The firm

Radiant Financial Planning is a UK financial advice firm based in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. The firm provides financial planning, tax planning, employee benefits and business consultancy services to individuals and businesses, supported by Intelliflo as its back-office and CRM system and a group-wide team of more than 50 people.

Letter of Authority work is a critical part of Radiant’s advice process. The back-office and paraplanning team gathers plan information from providers for new clients, transfers and reviews. It is essential, high-volume work: every case must pass through this stage before advice can move forward. When the team is under pressure — particularly around tax year-end — the wider advice pipeline can quickly build up behind it.

The challenge: LOA information-gathering had become a manual bottleneck

• Information-gathering sat almost entirely with the administration and paraplanning team, meaning cases waited whenever that team was at capacity.

• Uploading a provider response was only one part of the process; identifying, checking and extracting the right information still required separate manual work across multiple inboxes.

• When planners tried to gather information themselves, key questions were sometimes missed and cases came back incomplete, creating rework for the team.

• Radiant had previously tested other LOA tools, but none had successfully connected the process from request through to checked, CRM-ready output.

One thing we’ve struggled with when planners have 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 — we would then have to complete the task in the back office before it could progress to paraplanning. — Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

The solution: 4admin created one end-to-end LOA workflow

1. End-to-end workflow, not just document upload. 4admin manages the LOA journey in one place, from the initial request through to a checked, CRM-ready output.

2. An inbox agent that finds provider information. The system checks the team’s inbox and surfaces provider responses automatically, reducing the risk of information sitting unread or being re-keyed from scattered emails.

3. A consistent checklist anyone can follow. The workflow gives users a clear list of what to gather, helping information to be captured correctly first time and to the same standard, whoever completes the task.

4. Clear oversight and consistent outputs. The team can see what has been completed and checked, while information lands in Intelliflo in a consistent format every time.

5. A safe way to involve planners. With the checklist and oversight in place, Radiant was able to extend information-gathering to newer and junior advisers with spare capacity, without compromising 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 completed with the same resource

By bringing the full LOA journey into one workflow, Radiant has been able to move cases through more smoothly without adding headcount. The inbox agent reduces the time spent searching for provider information, while the standard checklist and built-in oversight have enabled Radiant to do something it could not previously do reliably: share information-gathering with planners who have available capacity, confident that cases will come back complete, checked 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 process rather than just uploading the response received. The response from our teams has been really good, and it is helping us shorten our turnaround times for completing info gathering.

— Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning

Our process just flows much better with 4Admin — What is especially helpful is that the system can check our inbox to automatically find responses from providers. It’s been a real time saver. We’ve definitely managed to get more info gathering tasks completed with the same resource than we did before.

— Mel Christie, Radiant Financial Planning