Key Advice Areas Overview [Product Guides]

Key Advice Areas offer you the ability to:

• Summarise the areas of advice in an easy-to-understand manner.
• Have Key Advice Areas represented on your client dashboard for action and validation “at a glance.”
• Sort Key advice areas that logically make sense for the client experience you want to provide, like focusing on the most urgent areas or the areas that have made the most progress first.

This simplifies how advisors communicate with clients by indicating which advice areas need review, are in progress, are working on it, or are inactive. Advisors can efficiently manage these areas during client conversations by effortlessly moving each tile to the desired column through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Think of Key Advice Areas as your client's 'project management tool' for their best life. This tool allows clients to visualise how their financial plan aligns with their life values and identifies areas where the advisor can further contribute to their success.

Working with Key Advice Areas

As an Advice Professional:

• Provide your clients with a comprehensive plan.
• Visualise your advice expertise and observe its impact on your clients' overall wellbeing and values.
• Effortlessly check, at a glance, your clients' progress.
• Draw meaningful connections through the strategies and their alignment with your clients’ values.
• Employ a straightforward, replicable process within your existing workflow, where you function as the 'Project Manager' of your client's financial journey.

As a Client:

• Experience alignment of goals, values, and strategies.
• See what my advisor is doing to achieve my goals.
• Clearly see the specific areas of advice actively being addressed by my advisor.
• See these areas of advice in the context of the rest of my plan.
• Feel reassured, knowing there's a clear path forward toward my goals.
• Understand how all of the parts of my financial plan are connected.
• Identify what my advisor specialises in, enabling me to leverage their expertise both now and in the future for emerging needs.

 Key Features of Key Advice Areas

• Customisable Strategies:
  • Tailor default strategies, Key Advice Areas, and associate an icon with each area to align with your practice. Refer to the guide Understanding Practice Manager Settings in Lumiant for detailed instructions.
• Advice Areas Categorisation:
  • Categorise advice areas based on urgency: Needs Review (red), Working on it (yellow,  and On Track (green). Immediate action areas come with detailed strategy descriptions. Key Advice Areas will also highlight advice areas not currently being addressed within the Not Active column.
• Activate Key Advice Areas:
  • Activate the Key Advice Areas where you have the expertise to meet your client's goals. Move a strategy into one of the three active columns to make it active.
• Logical Filtering:
  • Utilise drag-and-drop capabilities across four columns (Not Active, Needs Review, Working on It, On Track) and place in order of priority. 
• Add Strategies:
  • Define the strategies required to meet client goals, including start and end dates and target amounts.
• Recognisable Strategies in Status Columns:
  • Easily identify strategies within each status column, enhancing both advisor and client experience with visual engagement.
• Align Goals and Priorities:
  • Link strategies to clients' captured goals and objectives or add new goals as needed, ensuring alignment with their values and assigning responsible tasks.
• Set Priorities:
  • Arrange advice areas in order of priority or discussion.
• Dashboard Widget:
  • The Key Advice Areas summary widget on the client dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of progress, enabled advice areas, and critical areas requiring immediate action.
• Admin Notes for Each Strategy:
  • Admin notes are within each Key Advice Area, allowing practice staff to add confidential notes for internal review. This ensures advisors have comprehensive client information at their fingertips without client visibility concerns.

Key Use Cases

1. Core use case: Progress Meeting

When an advisor (or associate) is prepping for a review meeting, they can update the Key Advice Areas (KAA) page to reflect the current state and generate talking points by:

• Moving items from any corresponding column to the “Needs review” column to form your Agenda discussion points for your progress meeting. This could be:
  • Items from “inactive areas” you want to discuss as a value-add
  • Items from  “working on it” or “on track” that need to be tweaked or discussed in the meeting

After the discussion, you can move the appropriate items to the appropriate column, depending on the outcome of the conversation.

2. End client review

When an end client logs in to view their portal, the key advice areas page could look daunting if there are many key advice areas in the “working on it” column.

To address this, the top three items in this column are labelled as "Top Priority," signalling to clients the tasks associated with these areas as the most crucial.

3. End of Discovery/Understand/Goals Meeting for Prospect

After a Discovery/Understand/Goals meeting for a prospect, where Life score outcomes, values, and tangible goals have been discussed, the client

maybe asking, “What can you do as an advisor to help with all of this”?

In response, the advisor can effectively address this concern by identifying specific Key Advice Areas (KAA) related to the discussion. Through statements like, "Based on what I've heard from you today, I believe we can help with these areas [insert name of KAA here]," the advisor aligns their expertise with the client's pain points and desired achievements. This approach establishes a clear connection between the discussed goals and the actionable strategies the advisor can implement to support the prospect's financial objectives.

4. End of Strategy Meeting for Prospect

After concluding a Strategy meeting with a prospect, during which investment preferences are finalised, and modelling is completed to understand trade-off decisions, there may be the need to lock in a desired path forward.

Once this path is known, the advisor can utilise the Key Advice Areas (KAA) to guide the next steps. By stating, "Based on this scenario, the areas [insert name of KAA here] remain relevant, but we should also consider [insert name of new KAA if applicable] to help you achieve this scenario. We can incorporate this in our plan [AU language]/ implementation [US language]," the advisor seamlessly integrates new considerations into the existing plan. This approach ensures that the client's evolving preferences and decisions are reflected in the ongoing financial strategy.

Additional Information

Discover the power of configurable Key Advice Areas and elevate your advisory services to new heights. Tailor your approach, empower your clients, and seamlessly track progress for a fulfilling financial journey. With Lumiant's versatile Key Advice Areas feature, you can take control of your practice and clients' success.

For further reading, check out our guide How to use Key Advice Areas [How-Tos]