How a Wealth Management Firm leveraged automation to help address legislative requirements.
BLV Solutions is a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) process automation service provider founded by a group of expert RPA practitioners, based in Sydney, Australia. They offer affordable and end-to-end automation services for all-sized businesses, from initial process discovery, bot development, to ongoing support throughout the lifecycle of each bot.
Before starting BLV Solutions, the founders built up deep experience automation (‘bots’), primarily through delivering and maintaining hundreds of automations predominantly using Blue Prism and UiPath. The team understands that these bots fail when they're too costly or difficult to sustain - -which is why we offer our RaaS approach as an alternative for medium-sized companies who need help finding solutions with their problems! BLV Solutions’ RaaS approach is particularly helpful for medium sized companies who want to reap the benefit of automation without having to employ their own automation development and run teams.
Following a review by the Royal Commission, the Australian federal government enacted new legislation in July 2021 requiring all financial services companies to attain written consent from each fee-paying client. The fee recipient must obtain consent from a client each year before deducting, or arranging to deduct, advice fees from a client account as part of an ongoing fee arrangement. Through the legislation, financial service advisors must now:
- Renew all on-going fee arrangements annually with each client
- Disclose what fees and services had been provided in the past 12-month period
- Disclose what fees and services are expected to be provided in the next 12-month period
- Attain written consent by each client before any further fees can be charged
- Provide the consent to any third-party providers prior to the deduction of fees
With the stroke of a pen this legislation added significant back-office effort for all financial services providers, in order to charge fees for their services. Complicating this legislative requirement further was that client approval was needed for each platform the end client uses, with most clients using between 2 to 5 platforms, with no consistent form or layout amongst the many platforms.
One of BLV’s customers, a mid-sized wealth management firm (WMF) was grappling with this sudden challenge. With over 200 client renewals each month, and over 100 platforms to interact with, the WMF responded by employing full time offshore resources. With each client renewal taking upwards of 4 hours to complete, the cost of compliance was not insignificant.
With the on-going cost and associated effort of using offshore help, it was concluded that offshore as a solution wasn’t sustainable or scalable. The regular turnover of offshore resources created an ongoing drain in training effort which ultimately led to higher costs than expected; there were two options: either continue employing these resources at a higher price point OR build custom software - both expensive outcomes!
Working with the WMF, BLV Solutions designed a bot that creates a complete draft renewal for each client – the bot pulls all client specific data across multiple systems, references the client’s current fees, incorporates any proposed fee increase and creates and sends the draft client renewal form to the financial advisor for a final review prior to sending to the end client. Once confirmed, the bot sends the notice to the end client and monitors whether the form has been returned and send polite reminders to the client as needed.
To start, BLV Solutions reviewed the 100 plus client platforms and applied the 80/20 rule. Of the 100 platforms, two platforms generated over 60% of the client activity and was a smart place to start. This enabled the WMF to assess the success of the automation prior to automating the process across all 100 plus platforms.
The automation has removed over 3,000 hours of effort annually and reduced the cost of completing the task by over 70%. The accuracy of the automation is consistently higher the offshore team, with no training time or staff turn-over challenges. This is a direct cost saving for the WMF, with the savings going straight to the bottom line.
By starting with one robot handling the two largest platforms, BLV Solutions was able to address 60% of the effort with a single automation and the company to test and understand the value of automation.
The customer was impressed – the accuracy has dramatically improved (reducing rework effort) and the cost to complete the task has significantly decreased (1/3 the cost of offshore). Plus, the solution is completely scalable, so as their client base grows, the automation costs don’t (guaranteed flat rate).
With the first automation in place, the WMF is now looking for BLV Solutions to roll this out across all of their client platforms and automat 100% of the task. This has opened their eyes to what automation can deliver and the team are now dreaming of what else they can automate.
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