A professional revolution for IFAs?
Nicholas Ryan – CEO -Pilot Financial Systems explains:
Two young(ish!) IFAs, frustrated with the proliferation of expensive, clunky advice software, have simply decided to go ahead and build their own. Now, partly funded by a UKRI Innovate UK award, they’re launching Pilot.
Buckinghamshire-based Nick Ryan and Dave Mills together comprise more than 35 years’ combined experience as advice professionals and business managers. Nick launched his own IFA firm 14 years ago, building it from scratch to managing around £100 million in client assets. Dave, a CFP, has spent the past decade as co-director of a successful advisory business.
So, both have worked with – and still do, even today – a wide range of clients, and experienced first-hand the frustrations that come with the software advice professionals must use day in, day out.
As such, their goal was simple: build one ecosystem that covers the whole advice journey, end-to-end across factfind, risk, cashflow, research tools and suitability report. The idea being that an advice professional can get rid of all their “January gym memberships”, or in other words, all those legacy packages. Pilot, now three years in the making, is the solution they couldn’t find on the market. And because it’s been designed by advisers, for all advice professionals, it’s priced transparently and built to reflect how real firms operate.
The result is also simple: using Pilot should mean an advice professional halves their costs and doubles their time. That’s been Nick and Dave’s mission since their first conversation in Nick’s kitchen – to make things faster and more affordable for advisers.
But there’s another important dimension to what they’re doing.
Both Nick and Dave are still close to the coal face, and remember very well the sacrifices they had to make to get started.
With that in mind, they really want to ask a question that’s often avoided, or effaced out of an outmoded version of presenteeism. That is: who should enjoy the benefits of the minutes and hours that software should be saving advice professionals?
Clients? Yes, absolutely. Making more time for personal service is an IFA’s bread and butter.
But, for Nick and Dave, there’s another important stakeholder to consider here: us. Advice professionals ourselves.
It’s important for both Nick and Dave not to be seen to be selling glib productivity soundbites. They’re not selling the ‘grind’ or ‘hustle culture’. Rather, they’re selling time back to advice professionals like themselves – and saying what you do with it is up to you.
Nick and Dave are committed to building their business; but they’re also committed to their families, their lives, their wellbeing. For them, it’s that simple, and they want to promote a world in which our profession is not afraid to say it.
Because ultimately, time savings are worthless unless they lead to time well spent. It’s a modest goal, sure, but this is what they mean by a “professional revolution”.
Meet Nick on 26th August at the Pilot x The Financial Planning Club webinar. Webinar Details
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For more information contact Pilot.