A key focus for advisory businesses and superannuation funds in the next 12 months will be attracting more Australians to use financial advice, according to a Provisio Technologies director.
"Everyone's struggling with how [to] actually engage members. In superannuation it's always been a big challenge," Provisio Technologies director and chief software architect Jye Tucker said.
In a bid to meet industry need, Provisio has released customisable calculators called Provisio Widgets.
"[Tools available in the market] are certainly not engaging enough," Tucker said.
"The idea came about after conversations with funds and thinking about how we can put the capabilities in front of a member without having to drive them to web calculators.
"They have to sift through [various] calculators to find the one that they want. That doesn't work."
He said the widgets addressed the problem of super members only engaging when they were ready to withdraw their money for retirement or rollover.
"The financial advice capabilities that funds are developing allow them to talk to the members that are 30, 35 years old, helping them on the path to retirement as opposed to [hearing from them] for the first time when they want to take the money out of the fund."
He said the calculator tool would significantly help super funds with limited advice capabilities, drawing members to other online advice tools, full statements of advice and advice teams.
After AustralianSuper had used Provisio's tools, it reported back that the calculators became "a good way of leading members through to the full advice tool", he said.
The widgets are free of charge to any advice provider for 12 months regardless of usage, however, after the first year high-usage widgets may incur a cents-per-use fee.
"There's a free usage threshold for this, so for funds that don't go above that threshold, they never get charged," Tucker said.
"The whole idea behind that is to basically help the funds that don't necessarily have an advice capability to be able to start improving the level of engagement around it without breaking their budget."
Provisio was planning more services in scaled advice, he said.
