Brisbane financial planning and accounting firm Hudson Financial Planning have today announced the launch of its online investing solution, Hudson Invest. The new solution is designed to help Australians who are currently not receiving traditional financial advice.
Hudson Financial has selected Melbourne-based investment platform OpenInvest to underpin Hudson Invest.
Research shows that increasing numbers of Australians have been priced out of personal financial advice – the “advice gap” – due to increases in the regulatory cost of providing advice and a dramatic reduction in adviser numbers.
Hudson Invest offers simple online access to three multi-asset investment portfolios professionally managed by the experienced team at Hudson. Each has its own mandate and is designed to enable investors to select the portfolio that best aligns with their situation and objectives.
Managing Director Juanita Wrenn (pictured) said that the firm had launched its online solution for two reasons.
“First, we wanted to remove the hurdle for unadvised Australians to obtain the benefits of professional investing. Hudson Financial has been advising on clients’ investment portfolios for 30 years, and we have seen the real-life impact on their lives by investing the right way: disciplined, diversified, multi-asset, long-term investing. With advances in technology, we are now also able to offer this opportunity to the broader market of unadvised Australians via a simple 5-minute sign-up process and no advice fees.
“Second, we recognise the implications of the massive inter-generational wealth transfer that is currently underway. By actively seeking to reach and serve the next generation of HNWs, those who will be the beneficiaries of inheritance and/or “HENRYs, High Earners Not Rich Yet, now, we can develop long-term, trusted relationships with the ideal clients of tomorrow in which we can highlight the many strengths of our firm and people, in a scalable and efficient way,” Ms Wrenn explained.
CFO Kris Wrenn noted that the firm was always on the lookout for new technologies and partners that could enable it to operate more efficiently and help it achieve its long-term goals.
“The OpenInvest value proposition is very strategic, and perfectly aligns with how we run Hudson Financial and think about this industry. While financial planning has always been a relationship business, that doesn’t mean firms must only offer a single one-size-fits-all service. Not everyone is ready for, or wants the traditional personal advice service. Working with OpenInvest means we can now reach and serve new audiences and nurture the next generation of HNW clients. And it empowers us to compete against the ambitious digital-first platforms that are aggressively targeting the HNWs of the future,” Wrenn said.
OpenInvest’s Head of Distribution, Ravi Verma, said that he was proud to have signed up another forward-thinking financial planning firm.
“Tech-savvy planning firms like Hudson Financial are very aware that advances in AI and changes in how younger generation are using technology mean that well-funded digital-first providers are going to be increasingly serious competition, and hence it makes strategic sense for them to be pro-active in addressing this by launching their own online proposition,” Ravi Verma said.
“It’s easier to uplift a long-standing client to a personal advice relationship if you’ve been successfully servicing them within your online solution for many years and helped them to grow their wealth, than it is to have to win them away from a competitor when they become ideal clients. I call it Strategy 101,” Verma added.
