The importance for practitioners to be able to demonstrate the value of the advice they are delivering to their SMSF clients is set to escalate with advances in technology that are already underway, an SMSF specialist has said.
“Data mining and the way in which we can actually automate transactions and rules through the machine getting smarter in what it’s doing, that in itself is going to be the next real shift and it’s only really in its infancy at this stage,” Smarter SMSF founder Aaron Dunn told delegates at his organisation’s recent SMSF Virtual Day 2021.
“What that [will do] is put greater pressure on the pricing points of services. Now that’s not to say that we need to make our pricing of services cheaper, but we do need to think about the value that we’re putting on our pricing or the value we are providing for our pricing.”
According to Dunn, the process will require practitioners to shift their focus to services they provide to clients that technology does not influence.
“If we can provide more value to the work around the compliance requirements for our clients, then that is where we are going to be able to add greater value and further entrench the relationship that we have with our clients,” he suggested.
“But if we keep focusing on those areas in which technology is going to put downward pressure on, then we are going to continue to find troubles with the [price] we can actually charge.”
He pointed out the COVID-19 pandemic had actually exacerbated the situation as it resulted in more clients adapting to the technology available to them.
“What we have seen historically is clients may not have necessarily invested the time, effort and energy that you may have wanted them to actually use, but now they didn’t have a [choice] and they started to open their eyes [and] become more intuitive to the technology there,” he noted.
“That actually drives greater expectations in the service delivery that you’re actually trying to provide to your clients as well.
“[This] does provide a great opportunity to revisit the type of service offering that you actually want to talk to your client about and provide value to them on an ongoing basis.”
