In this blog, I’m going to do something different. I’ll get a little personal before dropping the insight bombs for your practice that you’ve come to know and love.
A rare personal tale (and why I usually avoid them)
I generally don’t care much for blogs that dwell on personal stories. Even the most compelling personal realisation often feels forced or out of place once translated into writing.
Usually, when inspiration strikes—whether during a long drive, a holiday, or navigating the hostile user experience of both McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks apps on the same day (kids, amirite??)—I prefer to channel it into logical insights or practical case studies.
But today, I’m going against type.
Because this time, the personal experience itself is essential to understanding my point.
My family and I moved to Shanghai, and it’s been… different
Nearly a year ago, not long after my last blog post, we uprooted ourselves from Brisbane. Moving from the only home our kids have ever known, we went to one of the most different yet most modern cities in the world, Shanghai.
Living in a city with roughly the population of Australia packed into an area similar to Perth’s metropolitan footprint is incredible. It’s exciting, vibrant, and inspiring—but suddenly, I don’t understand basic things like banking or utilities, let alone the financial or legal systems.
As someone who typically soaks up details and optimises every aspect of life, the complexity here and entirely different systems can be a constant struggle.
Despite four separate translation apps at my fingertips, subtlety often eludes me. In one of my worst moments, I ordered my youngest son a bowl of propane instead of noodles, proving even experts in one field can make explosive mistakes in another.
I’m still unclear if my bank card number is also my bank account number, and I’ve resigned myself to paying a couple of dollars monthly for a streaming service I can neither access nor pronounce. Somewhere deep underground in a data centre, my unused subscription quietly weeps in binary.
That said, one of the many upsides of the change, is a new perspective.
Systemic trust, through service and reliability
As a former financial adviser, management consultant, and someone who likes to consider (overthink?) every detail; being on the wrong side of information asymmetry is confronting. I’m accustomed to being in the know. Suddenly, I live firmly in the client’s shoes.
Unable to fully advocate for myself, I’m forced into less-than-ideal decisions. I find myself:
- Making choices based on unreliable factors (eg, restaurant choices determined by which app has the best pictures).
- Preferring simpler digital options or analogue processes despite knowing better solutions exist.
Living in this reality for nearly a year has clarified my thinking about trust and client experience.
Here in Shanghai, trust to me isn’t formed by credentials or technical expertise (which I can’t evaluate anyway). We’ve engaged professional services from a summa cum laude Harvard graduate, through to… the I-don’t-know-what university of somewhere graduate.
In a world that is opaque to me, trust comes from reliability and ease.
The service culture here is incredible. Fast, efficient, attentive, and warm. These qualities are often seen as opposites:
- Can an efficient, tech-driven service genuinely be personalised?
- Can warm, personalised service really be scalable and reliable?
In what might be the world’s most digitally engaged city, the answer is clearly yes.
Applying this to advice:
- Your portfolio might outperform every adviser in the country, but if your responsiveness is lacking, your competitor who replies in half the time wins the client’s trust.
- Your CFP credentials matter greatly, but to a client unfamiliar with its meaning, swift communication and clear explanations hold greater value.
- Your Corporations Act defined independence may be important to you, but an outdated website won’t communicate your forward-thinking mindset to potential clients.
Digital friction, is this how Boomers feel every day?
Immersing myself in Shanghai’s digital ecosystem has felt like stepping into a parallel universe. Even as someone tech-savvy, I struggled. Suddenly, even tasks I used to perform effortlessly now required intense problem-solving skills.
This prompted introspection: Is this how Boomers feel every day?
Are we actually trying to solve an ‘Us’ problem?
As we can be increasingly excited about introducing technology into processes, for any client-facing technology it’s worthwhile considering:
- Are we making life easier for the client, or for us?
- How does this technology help solve the problem clients came to us to solve? (Note: Whilst it can be valid, I generally recommend excluding ‘reducing cost to serve’ from your reasoning here.)
- Is there an alternative that is already available to clients that can take away this problem? You recreating the functionality of a free app, because that one won’t give you visibility, may not be compelling to the client.
If we’re not alleviating a client problem, it might be we’re trying to solve our own problem at the expense of the client experience (which creates another ‘us problem’).
