Automate paraplanning requests with Strategy Assist

We are excited to introduce our newest product, Strategy Assist. A natural next step in automation after file notes is paraplanning requests.

Strategy Assist achieves this in a unique way, by providing a collaborative workspace where you can interact with Athena, our AI assistant, and develop tailored client strategies and automated paraplanning requests in real time.

We will be updating this post to include a full length demo and walkthrough soon, but in the meantime, here is the breakdown:

We currently have 3 tasks available: Draft a Strategy Paper, Create an Advice Request and Quick Advice Request.

Strategy Paper

This task allows you to leverage a recent file note, and either upload fact finds, other file notes, product research and/or provide audio instructions to develop recommendations for the client.

Athena will use the reference material provided to make a cashflow surplus and tax calculation using current tax rates so you have all the right numbers when developing recommendations.

She will then suggest some recommendations based the scope of advice and the client's:

• Goals and objectives
• Ages and employment status
• Current financial situation, including their cashflow surplus

If the recommendation is an investment or contribution, she will quantify it and direct funds from one or more financial resources (surplus, sale of assets etc). If the recommendation is a rebalance or product switch, she will draw from any product research you have provided.

She will also provide a rationale behind each recommendation and a link to the relevant goal and objective.

From there you can refine your recommendations live, with text or audio instructions. Once you are happy with the recommendations and wording, she will populate your Strategy Paper template for review.

Once finalised, you can download or sync to your financial planning software.

Create an Advice Request

This task will take everything created in the previous step, or can be completed as an independent task. Again, you can upload reference material including other strategy notes, a fact find, product research etc. and provide audio instructions.

Athena will extract the recommendations and allow you to view and refine them, as well as confirm with you all the documents provided and how to use them to populate your advice request template.

Once all steps are completed, you will have a very detailed advice request ready to send to paraplanning!

Quick Advice Request

This task is super simple for those who just want to "talk" to their template. Athena will display your template in the workspace panel and you can record audio to populate it!

Tips & Tricks

1. The more accurate and concise your data, the better (and faster) the outcome: Athena will try and analyse what your provide, and make assumptions along the way, but providing her with huge PDFs or unnecessary reference material will slow her down.
2. PDFs with no password protection: Athena only supports PDFs at this time and won't be able to crack your password protection, so make sure you remove that before uploading. We will support other formats in the future.
3. Give her time, she is thinking through all this: Athena is a very powerful "reasoning" model, which mean she thinks, plans then executes all your questions and requests. This provides a much more accurate and comprehensive response, but will take her longer.
4. Start a new strategy for each task: You can go from one task to the next in one strategy, but Paradino only keeps track of one document per strategy, so it's better to start a new strategy for a Strategy Paper and another one for an Advice Request. That way you have each document available to download or sync at any time.
5. The strategy workspace: This is a text editor where Athena will generate and update documentation. It's our goal for this to be a real-time collaborative space where both you and Athena can make edits at the same time, but, for now, do as much refinement with Athena as you want, then as a last step make your final edits. Athena doesn't remember your edits (yet) so she may overwrite them if you ask her to update the documentation after you do. All updates in the editor will auto-save for you to download at any time.
6. Audio is the next big thing: Try out using audio to refine your document with Athena, we promise it's addictive and you'll wonder why you've been typing all this time!
7. The workflow is flexible: We have designed a simple workflow so that Athena can retrieve existing documents within Paradino, allow you to upload other reference material and optionally provide audio instructions. There are no strict boundaries around this, however, you can guide Athena to perform additional or different steps depending on your needs, just ask!

Strategy Paper vs Advice Request

What's the difference?

Strategy Paper provides more guidance to the adviser in developing client strategies and performs a very detailed and accurate cashflow calculation based on information from the reference material. It can be done as a step prior to Advice Request or as a pre-research step to provide a starting point to recommendations.

Advice Request pulls all of that together, extracts information from where it needs to and populates it into a full paraplanning request with all the bells and whistles. It's more comprehensive from a document perspective and will incorporate product comparison details. You can leverage Advice Request without completing Strategy Paper and upload your own notes or provide recommendations via audio.

Ready to see it in action? You can sign up for free and try it out yourself!