Heather Hopkins recently had the opportunity to sit down with Alasdair Walker MD at Handford, Aitkenhead and Walker.

You can listen to the full interview or read the transcript below. Alasdair shares his experience working with clients early on in the Coronavirus lockdown, managing team working remotely, cyber risk and phishing scams and offers helpful advice on taking advantage of resources already available to you.

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Transcription of conversation with time stamps.

Heather Hopkins

Thanks for joining us Alasdair.

Alasdair Walker

Not a problem.

Heather  1:14

The reason I want to talk to you today is because you are a self-described tech geek. And one of the challenges that we’re facing at the moment amid the Coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic is that financial planners, are having to connect with their teams and their clients remotely, using technology in ways that they potentially haven’t used it in the past. As somebody who’s a bit more experienced in this than others, I just thought you might have some tips and tricks to share with others. So would you mind just talking a little bit about how you’re using technology to connect with your clients?

Alasdair 1:47

Yes. So it’s blindsided us as much as anybody else and we have been, and are predominantly, a face to face based business as many people in financial planning are. But in the past couple of years, I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to get remote meetings in place. Other areas that have really helped more generally is, for example, we can have online meetings booking using a bit of software called calend.ly, which automatically links in with our Outlook calendar, which is really good for organising meetings, but even more so now. That will also, if it’s a web meeting that we’ve set up, automatically send a link to the client, which will start up the Zoom cloud meeting application, which is our virtual meeting software of choice. And explain to them in that automated email, how it works and what it does.

Heather  2:44

And you just produced an excellent infographic  for clients on how to use Zoom (more info here https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/blog/coronavirus-your-free-client-guide-to-zoom-6137/). I thought that was a really helpful summary as many of your clients are possibly not as tech savvy and may not have used Zoom before.

Alasdair   3:01

Yeah, and I’ve actually been really surprised — and this was really before the current situation — how amenable our clients have been to using this kind of remote meeting solution. They often prefer it to a phone call when given the choice. The guide is just a little quick sort of six pointer on how you can get set up with it. The best thing about these sorts of web meeting solutions is almost everybody has used FaceTime, or Skype, or something similar at some point, whether it’s family that far flung, or whether it’s just keeping in touch with other relatives with a video call. So they’re all kind of generally familiar with it. Zoom makes it dead easy, because it’s just a link, you click the link it takes you to the app, it all just kind of works. We recommend to clients in the businesses that they use a tablet or their phone because we have found it’s much easier. There’s often more troubleshooting involved if you’re trying to get a laptop or a desktop to work.

Heather 4:00

That’s a really good tip. Are you finding that clients are logging into their portfolios more often than normal? Are you monitoring any of that?

Alasdair   4:08

We haven’t really. So in terms of the size of the business, we’ve got around 350 actively engaged clients on an ongoing basis between three financial planners. Obviously, you remember the conversations you’ve had in recent weeks, and it gives a bit of, I think, a bit of a warped view on how much attention people are paying to it. By that, I mean, I’ve been talking to people who have been worried about it specifically. We’ve proactively contacted a couple of clients where we have identified that it would be useful to catch up, particularly clients that have joined us very recently, we thought that was that was quite sensible. People tend to be quite relaxed. I had a hilarious conversation a week ago, where I sort of launched into the very general ‘your plan is 30 years and we’ve stress tested the planning left, right and centre and you’re still able to do everything you need,’ but he said ‘oh, I wasn’t ringing about that.’ So that was quite nice to hear.

Heather   5:03

That’s excellent. And is there any thought about potentially vulnerable clients? Because that’s a big a big topic in the wealth management industry. And there’s potentially more  people that could be considered vulnerable at the moment if they’re self isolating at home.

Alasdair  5:20

Yeah, definitely we did an exceptional mass mailer to all of our clients at the start of the week. We are conscious of the factors as you mentioned at the start. Our clients are are of the age where they’re at increased risk to Coronavirus. And before the government mandate started rolling out, we took the decision to stop all face to face meetings to protect clients. I’m actually living that now as we have two young children who both had temperatures over the weekend. And so now we’re, we’re stuck at home for a little while too. So, I’m very thankful that we’d done the advanced planning before I got stuck at home.

Heather 5:54

Another challenge of working remotely that hasn’t maybe got as much airtime is the challenge of Managing teams remotely. And as the head of the business I was just wondering if you had any thoughts for people on how to keep teams engaged and involved and some of the things that you’re doing to keep things moving along.

Alasdair 6:12

Yeah, definitely it is a worry. And this is what’s hit us hardest because we are three financial planners, two paraplanners and three expert administrators. The financial planners have been geared up and working from home regularly for a number of years. So that’s all there in place. But the idea of having the administrative function in a paraplanning function working remotely was new to us. Again, we started that contingency about two or three weeks ago, which meant we actually managed to get hold of some laptops which are here are even rarer than toilet rolls at the moment. And so we have the hardware for everybody to work from home. But we were also very fortunate that we have good IT support. And then we have somebody like me who is a self described tech geek to be able to set it all up. Because I can see it being a very daunting prospect. Even if you’ve got all the hardware, if you haven’t got the systems and network understanding to be able to actually get it all plugged in together. What I would say is, you know, lean heavily on your IT support there, they’ll be very used to this. And if you don’t have it support, then there’s lots of online guides available. Often there’s a whole load of software we’ve got available that we’re not even using. So we use zoom with clients, as I mentioned, but for internal comms, we use teams, teams as a Microsoft application given away for free with almost any online Office subscription, which we’ve nearly all got. If you don’t use Office, you might use Google services, in which case you’ve got hangouts which is very similar. So these are all things we’ve already got. We don’t need to go out and find something new. Teams allows video calls, voice calls. It allows remote control of the desktop as well and screen sharing. So we’re now in the process of testing out collaborative working, for example, working on clients financial plans, between the planner in the paraplanner, just not sitting at a desk next to each other. And you can do that with this combination of software we’ve already got. Accessing files teams can help with. OneDrive again, is pretty much given for free with just about anything Microsoft use. And that’s a great sharing app in a pinch. You may use Dropbox or Google Drive, they’re all things that we can deploy quickly. We can worry about the detail later on. You know, if you just dump the stuff off your file server, you know you’re going to need for the next few weeks for example, then you know, that’s going to get you ahead of the curve.

Heather   8:48

Those remote drives have the advantage of security that sharing documents by email doesn’t bring which is an important consideration for a lot of a lot of firms.

Alasdair 8:57

Security is a really good thing to bring up at this point, actually, because there has been a massive uptick in what are known as phishing scams with a PH via email, things that look very legitimate, often that look like government edicts or HMRC. Emails talking about reliefs available to businesses, which turned out to actually be trying to get your login credentials and so on. So you’ve got to be really vigilant, even more so than than usual. Especially you’re working in an unfamiliar environment, perhaps working from home on a different PC than you used to, you know, you want to check everything you open three or four times.

Heather   9:35

Yes, that is such a good point, isn’t it? Because people can’t just ask the person sitting next to them anymore.

Alasdair 9:40

And whatever you do, don’t forward the email to somebody else to ask if it’s legitimate because you’re just making the problem worse.

Heather 9:45

Exactly. But yeah, these scammers always hit when we’re at our most most vulnerable. Great, so I have three things that I wrote down, so lean heavily on IT support. Your tip about using an iPad for zoom was really important. And then Triple checking every email and being really careful and security really, really good tips and also there’s actually use the use the resources you have available, such as Microsoft Teams and other services you’re already paying for how to use it. Terrific. really helpful. Alasdair, thank you. No worries. Thank you. Great and stay healthy. Thanks