Testimonial: Financial services company - practice management system
Our company employs several financial advisors and administrative assistants who manage hundreds of clients and thousands of insurance and investment policies in the course of our personal financial services business. For a long time we used an Access database to record clients' data. The database was, in effect, an extended contact list with a few fields specific to our business, like indicators of the type of policies the client had. There is a lot of work involved in administering the business. We need to review, on a daily basis, client policies that are up for renewal and request new premiums from insurers, compile summary reports for clients on their birthdays to inform them about their current financial standings, send our client birthday cards and newsletters, track the status of new business applications, calculate commissions received on current policies, etc.
Over the years we compiled a wish list of things we would like added to the database, which included recording details of insurers, products, policies and commissions, ability to hide details of policies written by one advisor from other advisors, automatic transfer of personal details onto documents for clients, ability to access the database from home or other places outside of the office, allowing clients to access their details electronically.
As we were planning to expand our business and take more advisors on board, a better data management system became a more urgent issue. We started actively looking at possible solutions. When we were evaluating Aware IM we first checked it against our wish list and found that it could, indeed, accommodate our wishes. So we made a decision to implement our new database using Aware IM. Once it was ready we moved our existing client data from the old Access database to the new Aware IM database. Our staff liked the new database because it allowed recording much more detailed data about clients and policies, and was easy to use.
What we did not realize in the beginning was how easy it was to set Aware IM to automatically do routine and repeating work. Now Aware IM can automatically check every day for policies that are up for renewal and send e-mails to insurers requesting new premiums. It can periodically produce summary reports and email them to clients, and can do several other regular chores.
However, the most impressive Aware IM capability has to be the way it creates documents filled with client data. For each of our clients we have to produce a Statement of Advice. This is a multi-page document detailing the client's current personal and financial situation and containing recommendations based on client's needs and objectives. Not only does Aware IM transfer client data from the database onto the document, it also calculates and inserts aggregate figures and prints different text depending on the client situation according to our rules. The Statement used to take us 4 to 8 hours to produce. Now with Aware IM it takes less than half of the time, and we are currently working on our template to reduce the time even further.
With the new Aware IM database we can now perform an in-depth analysis of our client base - a capability we badly lacked in the past. We can research clients in multiple ways, for example we can now list all clients with a particular occupation, with age and income in a certain range, who do not have an insurance policy of a given type.
There are some other things in Aware IM that will be definitely useful for us. We are planning to get Aware IM to automatically pick up e-mails from our medical practitioners reporting on client test results, so that the results can be automatically recorded in the database and forwarded to insurance companies to speed up the processing of new policy applications. At the moment the test results have to be handled manually by our staff. We are also planning to get Aware IM to automatically notify insurance companies of changes in client's personal information. Again, currently we do the notifications manually.
By our conservative estimates the new Aware IM database can save us at least 50% of the time we spend administering clients and policies, which would equate to savings of tens of thousand of dollars annually. More importantly, this will enable us to concentrate more on income producing activities, which will dramatically increase our bottom line profitability.
Lauren Mitsak
Integrated Planning Services
Email: ips@iprimus.com.au