The firm

Radiant Financial Planning is a UK financial advice firm based in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, providing financial planning, tax planning, employee benefits and business consultancy to individuals and businesses. The firm runs on Intelliflo as its back-office and CRM, with a team of 50-plus across the group.

Letter of Authority work at Radiant sits with a back-office and paraplanning team that gathers plan information from providers for new clients, transfers and reviews. It is unavoidable, high-volume work: every case has to clear it before advice can proceed. When that team is inundated — around tax year-end, for example — the whole pipeline queues behind it.

The challenge: LOA info-gathering was a manual, admin-bound bottleneck

• Info-gathering sat entirely with the admin and paraplanning team. When they were busy, cases waited.

• Uploading a provider response was one thing; actually gathering and checking the right information was separate work, spread across inboxes.

• When planners tried to gather information themselves, they missed questions and handed back incomplete cases — so the team had to start again.

• Radiant had tried other LOA tooling before, with mixed results, and it never joined the process end to end.

One thing we've struggled with when they've tried to do their own info-gathering in the past is they wouldn't get all of the information — they wouldn't ask all of the questions — and then they'd hand us something that was incomplete anyway, and we'd have to start again. — Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

The solution: 4admin gave Radiant one end-to-end LOA workflow

1. End-to-end, not just upload. 4admin runs the whole LOA journey in one place — from request through to a checked, CRM-ready output — rather than bolting onto a single upload step.

2. An inbox agent that finds the information. 4admin checks the team's inbox and surfaces the provider information automatically, so responses don't sit unread and nobody re-keys from scattered emails.

3. A standard checklist anyone can follow. The workflow gives one list of what to gather, so info-gathering is done right first time and to the same standard, whoever does it.

4. Oversight and consistent output. The team keeps visibility of what has been done and checked, and everything lands in the Intelliflo back-office in the same format every time.

5. Safely extended to planners. With the checklist and oversight in place, Radiant opened info-gathering to newer and junior advisers with spare capacity — without losing quality or consistency.

This is enabling them to have that list to easily do it themselves. We can see it, and they make sure they're uploading it to our back-office system in the same format the admin team would have done. It looks the same, and they've got all of the information. — Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

The outcome: more done with the same resource, and info-gathering opened up for the first time

With the whole LOA journey in one workflow, Radiant's team gets more done without adding headcount, and work moves through more smoothly. The inbox agent removes the hunt for provider information, and a standard checklist plus built-in oversight let Radiant do something it couldn't do reliably before: hand info-gathering to planners with spare capacity, knowing every case comes back complete and in the right format.

In Mel's words

We found that it's made a real difference in our process — having the end-to-end rather than just uploading. The response has been really good.

— Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

It just flows much better — especially the part where it goes and checks our inbox and finds that information for us. It's been a real time saver. We've definitely managed to get more done with the resource than we did before.

— Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

What's next

Radiant is now switching on 4admin's income-reconciliation extraction for its hardest cases. Most of the firm's reconciliation flows through EDI, but a handful of providers fall outside those feeds — led by a quarterly Zurich statement that runs to 80 pages and doesn't convert cleanly to a spreadsheet, splitting policy numbers and merging columns. Radiant's income reconciliation team is putting exactly those documents through 4admin first.

If a document converts, it takes 10 seconds to put it on Intelliflo. It's when it's not converting that we have these issues. That Zurich one is 80 pages and it doesn't convert properly — it's really bad at converting that one.

— Lindsay Hedley, Income Reconciliation Supervisor, Radiant Financial Planning