Financial planning firm State Super Financial Services (SSFS) has deployed Midwinter’s cloud-based platform, Advice OS, in a bid to overhaul existing business operations and prepare the firm for future growth.
As part of its Future Operation Model (FOM) Project, SSFS identified Midwinter as a key business partner to help with its “paperless office” transformation, with SSFS allocating a total budget of $50 million.
SSFS managing director, Michael Monaghan, said the deployment of Advice OS was in line with its expansion strategy, allowing for a greater diversification of their business operating model, services, and customers.
“We have successfully implemented an end-to-end advice system that has accelerated the delivery of our advice process and allowed us to bypass para-planning completely,” he said.
The partnership allows SSFS to implement real-time compliance check-lists, retirement modelling tools and a built-in management approval process where certain recommendations require management approval to continue.
Midwinter managing director, Julian Plummer, said the enhancement of its system’s reporting, integration, and API architecture back-end would allow advisers to leverage off in the future.
“In terms of innovation, we want to ensure our clients have a cohesive framework for advice. This means clients [looking at] the digital solutions that we have and investigating the benefits of advice, [before] escalating to other phone-based [options] or to a face-to-face interaction with a planner,” Plummer said.
“You don’t want to lose any of the customer information and you want to make it as frictionless as possible. Being able to escalate and ensure that the advice is frictionless is where we are looking to innovate the most.”
