The most recent statistics have Xplan holding 35%, COIN holding 20%, Visiplan holding 10% & Midwinter holding 10% of the adviser financial planning software market.
Regarding time to complete a Statement of Advice document:
Software providers also managed to reduce the time it takes to produce Statements of Advice by 40 minutes, from 7 hours and 36 minutes on average in 2006 to 6 hours and 50 minutes in 2010.
After completing SoAs for the past 10 years for the majority of financial planning groups in Australia, I have been working with various software providers in order to offer a way to enter the data online in order to produce Statement of Advice documents.
I have spoken to many financial advisers and they no longer want to do the following:
- Pay for financial planning software
- Learn financial planning software
- Provide paraplanning training to a staff member who may no stay committed to their business
- Wait 7-10 days for a centralised paraplanning unit to prepare their document
- Pay for research software
- Have their Statement of Advice prepared in an inconsistent way
- Present their clients with a 60+ page document that they may never read as it has been written for compliance only
And cost?
If you research the cost of completing an SoA, you would find that an in-house paraplanner (with all additional staffing costs, software costs, training costs etc) would cost $400 to complete a typical SoA document. The average for most outsourced paraplanner would be $400 – $600 for the same document. For the same document, completed in half the time (2 days instead of 4-10) using an online form, I am looking at a cost of $200 – $250.
The documents produced will be compliant, consistent, easy-to-read, well-researched and concise.
There will also be a range of Statement of Advice documents to have produced:
- SMSF Statement of Advice (including information on establishing a SMSF)
- Insurance Statement of Advice (including detailed comparisons of product replacement, RPAR reports)
- Business Insurance Statement of Advice (including details of structures)
- Review Statement of Advice documents (including references to previous Statement of Advice documents, Statement of Additional Advice SoAA documents, Financial Plan documents, CAR documents)
- Superannuation Statement of Advice (including detailed research and reasonable basis for advice when switching products)
- Investment Statement of Advice (including managed fund research & regular savings plans)
- Trust Statement of Advice (includes entity SoA information)
- Company Statement of Advice
- Estate Statement of Advice
- Gearing Statement of Advice (includes gearing analysis & suitability of lending in SoA)
- and many more….