AdviceTech Podcast #45 – 3Lines – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the Ensombl AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And the guest joining me here today to deep dive into 3Lines has worked in the ASIC financial advisors, stakeholder team, as an analyst who want to learn more about that is part of a building, actually Perth red tech community, and is in the unique position of kicking off a tech startup that was very quickly profitable. Who can believe that’s even possible? Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Julia Vojkovic.

Julia Vojkovic
Thank you, thanks for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
Which I’m so happy. Actually, before we dive in, we’ll dive into our questions in the audience know what’s coming, terms of getting to know you better. But I am actually a little curious about Perth and how there’s some sort of building players that are playing in red tech. How’s that come about? Like what’s going on with you guys over there?

Julia Vojkovic
I think Perth is a real hub for startups for a tech, there’s a real budding community of startups over here. So it’s very supportive, very collaborative. Yeah. So we’ve been very lucky to be over here. It was just an accident that we got into tech. But yeah, we’ve been in the right place at the right time. So

Peita Diamantidis
it’s so interesting, isn’t it? So it’s yin and look delicious. Men may not be aware, but they sort of well, of course, we’re all aware of Silicon Valley. Right. And so when you look at the biggest players that have come out in globally, you know, they’re all started in Silicon Valley. But what people don’t know is that that when you’re in a location where there’s a lot of that going on, then there are people that can help. There’s a can people that can create shortcuts for you of understanding or connect you to the right people so often that.

Julia Vojkovic
Yeah, absolutely. And just there are mentoring that comes out of it. And people are just so happy to help you out and give you advice and tips. That’s been the best part. I think being over Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Peita Diamantidis
Because it doesn’t. I mean, just like with starting financial advice, business, you don’t actually have to do this all on your own, when in fact, that’s what we’re all about. We’re like, get on the platform, talk to each other. You’re not on your own, you know, and so Absolutely, yeah. And so those communities are so, so important. All right. So before we do dive into three lines, then let’s get to know you through your use of technology. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Julia Vojkovic
I use emojis all day every day. Being the mother of three kids, I would say there are two one is the crying laughing face. And the other is the vomit face. Because everyone’s thought there’s always somebody who’s sick in this house.

Peita Diamantidis
I love it. I love how contexts find so much of this in terms of it’s fantastic. And if we know I’m imagining, there’s a lot of coordination, if you’ve got kids that happened via your smartphone, if you had to wipe everything off the phone and just keep three apps, which three would you keep?

Julia Vojkovic
And so firstly would be WhatsApp. That’s just you know, obviously stay in touch and up to date with people. Secondly, Spotify, I love my podcasts. I love your podcasts. So I keep Spotify. And my third. I keep realestate.com out because looking at real estate looking at houses that I can’t afford is my guilty pleasure. My favorite thing to do. Now how about that?

Peita Diamantidis
There’s nothing better. I love I’ve even cheekily got to the point of saying, you know, you can click inquire in Real Estate Talk to you. And you can just set a price and it comes back and my husband and I will just be rolling around laughing is the the very keen real estate agent comes back with the $12.5 million property value. Bliss.

Julia Vojkovic
Just wanted to know.

Peita Diamantidis
I try not to waste their time too much now. But I believe actually a lot of that’s automated now. So it’s all good. But yeah, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. So let’s dive into three lines. So there’ll be some listeners that won’t be aware of what you guys provide. But I think also may not be aware, really of much of the existence of reg tech, as opposed to you know, broader, more advice technology. So what you said under the reg reg tech sort of category, but who you’re generally lined up against what sort of broad category of services are you guys as you know, three lines is an app yours? Yes.

Julia Vojkovic
Well, it might help if I give you a bit of background as sort of to how freelance came to be because that will give you text. So predominantly, as you mentioned, three lines is a reg tech company, and it started about four years ago now I would say my business partner Eloise, some of it and I developed three lines. We have backgrounds, both of us founding ASIC big for professional services firms, and our worlds collided probably eight or nine years ago now when we met picking on similar roles at Macquarie private well, Macquarie at the time was in an EU so they have a lot of work to get through in order to meet their compliance obligations as a financial services license. And so after Macquarie wrapped up the EU, everything was kind of settled down. We We’re ready for a new challenge. So we decided to step out of Macquarie and start our own compliance consulting firm focused on AFSL. Yes. And that was probably about seven years ago that we started our compliance consulting firm. And when we were providing our consulting services at the start, in probably the first couple of years, it was all very manual. So we were managing a lot of spreadsheets and documents for clients. And our clients were doing everything manually as well. So they were keeping spreadsheets here, there and everywhere. And we found that in terms of servicing our clients, we were spending much more time on manual formatting of documents and Excel spreadsheets and alike, rather than actually providing advice and guidance to our clients and giving them value. And we just so we just knew that there had to be a better way to do things we we searched high and low for a product or a software solution that would serve us our needs. And especially, I guess, more so than our needs, but the needs of our clients as well. So we couldn’t find what we wanted. And we couldn’t find what our clients need it. So we set upon the, what we thought was a wise decision of making it ourselves. Looking back, it’s been a bit of a roller coaster. We do love it today. But we have been through many ups and downs along the way. So we became kind of accidental tech entrepreneurs, if you will. And I guess that’s kind of how we came to be. So reg Tech is a is a space where we provide regular regulatory compliance software. And we focus on AFSL. So there’s a lot of other compliance platforms out there that are very generic, and they can be tailored to many different industries. Ours is very sorry, everybody is very AFSL. Specific. So we have been, yep. AFSL is our our target market. And we’ve developed the software around specifically what an AFSL needs to comply with all of the regulatory obligations that they need to.

