Many advice practices talk to us with concern around accepting revenue from clients they have little to no information about. If you are a practice manager with a recently purchased book of clients or an inherited practice, the reality of a post royal commission world is that justifying income for clients you know little about could be keeping you and your compliance manager up at night.
Starting or reinitiating an engagement program is hard when all you have is a name or policy number and a low confidence in their completeness and currency. Where do you start?
Your options are limited:
- Continue taking the risk of accepting revenue for clients you don’t know much about. Good luck with that!
- Drop the revenue (this defeats the purpose of taking on the new book)
- Take on the task of enriching these records so you can make contact and start the process of engagement.
PlanFocus specialise in enrichment processes for licensees and practices. It’s ironic that the first step to enriching client records starts with the revenue records you currently receive from suppliers (insurers, platforms and managers). Suppliers are most diligent at ensuring revenue and policy/account numbers are reported regularly. If you are using a revenue system like XPLAN, Commpay, Revex or even excel to track your revenue, you likely have the bones of what’s needed to start a successful enrichment program.
Our enrichment program, designed for XPLAN users but applicable for any vendor’s system, involves taking revenue records and pairing them up with extracts sourced directly from your CRM, your insurers, platforms and managers. We then use this pairing process to create unique single views of client address, DOB, contact details. From there we backfill XPLAN with the enriched data, ready for the practice to begin a more meaningful engagement process with their clients.
The secret in this process is to specifically target providers where the unengaged clients are invested or insured. There is low value in obtaining client details from platforms where you already have strong client engagement processes. Consider therefore not only targeting suppliers with strong FUM but also suppliers where you have the most accounts or policies.
Any enrichment is only going to be successful if the supplier info is current and of good quality. Ask suppliers to give you the following (in order of priority):
- Policy number
- Name string
- Email and mailing address
- Date of birth (if available)
- Anything else they can provide (sum insured, premium etc)
Getting started – Your finance manager or commission administrator should be able to tell you which suppliers provide the highest number of unique policies. Reports from Commpay will also direct you to where the most volume or FUM is located.
PlanFocus design readymade, goals-based advice solutions for XPLAN users with the hard work ‘already done’.
For expert advice and support bridging your data gap, contact PlanFocus on 1300 361 973 or visit our website www.planfocus.com.au.
