The Intermediary – November 2025 - Flipbook - Page 26
T E C H N O L O GY
In focus
We need to talk ab
t’s fair to say that nearly
every broker firm will have
a customer relationship
management (CRM) system.
It’s the place where data lives,
pipelines are tracked, and
compliance boxes are ticked. But if you
talk honestly to advisers, few will say
they love it.
In most cases, the CRM feels like
a necessary evil. It’s a system that
everyone is supposed to use, but few
are truly motivated to keep up to date.
The irony is that CRMs were meant
to make our lives easier. Yet over
time, they’ve become tools that need
enforcing rather than embracing.
Managers must chase, remind and
even incentivise advisers to log
their activity. Data gets entered
inconsistently or aer the fact.
For many, the CRM doesn’t so much
reflect what’s actually happening in
the business, but how much time
advisers didn’t have to record it.
That disconnect maers, because
advice is built on relationships, not
record-keeping. The record-keeping
is something you need to do, but it
won’t grow your business. And when
your central system adds friction
rather than removing it, it’s a sign that
something’s gone wrong.
I
The motivation problem
The traditional way of driving CRM
usage is through either compliance
pressure or incentives. The stick is: ‘If
it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen’.
The carrot is: ‘Log your activity so we
can track your success’. Both work
to a point, but neither solves the
fundamental problem – the system
itself doesn’t deliver immediate,
tangible benefit to the person using it.
When you’re an adviser managing
dozens of live cases, the CRM can
feel like admin for admin’s sake.
The benefits of management data,
compliance and reporting sit
somewhere else in the business. The
person doing the work gets none of the
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The Intermediary | November 2025
gain, only the extra effort. That’s the
problem with most legacy systems:
they expect users to input before they
get any output. They demand time
before they give value.
Good technology shouldn’t work
like that. Just think about your phone.
No one has to remind you to update
your diary, reply to messages or check
your notifications. You do it because
the benefit is immediate and obvious.
If a CRM delivered that same sense
of instant value to advisers, adoption
wouldn’t need chasing. It would
happen naturally.
KARL GRIFFIN
is CEO and co-founder
at JammJar
Yesterday’s workflows
Most CRMs used in our industry were
designed for a different era. They’re
databases first, workflows second.
They capture data, but they don’t help
you use it.
Advice today is fluid – part call,
part message, part document
exchange. Yet most CRMs still sit on
the sidelines, waiting for the user
to feed them information. Advisers
spend hours typing up notes,
uploading documents, copying data
between systems.
Every manual step is a point of
friction, and every point of friction is
a moment where data quality suffers
and compliance risk creeps in.
We’ve reached a point where
systems should be doing the heavy
liing, not the humans. If a system
can’t support the way advice actually
happens in 2025, then it’s not fit
for purpose.
Manual to intelligent
Technology has now reached the point
where this ‘old model’ no longer makes
sense. There is artificial intelligence
(AI) available today that can listen to
client calls, transcribe them in real
time, populate the fact-find, dra
compliant follow-ups and even file
documents automatically. It can build
an auditable case record without an
adviser typing a single word.
Advice is built
on relationships [...]
and when your central
system adds friction
rather than removing
it, it’s a sign that
something’s gone wrong”
The result is a complete reversal of
the traditional CRM dynamic. Instead
of the adviser doing the work for the
system, the system starts doing the
work for the adviser. Compliance
becomes a natural byproduct, not
a separate process. Case files build
themselves. Audit trails are automatic
and complete. And, crucially, the
benefit is instant. Advisers feel it
immediately, with less admin, fewer
repetitive tasks, and more time to
focus on clients. Managers get cleaner
data and real-time visibility. Clients
get faster communication and a more
human experience.
Power of immediacy
There’s a lot spoken about ‘digital
transformation’ in financial services,
