Rob Kingsbury spoke with Rob Tedder, ex-paraplanner and recently appointed sales lead at AI-driven financial advice tech provider Plannerpal, about moving from paraplanning to a technology role, the skills paraplanners bring to roles outside of paraplanning, and how AI will help transform financial advice processes.
After 14 years working within advice firms, Rob Tedder says he came to a crossroads in his career where he was asking the question, “what next?”
Having become a financial advice administrator straight out of university, where he took a degree in food science and technology, Rob had worked his way up to deputy head of paraplanning at Epoch Wealth Management when he was given the opportunity to become involved in the development of the firm’s in-house-built cashflow forecasting tool.
“It came at about the right time for me,” Rob says. “After 12 years as a paraplanner, I felt I was ready for a change. At the same time, I didn’t want to lose the knowledge and the skills I had gained as a paraplanner. It was the perfect way for me to develop my career as a paraplanner in a new and exciting way.”
The team quickly took the digital cashflow tool from one used within the firm, to a product that could be used by financial advice firms in general – launching as i4C in 201.
Rob was given the job title of Knowledge and Success Manager, and spent three years helping to develop the product and sell it to advice firms.
“I was presenting the model live, showing business how using cashflow they could deliver advice to clients which was more engaging and transparent and importantly, how they could demonstrate the value of advice to clients and help them build the long-term relationships they needed,” Rob says. “I could use my experience as a paraplanner to really show advisers the benefits.”
In August 2019, i4C was acquired by intelliflo. Rob stayed with the back-office provider, becoming Client Cashflow Solutions Manager in March 2021.
His next step was to join Canadian company Conquest Planning, a software house specialising in financial advice delivery through technology.
“Conquest believed the old way of delivering financial advice technology, relying on the user to be the expert, wasn’t necessarily the way forward,” Rob explains. “They built an engine that would drive and enhance the build of the financial plan, the Strategic Advice Manager – known as SAM, that would do all the heavy lifting, making it easier, quicker and more efficient to do business.”
He stayed at Conquest for three years, then in late 2024 he was offered the opportunity to re-unite with i4C CEO Mark Harman, who by now was chairman at start-up advice technology company Plannerpal, in the role of sales lead at the company.
“At each stage in my journey, I’ve been evolving with the technology,” Rob says. “Joining Plannerpal, apart from re-igniting the excitement you get from working in a start-up business and with start-up technology, is an opportunity for me to once again use my paraplanning knowledge, experiences and skills.”
Explaining what Plannerpal is and does, Rob says: “Plannerpal is essentially the assistant to not just financial planners, but to paraplanners and administrators too.
“As a technology, it’s there to augment and enhance each of those roles, to get each of them working more efficiently so that they can focus on their jobs that are business generative, add value and that they more enjoy.”
AI-driven, the technology is about making the advice process smoother for the client, more efficient and cost effective for the advice business, and continuing to evolve to help create further improvements by helping to automate even more of the advice processes.
It starts with the onboarding and review processes. “The challenge all paraplanners will have experienced, is getting the information out of the adviser’s head, so it can be used by the paraplanning and administration teams,” Rob says.
“Plannerpal can transcribe the client meeting, download the meeting notes, generate a proposal letter or an e-mail follow up, and that can all be done within the space of five minutes after the meeting.
“It’s capturing all the relevant information, and it moves things into the decision-making process a lot quicker. It means the paraplanner can get on with the job straight away, with the right information, and they’ve got it all in the client’s own words. A paraplanner can actually quote the client.”
By having access to the meeting notes straight away, it also means that any vulnerabilities a client may have, or opportunities to add value for them, can be spotted and acted on faster.
“There is a lot of value just from AI being able to create simple documents and outputs like this. And there is more coming. We are currently beta testing annual reviews and suitability report writing capabilities, which will further speed up and the advice cycle.”
Rob emphasises, however, that the technology will augment and enhance what paraplanners do, not replace them.
“It’s not about replacing the roles that currently exist, it’s about making them easier. If we can take away the heavy lifting of actually generating the reports, the paraplanner can use their technical expertise to go through and sense-check it and refine the output, rather than having to just be a template editor.
“If the technology can produce the draft report in five minutes and the paraplanner then uses their technical knowledge and experience to tailor it, becoming the technical expert to the adviser, then that’s going to considerably shorten the advice process and improve the service and the outcome for the client.”
Similarly, for the administrator role, he says. Administrators will know straight away what actions are needed following the meeting and they can pick up on them and get started. They haven’t got to spend time drafting emails to send to clients, because that can be done for them.
“And for advisers, they no longer need to sit down and write their notes from the meeting. They know everything will have been recorded and passed to the paraplanning and admin team so they can get on with what’s needed for the client. This gives the adviser more time to service more clients or deepen their existing client relationships.
“It takes away the need to tackle the simple elements of everyone’s role and deliver a faster yet richer experience for the client.”
Using paraplanning skills in other roles
Traditionally, paraplanning was seen as a stepping stone into advising. It still can be but over the past decade it has been increasingly recognised in its own right.
As Rob’s career to date has shown, the knowledge, skills and experience acquired as a paraplanner, can also be transferred into other roles within financial services.
It has been particularly useful, Rob says, for people to whom he is talking to know that he has been at the coalface and knows the challenges they face.
“I know the issues because for 12 years I was dealing with them. Likewise, I understand what the frustrations with technology can be, having been there and experienced it myself.
“I can talk to those sort of issues and say, ‘I know this is a problem but we can solve that through Y, or we’ve built our integration to do X’. I’m able to talk at the same level, in terms of what they do day in, day out. These are the qualities that a paraplanner can bring to other roles.
“Whether someone wants to make the move will depend on their appetite for it. Are they happy staying where they are, or are they thinking ‘what’s next?’”
Main image; blue-nick-fewings-zF_pTLx_Dkg-unsplash
