. Advice, you know, you sit there forever waiting for so as to go out. I think they’ll go out in a matter of days. So that’s what I’m certainly thinking will happen. And then if you think about that, what that does, if you can do that and conquer those two things, then what else can you be doing? So the business will look totally different, because if you nail those huge bottlenecks and get that core bits right for your clients, they’re going to be much happier people. Now I think gone are the days, and I remember this from starting work and you’d get a tax return. This is back long time ago when I first started, but you do it straight away. You know, you’re grad, you got nothing to do. They give you a tax turn. You do it in an hour, and then you’d be told that, don’t send that out. We can’t send the bill. You’ve literally done it in five minutes. But those days are gone. I think of those days when I started, like right now, people want things done quick. They just want it out of their hair. They don’t have to think about it. They will pay a premium to get it done quick. It’s the total reverse. It’s not like, oh, that took you too short a time. That’s not the case. They’ll pay you more to get it done out of their mind. Don’t have to think about it. And that’s the premium service. So that’s where I think it’s moving. That’s where I think we’ll get to, and I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to conquer those two big ones in a short space of time.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. It’s exciting for sure. So as we wrap up, one more question for you, you’re offering your spot service now more widely through your partnership with VBP. In your view, what kind of financial planning business is best positioned to benefit from this? It sounds like you’re probably going to say everyone. So I’m keen to hear your answer, and are there any firms with this approach you just think won’t work?
Nick Perrett
So I do think all planning businesses, to be honest, and it’s not just planning businesses. I think it’s also any business that really uses a computer, which is a lot of them, but they’re the ones where I think it probably doesn’t work so well. Is like, for instance, a large, large institution, like a bank, for instance, we’re in that perfect sweet spot, I believe, in the SME space, where we might be dealing with an adviser, might have 200 clients. 200 is a very small number. Yeah, you might have, you know, across your firm, you might have 10 advisers. Well, that’s 2000 clients. That’s a very small number. Whereas, if you’re a bank and any of these massive institutions with huge amounts of data, you know, they’ve got millions of stuff that they need to go through, so maybe they do want more of the API and, you know, the RPA, this sort of solution doesn’t apply to them. So maybe that’s not appropriate. I’m sure there is parts of their business, obviously, that they could utilize it, but when it’s just that the data volume is too big, because you literally are going in client by client and clicking through and updating, you know, I think if the data size is just enormous, then maybe it doesn’t apply. But honestly, for the rest of us and all of the SMEs, it’s going to apply.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, I agree with your point earlier. You talked about the fact that automation won’t replace the human it’ll just augment them. And the fact is that people still do want human connection. They still want someone they can trust to talk to. So that stuff will be perennial in nature, but the stuff that we are doing behind the scenes, that people are currently paying for, we can make that a much more efficient way of getting things done, so we could be more present, more available, and provide better services to our clients. So I love that framing Nick I mean, it’ll resonate so strongly with everyone listening, for sure.
Nick Perrett
Yeah, and I think, like I sort of break pretty much our client interactions into three parts. We collect information from them. There’s a human bit to that. And it’s bit of automation, definitely like in terms of making that easy for our people to go and chase and get information. But that’s the first piece of puzzle. The second piece is we’re then processed. They have no idea how we process. They don’t sit there watching us do the work. They don’t care. They just want it done accurately. That’s a minimum standard, like, get it right and do it quick. So that’s that middle piece that we’re really playing in. And then the third bit is the delivery. Like, once we’ve done it all in the background, they don’t know how we’ve all got different ways of doing it, and they don’t care. But when it’s completed, we’ve got an SOA, I think the real skill is then deliver it. Like, how are you connecting with the client, explaining it, taking them through it, that bit. You know, again, we’re not automating that at all, that the bit that is the human skill. So, yeah, I think that middle piece of the puzzle, that’s what we want to really automate.
Rob Pyne
Yeah, it’s a very compelling business proposition. Nick, you know, congratulations on being an early adopter and applying it to your business and being someone who’s actually leapt straight in and actually implemented some of this tech, which we’re all hearing about, and actually applying it making your business better. Thinking that the listenership on this one will be big, because it is the most topical thing, and it’s such a powerful message around how to actually make your business more capable for doing more and more profitable potentially. And it does make you rethink the whole model of business in terms of who you’re hiring, what are they going to be doing, and perhaps redeploying some of your current team as you can start to automate some of these processes. So thank you for joining me today Nick, on The Trusted Adviser podcast.
Nick Perrett
No problem Rob.
Thanks for tuning in to the Trusted adviser. I hope today’s conversation brought you new insights and inspiration for growing your business. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite 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, you.