Inactive clients are currently being ignored, but a single online portal, similar to online banking, could help advisory groups re-engage with them.
“Every organisation, large or small, has got prospective clients, and we’re talking about people with medium to low balances, so they are being ignored,” Decimal managing director Jan Kolbusz told InvestorDaily.
“In all cases, the data on those clients is invariably incomplete or maybe even aged, [but] even though it is incomplete data, it’s still usable – there’s more value in that than picking people off the street.”
The banking sector had managed to engage customers through online banking facilities and the same needed to happen in the financial planning industry, Kolbusz said.
“Clients need to get engaged online and continue on that portal, just like Internet banking,” he said.
“The reason Internet banking immediately started working was because we trusted that everything we did was seamlessly sitting with the bank.”
The online portal for advisory groups must work on a personalised level, be easy to use and reinforce to clients that it is the account for their advice.
Advisory websites were not currently all-encompassing and were usually overloaded with calculators, Kolbusz said.
Re-engaging inactive clients was a major undertaking from a technical perspective, but as Australians held a few banking and superannuation accounts, there would already be some historical association, he said.
“It will all be a matter of who takes advantage of that historical relationship,” he said.
“The potential is just so important for the industry.”
Many advice groups were spending too much time on manually identifying and calling dormant clients, which was a costly exercise, he said.