If we’re moving ahead, imagine your clients find technology less an enabler and a problem to work through:
- Would they consider this worth solving?
- Could we make this optional?
- Could we set expectations for effort upfront?
- Could we make the analogue alternative option clearer?
- Could we reduce the effort required?
- Could we stagger the effort required?
As someone who has been walking in the shoes (or app store) of someone who typically finds technology frustrating, the pain is very real. Conversely, as someone who craves a better digital experience, the impact can swing both ways.
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a tool developed by Gartner we routinely use in our client survey work, and it is exactly the type of score the wrong technology rollout will impact. You can learn more about it here.
Research published in the Harvard Business Review suggests that CES is a more accurate predictor of customer loyalty than Customer Satisfaction scores or even Net Promoter Scores (NPS). The premise is straightforward: The easier you make it for customers to achieve their goals, the more likely they are to remain loyal.
Solving an ‘us’ problem, at the expense of increasing customer effort creates a different ‘us’ problem.
Even if some clients would like it, you may be making life harder for your less tech-enabled clients (Boomers or no).
Sounds more important than reducing offshorable problems like data-entry, right?
So, before you make a decision, consider:
- Mandatory self-service can frustrate older (often most valuable) clients.
- Completely ignoring self-service options can alienate busy, digitally-savvy clients.
It’s a tension you need to monitor in both directions, taking the wins without trade-offs where you can get them, and being mindful about the trade-offs when they can’t be avoided.
Not just your service, but your recommended products
When you stand behind a product you recommend, poor digital presentation of those products can frustrate clients.
Client goals and preferences are hard to capture at the best of times, but if you’re going to recommend the most structurally beneficial product, that has the worst ever client experience, you might be making a rod for your own back and your clients.
Consider this.
The Connected Financial Services Report by Salesforce (2023) asked why individuals switched financial service providers, and digital experience was the #1 reason other than price in Banking and #2 for Insurance and Wealth Management as below:
| Banking | Insurance | Wealth Management |
| 43% (#1) | 16% (#2) | 31% (#2) |
Having heard complaints from clients who ‘used to be able to see everything in one spot and now it’s everywhere’ first-hand, it’s an understandable frustration.
A frustration, that may be more important than cost.
At a minimum, it’s worth capturing if this is important to clients, and being mindful of it in your work.
Interestingly, this can be one of the most compelling cases for a client portal in my view. A wealth portal that is product agnostic, just as I suspect most of my readers are, can allow for the best products to coexist in a single view.
We’ve written more about this in our related blog: Digital doorways: Navigating the client portal terrain for financial advisers
Full Circle—Shanghai to Financial Advice
After nearly a year in Shanghai, my once-daunting daily tasks have become comfortable.
I trust the city not because I’ve mastered Mandarin overnight (far from it), but because of consistently positive interactions and frictionless experiences. Shanghai’s combination of reliability, excellent service, and digital engagement turned what initially felt chaotic into something navigable, even reassuring.
This mirrors exactly what clients experience when first engaging with financial advice. They’re stepping into unfamiliar territory—often confusing, overstuffed with industry jargon, products, and regulations. Their trust won’t come from immediately understanding your expertise; it’ll come from consistently good service, clear communication, and low-effort interactions.
Ultimately, systemic trust isn’t built on qualifications alone, nor digital sophistication for its own sake. It’s built on removing unnecessary friction, providing reliability at every turn, and seeing clearly from your client’s perspective.
After all, the goal isn’t just to impress clients with your technical competence—it’s about making their experience so reliably smooth and effortless that they stop worrying about their financial future.
Take it from someone who’s learned to trust entirely new systems in an entirely new place: The greatest testament to trust isn’t that clients comprehend everything you do—it’s that they no longer feel the need to.
(And, as someone still paying monthly for a streaming service I can’t pronounce, I can assure you: Clients appreciate simplicity more than you realise.)
Further reading:
- The Connected Financial Services Report by Salesforce (2023):
- Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers in Harvard Business Review
- You’ve got a website, but does it look and feel alive? via Simply Advice Websites <- In case you’re at risk of doing what I did, leaving it too long between posts.
- The Trust Canyon for more on how to identify good opportunities for process improvement.
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