Using Data and Technology to Make Financial Advice Accessible

6 min read
6 min read

If you work in financial services, chances are you’ve had friends, family members, and strangers at parties ask you for financial advice (yes, we do occasionally get invited to parties). Australians yearn for financial advice. Despite this, financial advice remains difficult and expensive to obtain. Though there have been some issues with the recent tabling of QAR-related legislation, providers of financial advice now feel that they have the certainty required to tackle the problem of advice. Given the dwindling number of financial advisers in Australia, and the increasing range and maturity of digital advice solutions in the market, technology will doubtless be an essential part of the solution. 

We see three key data and technology problems in advice. One is all but solved, one has a plausible solution, and one we frankly don’t know the answer to (yet): 

  1. Digital advice — how do we offer digital and hybrid advice to Australians en masse? 
  2. Data to deliver advice — how do we quickly and easily gather the data we need to be able to provide advice? 
  3. Data from the advice process — what can we do with the rich data assets we create through the advice process? 

Digital advice 

The change in regulation mooted by QAR and the decline in adviser numbers has already — to quote an AMP Digital Financial Advice Market Scan — prompted a “flurry of activity” among digital advice providers. A variety of high-quality tools are now available in the market, hence us feeling that this problem has effectively been solved. They broadly fall into two categories: 

  • Incumbent comprehensive advice tools — these are well-established offerings, but often suffering from issues common to legacy technology, such as complexity, clunky UIs, difficulty integrating with other systems. 
  • New entrants — often built by startups, offering a more modern user experience and out of the box integration with advice providers’ ecosystems. 

With these tools readily available, advice providers, including superannuation funds and life insurers just need to select the right one and integrate it into their systems. The challenge here is integrating a digital advice tool from a third-party provider with internal data sources and targets such as CRMs and registry system, and external data sources like CDR. In doing this, seamlessness and consistency of advice across channels — such as digital, in person, phone etc — is key. For organisations that already have data management platforms and data quality solutions in place this will be relatively straightforward.  

Changes will need to happen behind the scenes too. The limited number of advisers and the rising number of clients per adviser point to a need for increased efficiency. The same kinds of integrations referenced above are equally important in the non-client facing systems and processes used by financial advisers and paraplanners. What is unclear is what model will prevail. The back-office of financial advice providers generally includes an advice platform serving as a system of record, these are often described by their users as “slow” and “clunky”. If this continues to be the case, it is likely that more will be done outside of the advice platform, through integration with best of breed applications and the use of data management platforms. 

People will inevitably need to be carefully guided along the journey. Advice providers would be well served by starting with limited and scaled digital advice implementations and experimenting with ways to nudge customers towards using them. 

Superannuation funds should also consider the skills and capability required to support digital advice. The staff required to deliver in-person advice may not be the same staff required to manage digital advice tools. Approaches to digital advice will also need to be constantly fine-tuned and improved; funds will need to ensure they are capturing data on the uptake and usage of these tools, and continuously improving them accordingly. 

Data to deliver advice 

Gathering the data required to deliver advice still poses a significant challenge. In the QAR, Michelle Levy declined to make a recommendation on access to consumer data. She cited the proposed expansion of CDR to include “Open Finance” as the solution to current difficulties in collecting client information for the delivery of advice. 

Since then, the expansion of CDR to superannuation and insurance has been paused, with Treasury not due to review this decision until the end of 2024. Other valuable data is held by government agencies like the ATO and Services Australia, and no current plans exist to make this easier for advisers and advice tools to access this data. 

Though this problem has not yet been solved in practice, we believe that the solutions are known. Some form of public utility, developed in partnership between government and industry, could make it possible for client data to be accessed for the provision of advice. Such a utility would ideally serve two purposes: 

  1. Allow an individual client to share their data with an adviser or advice tool. CDR provides a good model of how client consent and data sharing can work here. 
  2. Allow advice providers and software developers to access large, anonymised datasets which could be used to support decision making in the advice process. 

The solution here may indeed be an expansion of CDR, but the loss of momentum and lack of a plan to incorporate ATO and Services Australia data into the CDR regime is cause for concern here. Advice providers and their partners may need to explore other avenues. 

Data from the advice process 

Financial advice creates the richest and most complete datasets that financial institutions are likely to hold on their clients. Despite this, we have found that neither advice providers nor organisations like super funds know what to do with this data. The problem potentially lies in the relatively small number of clients that this data is available for — a superannuation fund might have millions of members, but advice records for mere tens of thousands of them. Nonetheless, we feel this comprehensive sample of data must have applications in problems that require cohort analysis. Retirement income strategy, marketing, and member engagement are just a few that come to mind. 

With the regulatory handbrake taken off financial advice, we expect the number of advised Australians to grow rapidly in coming years. As well as improving our overall financial wellbeing, we anticipate that this will lead to a host of new opportunities for advice providers throughout the industry. 

Advice is one of the topics explored in Novigi’s Q3 FY24 Quarterly Report.

Picture of By Kevin Fernandez

By Kevin Fernandez

General Manager, Market Strategy & Propositions, Novigi

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In his paradigm-shifting #1 New York Times bestseller, Abundance (co-written with Ezra Klein), this award-winning journalist reveals how our policies and culture have pushed us into a world of scarcity (not enough housing, workers, or progress)—and offers a radical new path towards a world where housing is affordable, energy is plentiful, and innovation flourishes across industries.

He shares a compelling vision of a future where we have more than enough for everybody, and a practical, actionable roadmap for how to get there. It starts with taking more risks, building more expansively, and recognizing that we all have the power to create a world of abundance. “Everything’s utopian until it’s reality,” he says.

Carmen Beverley-Smith

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Carmen joined APRA in March 2023 and holds the role of Executive Director, Life and Private Health Insurance and Superannuation.  

She has had an esteemed career in financial services, spanning over 25 years. She has held diverse leadership roles at Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including across risk, transformation and change, product and portfolio development, and sales and service. 

Prior to joining APRA, she held the role of General Manager, Risk Transformation Delivery Integration at Westpac. This involved leading the group-wide implementation of a suite of solutions to uplift risk management capability and develop data, analytics and reporting. 

Carmen leads with a values-driven approach and a particular interest in developing and mentoring talent. 

She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Accounting, is a certified Chartered Accountant and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. 

Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

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Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.  She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organisational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. 

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Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organisational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

 

Daniel Mulino MP

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Born in Brindisi, Italy, Daniel was a young child when he moved with his family to Australia. He grew up in Canberra and completed his first degrees – arts and law – at the ANU. He then completed a Master of Economics (University of Sydney) and a PhD in economics from Yale.

He lectured at Monash University, was an economic adviser in the Gillard government and was a Victorian MP from 2014 to 2018. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer of Victoria, Daniel helped deliver major infrastructure projects and developed innovative financing structures for community projects.

In 2018 he was preselected for the new federal seat of Fraser and became its first MP at the 2019 election, re-elected in 2022 and 2025. From 2022 to 2025, Daniel was chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Economics Committee in which he chaired inquiries; economic dynamism, competition and business formation and insurers’ responses to 2022 major floods claims.

In 2025, he became the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services.

In August 2022, Daniel published ‘Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia’, which aims to explore the ways in which an insurance approach can improve the effectiveness of government service delivery.