Quality vs. quantity
Neil Gross, the chair of the Ontario Securities Commission’s Investor Advisory Panel, was careful to distinguish between technology’s potential to enhance the quality of service to clients, and its ability to enhance the quantity of clients advisors can serve.
“You can use the technology to create better outcomes for the clients that you have. Or you can use the technology to create a better outcome for you by serving more clients,” he said. “We’re really talking about improving outcomes for clients as the most important element of investor protection, and we need to make sure that we’re leveraging technology for the right purpose.”
Dewdney noted that advice quality shouldn’t have to come at the expense of scale, especially if the industry is expected to provide advice from coast to coast. He pointed to the gap between the number of financial planners in Canada – there are about 17,000 CFPs and 2,000 QAFPs in the country as of September 30, according to FP Canada – and the population of roughly 40 million Canadians.
Jill Huls, CEO of Thrive Wealth Management, agreed that technology has accelerated advisors’ ability to work with clients.
“If you think of the last 20 years in financial planning, or investment advice, or insurance advice, … it’s often been a one-to-one advice relationship. You had to access a human and disclose your information. You had to have a trusted conversation,” Huls said. “In the past five years, we’ve got the ability now to actually access some of those questions or information online through many of the mediums that that are available to us.”
