30 July 2025
At the 30 July 2025 Financial Services Council (FSC) Shaping Advice in a Time of Change symposium, Andrew Baker, our Global Head of Strategy joined a panel of industry leaders to explore the evolving role of digital advice in institutional settings. The insightful discussion covered the renaissance of institutional advice via digital means, diverse models of digital advice deployment, and why asset management may offer parallels for digital advice adoption by institutions.
As a founding member of the Financial Services Council’s Digital Advice Expert Group, Ignition Advice is pleased to contribute to ongoing industry dialogue on digital advice and we thank the FSC for the opportunity to share our experience and expertise to help shape scalable, customer-centric institution advice solutions.
Institutional advice rebound
We are passing the trough of institutional provision of advice. Since the Royal Commission the trend has been institutional exits from advice, with those remaining focused on general and intra-fund advice. That trend is now reversing via technology adoption. Jo Brennan (GAICD) spoke to take-up at Aware; UniSuper will soon launch digital advice with Ignition. Other institutions will follow. Growth of institutional advice provision will be rapid from current lows; this trend will play out over a decade at least.
Lessons from asset management
Asset management may provide a case study. Leading super funds entirely or largely used external asset managers 20 years ago. A common model today (especially larger funds) is substantially in-sourced with complex / specialized asset classes managed externally. It’s similarly possible to see a future where large funds are handling their members’ simple advice needs (the great majority) internally while maintaining a third-party channel for the smaller number of more complex member advice needs.
Diverse digital advice models
Digital advice is a label applied to quite different capabilities (from the very simple to the complex) and will look very different in differing deployments. What an advice dealer group wants from digital advice is likely very different to an institution. Dealer groups typically look at digital advice to extend their reach into mass affluent; typically an incremental lens. Institutions (especially super funds) have many members moving towards retirement and regulators prodding them to do more for those members. Many have large leaks of members and assets, especially near retirement, which damage the commercial model of for-profit funds and the liquidity model of not-for profit funds. Their incentives are to make larger decisions.
Clarifying digital vs robo advice
An audience question about take-up rates indicated a common confusion between digital advice and robo-advice. Robo-advice is typically a investment-only and online-only, a bundled advice and product sale which has typically seen limited take-up and poor economics where deployed (mostly overseas). Digital advice is digital channel deployment of regulated personal advice, which might stretch from general advice style health checks to intra-fund advice topics to simpler retirement advice. Especially when deployed as a hybrid model with human adviser support, it sees large volumes and high completion rates. The digital advice engine also provides the compliance “walled garden” which prevents conduct risk from emerging as institutional advice volumes increase.
The panel featured:
- Andrew Baker, Ignition Advice
- Jo Brennan, Aware Super
- Renee Howie, Insignia
- Jason Nyilas, MoneyGPS
- Linda Elkins, KPMG (panel moderator)
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For Ignition Advice media enquiries:
Natalie Kleibert, Head of Marketing. Email: natalie.kleibert@ignitionadvice.com