Introduction to Lumiant [Getting Started]

What is Lumiant?

Lumiant, we are seeing structural change taking place in the financial advice industry that is ensuring clients not only comprehend the advice they are receiving, but engage with it. There are no other financial planning solutions that allow advisers to offer a deeply personalised and individualised experience at scale.

Lumiant is a dynamic planning process that brings to life what really matters, enabling a continuous and valued engagement process which can critically underpin the regular advice recommendations and review processes between the client and adviser.

Lumiant does not centre around the Statement of Advice, but around uncovering the client’s relationship with money, their values, their goals — what living their “best life” means to them.

Through a series of modules and via a client-centred process, advisers come to understand what truly matters to their clients.

Lumiant responds directly to the guidance from the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, as well as aligning with the FASEA Code of Ethics. We are compliant by design, by:

Creating a methodology for true consumer centricity and best interest duty (BID).
Putting the client, not the product, at the centre of the advice process.
Improving professional standards of financial advisers to current and future requirements (e.g. FASEA).
Establishing a basis for an ongoing transparent and values based advice process, to deliver a consumers' best financial life journey.

From making initial contact, clients will undergo a series of steps:

Your Life- A questionnaire on the client’s feelings toward their current financial position, which takes less than 10 minutes.

Your Values - After clients complete the Your Life survey, advisers meet with them to chat about their needs and values.

Your Investment Preferences - Capture client preferences on how their money is invested and the values driving their decisions.

Your Best Life Plan - Capture everything for your clients in their Best Life Plan to track their progress and provide ongoing engagement with their financial goals.

The Lumiant Story

The financial advice industry can have a massive impact on people’s lives, however it has not yet fully reached its potential. It currently lacks the evidence-base needed to create services that truly align with how a client wishes to live their life. Just selling a financial product is not enough, as clients begin to search for more meaning within their financial footprint.

Competitive products and alternative financial solutions are beginning to enter the market, disrupting traditional financial advice. We see this not as a threat, but as an opportunity to build an advice process and experience that is human-centred, and understands the fundamental values that sit behind any client’s stated financial goals. As an industry, we must prove that we add value to client’s lives.

Lumiant set out with a very simple objective; to make the profession noble. To prove that there is a wonderful intrinsic value in advice.

This is done by creating a unique measurable and memorable advice experience that is a combination of face-to-face and digital client experience. Through its digital interface, financial advisers can finally control what their clients can see. By codifying and digitising the process, it also allows firms to scale rapidly by ensuring compliance throughout the process, while still recognising the need for the human element of advice.

We may not be able to influence market returns, but we can influence what the client is doing today, to help them lead the life they have dreamed of. That is the power of advice.

Our unique process helps identify what really matters, so we can identify priorities, shape strategies and drive action to ensure clients live their best life.

“Why can’t the financial advice process be as enjoyable as its result?

In a process designed to be as satisfying as the outcome, Lumiant provides advisers with a measurable, meaningful and repeatable process to break down barriers, provide clarity, and open up communication – allowing advisers to better understand their clients, and clients to better experience the incredible value of advice.

Our ambition is to help advisers and their clients achieve their potential, by pushing beyond the mediocrity of yester-year, and get to the heart of what great advice can achieve…

Helping advisers and their clients live the lives they’ve always dreamed of and finally enabling advisers to live best interests, not just comply with it”.

- Santiago Burridge, Lumiant Co-Founder

Lumiant Research and Development

Having recognised the issues facing the financial advice sector, the founders of Lumiant decided a design-led approach to its development would be the best way forward. Management research has found design-led companies to outperform competitors time and time again. The Design Management Institute (2016) found that design-led businesses in fact outperformed their S&P competitors by 211%. As a people-focused service, this approach was chosen to ensure the best possible client experience, and create lasting impact within the profession.

The Lumiant client experience is based on a large body of evidence, including global research reports, behavioural economics, and communication best practices. We also conducted our own primary research and rounds of user testing, drawing from the experience of many financial advisers from the Lumiant Foundation Group.

In developing the Lumiant client experience, we followed a human-centred approach to researching with clients and advisers, to ensure we were designing to fit their needs. We mapped the engagement journey across 7 key stages:

Contact
Discovery
Engagement
Analysis
Solution & Implementation
Ongoing advice
Death & Beneficiary Advice

Previously, steps 1-3 revealed a high cost and effort in establishing trust with new clients and qualifying them prior to formal engagement.

Post engagement, in steps 4-5 the first 3-6 months required more work upfront before value was realised.

Step 6, ongoing advice is made difficult with the need to keep the client accountable within the rigid framework of the annual meeting.

We found there were issues at each stage of the journey that could be directly addressed by the Lumiant solution.

Research Findings - Client

Our primary research with clients found themes that resonated with most participants. It showed that throughout the course of an adviser engagement, the clients appreciate the peace of mind from having an expert guide them in an area as important as their personal finance. There are spectrums of openness and engagement, however most who seek out financial advice are grateful for instruction. Many saw their adviser like a friend, someone they had a relationship with and could trust, so “fit” was important.

However, the research also found that clients dislike the amount of paperwork and legalese involved in their engagement. They saw the sets of products offered to them as limited, and felt that “everyone’s a salesman”. They also tended to be wary about fees, and felt there was limited fee transparency.

