Count Financial has approved the latest DIY Advice technology from Padua Solutions for its adviser network, which will reduce the time taken to produce a Record of Advice (ROA) to less than 15 minutes on average, down from an average industry production time of around two to six hours.

Count Financial is the first licensee in Australia to implement the system, designed to bring down the cost of advice and improve affordability for clients.

Simon Jeffery-Bilich, Head of Practice Development and Research at Count Financial, says supporting advisers to make the advice process more efficient without compromising quality is a focus, which Padua’s technology will assist with.

“The new capability from Padua produces an ROA in accordance with our Professional Standards requirements, alleviating the challenge to produce quality advice in a timely fashion. It includes Inline Editor, which allows our advisers to customise the ROA to suit their clients’ individual circumstances as required.”

“There is also ‘fact find’ technology which integrates with our version of Xplan to access client information, enabling advisers to instantly compare a client’s existing platform and underlying investment options against various platforms and investments (including model portfolios and SMAs) on our APL,” he added.

According to real-time advice data from Padua, there are over two million ROAs produced each year, representing almost 80% of the 2.6 million advice documents created for individuals paying for advice in Australia.

Matthew Esler, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Padua Solutions, says that the amount of time that could be saved by advisers using Padua’s new ROA generation system will reduce from an industry average of 520 hours per year to 130 hours – a time saving on average of 390 hours per adviser. 

“We are delighted to be introducing this technology with Count Financial to support their advisers and their clients. It currently takes advice practices in the industry between two to six hours to produce an ROA for each client. We calculate that there are almost 160 clients per adviser*, and approximately 130 clients requiring ROAs per adviser. Cutting this time to less than 15 minutes will make a huge difference.”

* Calculations based on Wealth Data report of adviser numbers at just over 16,350 as at 25 August 2022.