We’re Exhibiting at MFAA 2025! Click to know more
The gap between the advice clients value and the documentation the regulator demands has never been wider.
For the last decade, the cost to serve a client in Australia has climbed effectively unchecked. While the industry waits for the full operational relief promised by regulatory reforms, the reality on the ground remains unchanged: the Statement of Advice (SOA) is still a heavy, complex, and expensive document.
For many firms, the SOA has mutated from a helpful guide for the client into a rigid operational bottleneck. It is the single biggest choke point in the advice process.
When you calculate the true cost of an SOA—factoring in adviser hours, paraplanning delays, and the opportunity cost of lost client-facing time—the numbers are alarming. Burnout isn’t just about working late; it’s about the frustration of high-value professionals doing low-value administration.
An SOA is meant to be the roadmap for a client’s financial future. Instead, it has become a compliance shield that demands significant hours across data gathering, strategy modeling, and drafting. For many firms, producing a single SOA can take days — sometimes weeks — especially when capacity is stretched.
According to Fidelity’s IFA DNA study, advisers are spending barely 33% of their day in client meetings. The rest is consumed by SOA preparation and SOA documentation including report preparation (20%) and compliance administration (18%), highlighting how SOA-related workloads pull advisers away from advice.
When an adviser spends nearly 40% of their week on non-revenue-generating activities, the firm faces a difficult trade-off:
Neither option is sustainable at scale. This bottleneck creates a “hard ceiling” on growth.
You cannot scale a business where your most expensive assets (your advisers) are tied up in Word documents.
This is where the real cost shows up — not just in dollars, but in adviser fatigue, slower turnaround times, and reduced capacity to grow.
Many wealth management firms still rely heavily on advisers or senior staff to drive SOA production from end to end. While this offers control, it also concentrates workload and risk in the most expensive part of the business.
Consider the opportunity cost: Every hour an adviser spends formatting, validating projections, or aligning compliance wording is an hour not spent:
Outsourcing paraplanning is often viewed as a tactical fix — a way to get SOAs drafted faster. However, the highest-performing firms view it as a strategic operating model.
By partnering with a specialised provider like SuperRecords, you aren’t just getting documents typed up. You are decoupling the production of advice from the delivery of advice.
A robust outsourced paraplanning function delivers:
The firms navigating today’s environment most effectively are those that recognise a simple truth: advisers add the most value when they’re in front of clients, not buried in SOAs.
Reducing the SOA bottleneck isn’t about cutting corners or compromising compliance. It’s about building operating models that scale alongside regulatory complexity and client demand.
As SOAs continue to evolve, the real question isn’t whether they require time — it’s whose time they should require, and at what cost to your firm.
Don’t let documentation define your capacity.