Our research with clients of financial advisers found that they generally know they have an itch to scratch, whether good or bad, but often haven’t really discussed what they want out of life together with their partner.

There’s often a CFO in the partnership who controls the finances, leaving the non-CFO without a voice.

“I had no idea that was important to you, honey.”

- client

Overall clients felt they needed to be able to trust their adviser as more of a mentor working in their best interest, the way only a close friend would.

These findings fed directly into our Lumiant ‘Your Values’ feature.

Research Findings - Adviser

We also researched with advisers, to understand their pain points and moments of joy. Pain points for the adviser included trying to offer value in an environment of increasing compliance friction. This is compounded by fragmented systems and tools that are not adapted to the changing regulatory environment.

We found that there’s no repeatable way to show value. It is hard for the modern adviser to show value upfront and over time, especially when the intangible psychological value they provide is not traded on or realised.

Due to the fragmented nature of AdviceTech there was also the issue of compliance and double entry of data driving up cost. The compliance burden creates lots of manual processes, impacting adviser fees and in turn the types of people they can help. All advisers we researched with mentioned that the level of compliance required has made their advice more expensive than it needs to be.

And finally, we found that scaling is hard when processes are not uniform. A lack of strong process when working with multiple advisers with different approaches was a barrier to scaling their businesses.

Design Principles

The design of Lumiant incorporated findings from the human-centred discovery research. To ensure the output was an experience that directly fit the needs of clients and advisers, we followed a set of Design Principles:

Measurable - interventions need the ability to be measured for their impact.

Memorable - experiences that form lasting memories.

Repeatable - processes that can be repeated and scaled.

Sustainable - services that can continue to deliver over time.

Purposeful - placing human purpose at the heart of the experience.

Trustworthy - advice that can be relied upon.

Efficient - reducing manual handling and repetition of input across the journey.

Compliant by Design

From January 2021, all financial advisers in Australia are required to have FASEA accreditation from the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority, and be prepared to be audited to these standards. This increased pressure to comply with additional standards is an additional stress for financial advisers.

Lumiant is compliant by design, having been created with these requirements in mind. Advisers who use the Lumiant platform automatically capture the information that they’re required to keep to ensure they can be audited without issue.

Lumiant Philosophy

Values-Based Advice

Money conversations can be difficult, and are often cause for stress and tension in relationships. The opposite is also true when we feel in control of our finances. When this is the case, we are far more able to make calm and clear decisions about how our finances impact the lives we live.

Financial advice provides objective expert support, immediately giving clients peace of mind. Once the stress is removed, and they are taken through a process that uncovers and aligns their values, clients are better able to make financial decisions based on their own values and the life they wish to live.

Values-based financial advice redirects the focus from how much money is gained over time, into how to spend in a way that creates a life the clients want.

Values-based financial planning was promoted by Bill Bachrach in his 2000 book. In the last decade it’s been espoused by a few boutique planning firms.

The promise is a move from ‘salesman’ to ‘architect’. Someone who knows what clients value and so designs their financial plan to service the life they wish to lead.

In the past, Australian financial advisers have not had an aligned or consistent process for understanding client values. That’s why Lumiant was created.

Lumiant’s Philosophy

Our unique process helps clients articulate what really matters to them, so together we can identify priorities, shape strategies and drive action to ensure they live their best lives.

The Lumiant platform was built as an engagement tool to help facilitate deeper conversations and improve conversion rates for advisers. The platform stores and manages client information over the life of your engagement, tracking their progress through the different stages.

Lumiant is a values-based advice service which helps financial advisers identify what really matters to their clients, shape strategies to realise priorities and goals, then drive behavioural change for living an extraordinary life. For the first time, it enables advisers to deliver on the promise of advice by shifting the outcome from best product to best life.

Lumiant provides an industrialised, repeatable and measurable SaaS platform that rapidly builds trusted relationships, demonstrates the value of advice and drives action. It dramatically reduces the cost to serve, de-risks compliance and delivers a high-quality, consistent experience at scale, creating clients for life.

The Lumiant process and platform operationalises an advice business by enabling measurable, memorable and repeatable advice and consumer experience processes. It drives scale and economic value while assisting advisers to meet and exceed the regulatory requirements of BID. Lumiant enables advisers the ability to serve up to 100% more clients by leveraging a bionic advice experience – using automation to extend and reinforce your relationship with clients.

Lumiant values

To really support advisers to deliver great advice, we know we need to embody the values of great advisers. These have created the core Lumiant values:

Trustworthy - Integrity is at our core. We are always reliable and honest. We deliver on the promise of advice.

Progressive - We are excited by progress and leverage advances in science, technology, economic development and social organisation. We seek innovative methods to build greater financial literacy and drive positive behaviour change.

Purposeful - We are driven by the greater good and care deeply about others. We are empathetic and strive to help people live their best lives by unpacking what’s important to them.

Enjoyable - We seek to create fun, meaningful and memorable experiences. This helps build engagement, create deep connections and open up opportunities to get to know our clients real goals and aspirations.

Effective - Our aim is to create value that goes beyond the numbers helping people shape, realise and sustain extraordinary lives. Life doesn’t have to be a dream.