Last year I was fortunate enough to be invited to join 7IM’s excellent team at some of their Seven Imagine Summits. I often asked attendees if they are making use of open banking. It was at one of these summits that I met Ellie Price, IFA with Grovely Financial Limited, part of the Vision network. Ellie told me she uses Open Banking through Moneyhub with some of her younger clients. I recently caught up with Ellie to learn more.

About Ellie

Ellie has been a financial adviser for the past three years. She started Grovely Financial in early 2020 and is based in Wilton, in Wiltshire

Giving clients a picture of their net wealth: Moneyhub

Ellie uses Moneyhub with her younger clients to give them a full picture of their financial situation. About half of Ellie’s clients are under the age of 35 and she says there is a “misnomer that younger clients will not pay for advice – they just won’t pay over the odds for advice. They are in the wealth creation stage not wealth management, so their needs are different,” she says.

Ellie points out that many of her clients in their 20s and 30s are very “tech-savvy” and want it to be an easy process. Many of them use Monzo and Starling. They don’t consider these firms ‘fin-techs’, they’re just modern banks.

Ellie started using Moneyhub to give her clients an overall idea of their net wealth. Many of them were doing mental accounting and didn’t see the full picture of debt, pension, savings and mortgages. She says her clients often know their current account balance “down to the penny” but they have “less of an idea of their net wealth.”

If a young client sees their pension once a year, and the projected income is only £50 a year in retirement “it’s not that inspiring or useful,” she says. Moneyhub provides the opportunity to paint a fuller picture. The client can see how “consistent and manageable deposits to key accounts will affect their net worth positively. Moneyhub brings this into a usable format.“

Practice management system

Vision provide a compliance team in the back office and provide process and workflows that Ellie is expected to follow. She doesn’t use a practice management system because fee reconciliation is managed by Vision. She would make use of a CRM system or workflow system but doesn’t feel she needs all of the bells and whistles of a back-office system. She thinks there is a gap in the market for a financial-planning focussed basic CRM solution.

Cashflow Modelling

Ellie uses CashCalc and at her previous company she used Voyant for cash flow modelling. She praises CashCalc’s ease of use, and the “client facing feel when working through the system.” She praises the addition of pension forecasting tools and the ability to allow client’s comfortable with tech to “key in their own details”

Ellie is taking an innovative approach to servicing younger clients, empowering them with an understanding of their net wealth. She is one of few financial advisers I’ve met that is making use of open banking and her story offers an example of how it is being embraced by a generation of savers and investors who expect the user experience offered by a Monzo or a Starling to apply across financial services.

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Note: Grovely Financial Limited is an Appointed Representative of Vision Independent Financial Planning Ltd which is Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Firm reference number 487395.