Advice Explorer

Financial advice is traditionally a world of graphs, tables and numbers; inaccessible to everyday Australians. As a result, fewer Australians are seeking financial advice. Our challenge was to communicate the value of financial advice, and how it helps everyday Australians live the life they want. We needed to redesign the experience of AMP’s financial advisers by reinventing the tools and technology they use. This execution needed to be an in-branch experience facilitated by a financial adviser for a wide range of clients including couples, parents, business owners, and individuals.

Using the Advice Explorer’s touch-interface, advisers help customers create a timeline of their life’s aspirations and simulate how financial actions will help them achieve those goals. They drag, drop, scroll interactive elements, and see real-time updates based on their data and sophisticated financial modelling. Putting the power to explore life’s possibilities at their fingertips enables a richer conversation. Advisers also use the Advice Explorer to simulate different life events and scenarios, enabling customers to make informed decisions about their financial future. With the Advice Explorer advisers deliver empowering financial advice in a way that anyone can understand.

Since launch, in addition to the 12,285 goals we’re already helping 2,000 customers achieve we’re also saving advice practices not minutes, but hours in advice production. By getting “hands on” with financial advice, customers leave feeling clearer, more prepared, and empowered. This forges stronger and longer lasting relationships, and gives advisers more opportunity to help customers realise more goals. At a brand level, the Advice Explorer is helping position AMP as one of Australia’s most progressive financial services providers, whose purpose is to make its services as transparent as possible for the benefit of all consumers.

The Advice Explorer is the product of a human centred design approach where customers and advice practice staff were constantly engaged to co-design and validate the solution resulting in an innovative, scalable, and future-proof product. The modelling technology and process underpinning Advice Explorer is currently patent pending. Known as the “goals engine” internally at AMP, it breaks new ground using stochastic modelling which forecasts 1,000 possible future return paths for each goal. Each path is based on customers’ personal data, projected financial performance, and takes into account variability such as market volatility. From these paths, we determine the likelihood of a goal being reached as well as the likely future gap, or shortfall, relative to the goal target. Never before have we seen such modelling placed in an interface directly accessed by customers, and this may be a world-first application of such technology for the sake of helping customers see and realise their goals.