Coronavirus Forces Restructure Of Work – Advisers Come To The Party

New data released by the ABS has revealed the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic has forced changes upon Australian businesses and employment practices. While the hardest hit sector is the hospitality industry which has seen 70% of businesses reduce the hours of their staff, Over 95% of businesses in the financial and insurance sectors remain open - one of the highest rates of any industry sector. Overall, it seems advisers have been successful in transitioning to the new working environment and are making use of technology to continue servicing their clients.

The ABS said almost 90 per cent of businesses across the country were expected to be impacted in future months. This correlates with a recent survey by Money Management, which found that 87% of advice practices were dealing with the pandemic by phone consultations. Other ways advisers were servicing their clients included online contact through emails/chats (80%), video consultation (53%), and 20% were carrying on with face-to-face meetings if clients required them. The same survey found 53% of advisers said client enquiries were higher than expected.

Anecdotally, some advice practices have been switching solely to video conferencing to service their clients, Steven Nickelson from Income Solutions in Richmond said his team are currently using zoom – the cloud-based video conferencing service, for all client meetings.

Keith Cullen, managing director of Wealth Today told Money Management that the move to working from home has been pretty seamless for a lot of advisers as most have had years of working at least a part of their time, if not most of it, from home or on the road in other cases. However, he said “the greatest impact we are seeing is massively increased workload due to the emotional and financial stresses that their clients are under”.

With the end point of the coronavirus epidemic yet to become clear, advisers could expect a continued increased workload due to worried clients needing reassurance of their plans and potentially altering their focus based on the rapidly changing economic circumstances the pandemic creates. The ability to manage this increased workload can be assisted by the uptake of digital technology such as Calendy to help automate bookings, different software suites to internally manage data, file and communications managementand DocuSign wherever possible, when “wet” signatures are not required. 

Adrian Patty, Director of Innovation at Advice Revolution and Co-founder of XY Adviser published a LinkedIn post saying that the digital shift happening right now as a result of social distancing will help advisers in a number of ways.“Everyone has incorporated some form of digital in their business in the last few years...but there are still the remnants of the paper age.”

“For some advisers this is catapulting them into the digital age and for others, this is the same way they've been operating for years. For the newly digital advisers, the benefit will be that they transform their practice efficiency and reap the productivity and compliance benefits. For the already digital advice propositions, they've just had their addressable market boom.”

There is a lot of technology currently available to help advisers conduct their business in these tumultuous times and we can only encourage further digital uptake in the advice community in the future. There is still a long way to go in our current scenario and the economic and social consequences are yet to fully play out. The chaos seems set to continue with economic growth set to be smashed and unemployment figures reaching levels not seen in decades.

Earlier this week, economists from Westpac predicted that Australian gross domestic product would contract by 8.5% in the June quarter. “Overall, the economy is expected to contract by 5% through the 2020 year,” Bill Evans, Westpac’s chief economist, said. “All else being equal, these growth forecasts would be consistent with the unemployment rate peaking at 17% in the June quarter and settling around 9% by year’s end.”

Article by:

Adviser Ratings

Was this helpful content?Let others know - share and vote-up