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Progeny Client Story

“There’s a new breed of advice coming. Financial advisers like talking to clients, they like sitting with clients but the new breed of adviser will be less geographically focused.

This will change the way you set your business up and change the way you get new clients. There isn’t a dominant brand in the independent advice market able to get clients UK wide and this is where Progeny is focused.”

In an interview with Cathi Harrison of the Verve Group, Neil Moles, the CEO of Progeny talks about lockdown, technology and how it may have a permanent change to the way advice is delivered.

moneyinfo allows our clients to see all their information and most importantly upload documents. With Docusign electronic signatures we are able to communicate with our clients fully digitally.

“When lock-down hit we were fortunate to be already rolling out moneyinfo to our clients. We had 400 of 3,500 clients live at the start of lock-down. The moneyinfo team have been fantastic working with us and we’ve now rolled out to all of our clients across not only financial planning but also the legal sector.

We are no longer posting anything and it’s made us hugely more efficient.

We may not be back at work fully before the end of this year, which is a challenge but communication is stronger now in the business than it ever has been.

Progeny 1Post-Covid we will become a hybrid model with almost all internal and supplier conversations via WebEx. We will continue to offer face to face advice for clients once it’s safe to do so but many clients will choose virtual meetings over face to face for their convenience.

Just because you’ve always done something one way, doesn’t make it right. We have an opportunity to determine what the future looks like. We need to listen to our clients and work in the way that works best for them.

We’ve created a positive index to measure how well we are doing as a group with a focus on three things –

  1. our responsibilities to our staff and their families;
  2. our responsibility to our clients and
  3. our responsibility to society.

Progeny 2We’re a very strong financial business, we’ve taken on new staff during lockdown and have not furloughed anyone. We want to grow through this period and come out of lockdown leaner, stronger and fitter.

75,000 fewer pages printed.

Our responsibility to society means a responsibility to the planet. We’ve cut down on travel and we’ve printed 75,000 fewer pages.

It’s a change to habits, we’ve not been able to post stuff to clients, we’ve got the portal active and we’re able to upload documents into it, clients can print if they want but most choose not to, they can read it, electronically sign and it comes back to us and straight back into our back-office system.

Suitability reports (3,000 a year at 20 pages each), application forms, fund switch forms etc. they’ve all gone digital and we categorically won’t be going back to printing. We’re already sending some of our photocopiers back to the manufacturers.

We’ve become a technology company overnight that advises clients. Communicating digitally rather than physically and it changes your entire model.

We’ve seen great creativity in both internal and external communications and a shift in the way we’ve worked for years. It doesn’t mean you have to stick with this forever, but it also means you don’t have to go back because now you have more options.

Before the lockdown I travelled a lot. With eight offices in the UK and growing international connections it was necessary to grow the business. Digital communication is making me reassess how much of this I will need to do in the future.”

Neil Moles, CEO, Progeny Group

Progeny 3Reproduced with the kind permission of the Verve Group.  www.weareverve.co.uk 

See the full webinar at -

The Verve Group in conversation with Neil Moles