From the meeting to the suitability letter.

Ask a financial adviser where their week goes, and the answer is rarely “advice”. It goes on the paperwork around it: collecting documents before the first meeting, writing up notes after it, drafting the suitability letter, preparing the annual review. Then chasing the client for the one form that is still missing.

We have worked on this in a financial-planning practice, an independent advisory group and a commercial insurance broker. The details differ, but the shape is the same.

Before the meeting: the chase

Onboarding a new client means collecting ID, proof of address and anti-money-laundering documents. Clients send them in pieces, by email, by post, and increasingly by WhatsApp. Someone in the office keeps a mental list of who has sent what.

In the planning practice, we built an agent that collects these documents on the channel the client actually uses, checks that each one is complete and in date, and chases what is missing. The administrator stops chasing and starts checking a list that is already complete.

After the meeting: the write-up

The conversation is where the value is. But after a 15 to 20 minute call, an adviser at the broker would then type their notes into the broking system and build each document by hand.

Now the call is transcribed, and the system reads the transcript and fills about 25 of the 30 case fields. Then it fetches the firm’s own document templates and fills those too. The adviser opens a draft, not a blank page, and edits it in a live editor before anything is sent.

The firm’s director put it simply: even if it only filled in 90 percent of the information, it would still be a big time saving. That is the right expectation. The system does not need to be perfect. It needs to be checkable.

The suitability letter

In the advisory group we are building with now, the same pattern ends in the suitability letter. The meeting is transcribed, the key facts are drawn out, and a draft letter is written in the firm’s own template and wording. The adviser reviews every line and signs it, and compliance sees what changed.

We are careful here. A suitability letter records regulated advice. The system prepares it, and it never decides what the advice is. The adviser’s judgement, and the adviser’s signature, are the whole point of the document.

The annual review

Then there is the review cycle. Each client is due a review, each review needs a pack, and each pack needs current figures pulled from several places. The planning practice now tracks who is due, prepares the pack, and drafts the letters that go with it. The adviser walks into the review with the paperwork already done.

What makes it work

Three rules have held across every firm:

• Use the firm’s own templates. Wording, branding and compliance language have been approved over years. We fill them; we do not rewrite them.
• Keep the adviser in the loop by design. Every document is edited and approved by a person before it leaves, and the system records who made it, when, and at which stage.
• Stay inside the firm’s environment. One of these firms runs a strict zero-trust setup with its IT provider. The system was designed to fit it, not to work around it.

Where to start

Pick the document your advisers dread most, usually the suitability letter or the review pack, and time one from the end of the meeting to the moment it is sent. That number, multiplied by your client book, is usually the case for the first system.