"This does everything in one": The self-confessed software magpie who's replaced four tools with Marloo

Iain Cairns, director and lead financial planner at Argyll Financial Services, says he's a bit of a "magpie for new bits of software." Having always been "tech savvy" and striving to be "ahead of the curve", Iain wasn't short of AI tools by the time he found Marloo. He had a different tool for almost everything.

For about three years he'd been running client meetings through an AI note-taker, upgrading to its enterprise tier to stay compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules. He'd been writing suitability reports in a template-driven suitability report writing system he'd used since around 2016. A separate piece of software analysed policy documents and built checklists from letters of authority. A separate back-office system handled day-to-day admin. And when reports got too complex or time-consuming to do in-house, he sent them out to a paraplanning firm.

"I think that kind of long and short of it is we were trying to harness and keen to use AI within the business, but I was finding it kind of overwhelming to keep up with the pace of change and to have these things all coherent and together."

Since switching to Marloo, several of those tools have gone or are going: the suitability report writing system, the note-taker, and the policy-analysis software are all being replaced by features within Marloo.

He used to jump between a note-taker, a report-writing wizard, and a back-office system, downloading transcripts from one tool to feed into another. Now with Ask Marloo he can pull from meeting transcripts, policy documents, and suitability letters all at once. Iain runs three screens at his desk. Marloo, he says, is "just constantly open on a screen now."

"The thing that it's all one place is absolutely great... it's cross-referencing all these things instead of having to go to three different bits of software."

Aside from the chopping and changing between systems, the costs were adding up too. The suitability report writing system he was previously using came with its own subscription, his AI note-taker required an enterprise plan with AI credits billed on top, and a further admin subscription added to the pile. Plus, he was always paying more to unlock full functionality. Altogether Argyll was carrying the cost of multiple overlapping subscriptions for tools that Marloo has now absorbed into one product. And with Marloo, the Pro tier is the top tier: no AI credits, no service cost add-ons and no creeping extras.

His outsourced paraplanning has seen a drop too. Iain still plans to send genuinely complicated cases to a paraplanning firm. But most of the bigger, more time-consuming reports that used to go out as a matter of course no longer do. Those reports cost £300 to £600 a time to get back, with a minimum five working day turnaround through an online portal: upload the fact find, upload the notes, upload the recommendation, then wait.

"Marloo is bringing it back to me within about five minutes, as opposed to waiting five working days for it to come back. Marloo also reads my meeting transcripts better and more thoroughly than an outsourced paraplanner does."

He says generic AI just doesn't compare. Before Marloo, Iain tested a mainstream general-purpose AI chatbot on a dummy suitability report, just to see what off-the-shelf AI could do. It wasn't up to the job.

"It was a totally different report each time I tried with the same inputs. You just got this document which would take so long to review, because you didn't know where it's pulling things from. AI, as usual, is 'aiming to please', sometimes it joins gaps on its own that you may think are in the file, and they're not."

That's the gap he says Marloo's review mode closes. Every piece of information in a generated report is colour-coded and hoverable back to its source, whether it's pulled directly from a file or inferred, so he can work through a document systematically rather than re-reading the whole thing end to end. And you can feel much more confident that it's correct and compliant.

"If you just get a 20-page document that generic AI's produced, it will take you as long to read that as it would writing it, to make sure it's all correct. The review mode's really the game changer for AI suitability report writing."

Having tried a parade of tools over the years, Iain says what sets Marloo apart is its simplicity.

"You don't need an instruction manual to know how to work it, really, you don't need to go and do 10 training webinars. It's probably the most capable bit of software we've ever used, but probably the simplest to use."