Cork solo adviser saves a day a week with Marloo, the AI tool that knows Irish advice

John McWey runs Ardbrack Financial, a solo advisory practice in Kinsale, County Cork. He and his wife are its two directors, but John does all of the advice and paraplanning work himself. His clients are Irish business owners and high earning professionals, and when it comes to the work he's seeking he's not just going for volume. John enjoys the complex cases: extracting capital from a company tax efficiently, retirement structuring, lifetime cash flow projections, and tying it all together into a plan. Alongside that sits the usual work of investment advice, education funding, life insurance, and income protection.

Until Marloo, the work behind the advice was mostly manual: typing up notes, spreadsheets, an internal file note written up after every meeting, then a follow-up letter to the client.

Then he generated his first advice document through Marloo.

"It was mind blowing how quickly it could do things. I would say almost barely believable. It just kind of works straight out of the box."

He immediately saw how Marloo could help him run his business on his own terms.

"My intention is very much to remain a solo practice and target those clients that have more complex needs, whilst managing my business and my personal time my own way."

Marloo means he can more confidently target the clients he enjoys serving.

"The process of onboarding a complex client is a lengthy one. There's a lot of meetings, there's a lot of getting to know you, and the whole trust piece, and I have the time to do that now."

Meeting preparation, which used to mean gathering information from old documents and memory, saves at least an hour per meeting. Writing up the follow-up notes saves another hour plus. That is two hours per client interaction before he gets started on any document generation, and closer to three for a full annual review meeting. Across the two to four client meetings he holds in an average week, it adds up.

"If we wanted to roll that up into a 10 hour saving per week, or the guts of a full business day saved per week."

Before Marloo that day usually came out of his evenings and weekends.

"I was scrambling to find the time, working late in the evening or weekend days to generate documents. With Marloo, that personal time that you get back, just for quality of life, is invaluable. It's incalculable."

It also means he can stick with being a solo adviser.

"I don't need an assistant. I feel like I don't need a paraplanner or a junior adviser, or somebody to throw that extra set of eyes over my work. I'm confident that this tool is doing that for me."

One of his most heavily-used, time-saving features is Ask Marloo, which he chats to before a client meeting.

"I can go in and say, I'm having a meeting with Mr and Mrs X tomorrow. What are the follow up points? What are the things that we discussed? What's outstanding from our last series of meetings? That comes back really, really quickly, and I don't have to manually go through a few years of docs to double check that I've got everything there."

Marloo pulls from meeting notes, emails, and old letters and communications in multiple formats, including records of client interactions from years earlier, then brings them together as talking points and a summary of what was previously discussed.

And once he is in the meeting Marloo now takes care of all the notes.

"Before Marloo I was literally taking manual notes. That didn't allow me to be as present, because I was frantically trying to jot down the important things, and that by default means you miss some cues from the conversation. Marloo allows me to be more present in meetings and 100 per cent focused on the client and their goals and needs."

For an Irish adviser, though, the key is that Marloo actually understands Irish advice. John generates statements of suitability, planning letters and pension drawdown documents in Marloo, and says it reads the local environment correctly from the start.

"Where I might have a discussion with a client or a recommendation around a particular type of pension structure, the information that Marloo is able to pull on that, from the outset, has been pretty much bang on."

Consistency is the other half of that. As a sole adviser answerable to the Central Bank of Ireland, John used to check his own work for consistency by hand.

"If there was ever a compliance review, or an external review from the regulator around how I communicate with clients and the advice that I give, I can be confident now that that is completely consistent. Beforehand, I was having to manually go back and check, is this consistent? But now I know it's consistent, because that initial document that I'm then reviewing is coming in in a consistent format all the time."

Time may not be the only saving. John used Marloo's Morningstar integration to pull performance data into a statement of suitability for a two fund portfolio, something he had until now been running manually in a separate analytics tool.

"It did a good job on this, and I'll use it going forward, maybe building it into my recommendation docs as standard. The data from the analytics tool is very detailed, but I don't always need that level of granularity. All I need is a simple summary of asset allocation, fund charges, performance history, and comparison against a benchmark. I'd be happy to save about €3,000 a year by dropping it."

Like most advisers, John pays for a long list of providers that all cost money and none of which talk to each other. The CRM his client data sits in was built just for Irish advisers, and he doesn't find it user friendly.

"The Marloo UI is fantastic. It's a completely different world compared to legacy service providers, and I really like the pace of new features being added. The new dashboard feature looks like a dashboard I want to have from a CRM system, but I'm actually not getting from my CRM system."

What would he say to another Irish adviser who's weighing it up?

"It's been a massive time saver, and that whole piece around being an extra set of eyes, making me more confident that I'm ticking all the compliance boxes, that I'm being consistent across my advice piece, is a huge burden of worry that's taken off my shoulders. Give it a try."