Peita Diamantidis
Okay, and so in terms of then the problem is so, I mean, there’s layers of this, right. So there’s the immediate, like you say, the admin organization, coordination, multiple places, and information everywhere, sort of challenge. So that’s sort of getting organized, generally. But I guess the other problem was trying to solve is, is making the sort of collection and response to say issues or even information and registers, making it a habit, like a real habit, rather than a painful manual habit

Julia Vojkovic
lately, and I think that’s one of the pain points for people who aren’t your licensees that aren’t using some sort of software to help them with their manage their compliance obligations, is that you have everything sort of saved in a million different places, you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s really easy to be overwhelmed by all of the compliance obligations, and also to even miss things because you just have no kind of process or framework around what you’re doing. So that’s really one of the big pain points for licensees. So with three lines, everything is housed in one place, you know that if you log on, and you make that a daily habit, or a, you know, habit or what have you, if you’re using it in your day to day operations to manage compliance, then if you’re keeping up with each module in the system, then hopefully you are on well on your way to having a compliant business.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. And why don’t we actually start? I would normally ask this a bit later, but I noticed on your website, you have an RM sort of online boot camp? Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. So did that come about as a way to help people build that habit, it’s like, alright, let’s, let’s get you to a certain point. So you’re aware of what you should be aware of?

Julia Vojkovic
Absolutely. So through our consulting business, when we were running that and we still have a sister consulting firm, now, three lines consulting. And that’s what it’s got its own managing director. So Eloise, and I work very much on the platform side. And then we have the consulting business that kind of goes hand in hand with the platform. So through consulting we do, we sort of have a full suite of AFSL compliance services in our offering. And we help clients from the very getgo when they obtained their AFSL, or when they’re in that process of deciding whether to get an AFSL and become self license. And we find that a lot of people were either a client or somebody to ask to be an RM or the license or they were, you know, recently appointed, but didn’t really have a good understanding of what that entails. And we know that there’s a few different course providers out there, but our product differs in that it’s an online course. So it’s a set of, I think, nine virtual lessons, and you get 12 months access to the course so it’s not live. So if you want to learn at your own pace and log out, log back in and do everything in kind of bite sized chunks, you can do that. And then if you watch the whole course and maybe six months down the track, you have an incident or a breach and you just want to understand, again, what you need to do in order to remain compliant. You can look back in and have noticed was that the lesson and the quizzes, there are CPD points available in that as well. And we also update it regularly with bonus lessons as well. So for example, a couple of months ago ASIC did update the guidance in terms of incident and breach reporting to ASIC and So we’ve updated that with a lesson so that licensees or RMS can remain aware of what they need to do. So everything is kind of constantly updated.

Peita Diamantidis
And it is it’s an interesting, this is one really interesting area, because I think, to date, well, no, not now, I would have said, what year are we in 2023, at least, up to sort of 2015 or later, the compliance like broad of you know, licensing and compliance was a mystical art. Like, really, everybody had sort of it just saw it, they didn’t see science as much as they saw this sort of mystic approach. And it was very hard to apply structure and logic from the outside, confident there was lots of that inside. I feel like

Julia Vojkovic
that was the case inside as well, right? For the last 10 years or so we’ve seen layer upon layer of regulation be released, nothing’s been to date clawed back, it’s just layer upon layer, and it keeps getting more and more. So it’s really overwhelming for a licensee to understand what their obligations are, and how to address them. That’s very overwhelming. And that’s what we hear all the time. So our sort of philosophy is to make things simple, to keep things efficient, and to do sort of to maybe, like, lower the bar a little bit, I’m still remain, right, like, remain compliant and meet all your basic regulatory obligations. But don’t go too far over and above, just meet what you need to keep it simple. And if you want to down the track, go high and aim higher, then absolutely do that. But just keeping things at a base level, you know, in the short term is probably a good place to start. Yeah, and

Peita Diamantidis
I think you look, there’s this interesting spectrum, for, uh, you know, regulatory environments, which is, you know, all the way on the right end of the spectrum is the lawyer who would really prefer we didn’t have clients. I mean, if they were really truthful, the average lawyer would just prefer, we didn’t have clients, because that means the risk is zero. Right? So and then all the way over the other end, is, you know, the salesperson going hard of just engaging with the problem without any sort of construct. And in the middle of that spectrum is compliance. And they’re the people trying to balance commercial reality and, and environment

Julia Vojkovic
with. And we always say that we always try to balance the commercial aspect of the business with compliance. So we, we come to it with very much a point of view of keeping it simple, remaining commercial, but also just meeting a base level of regulatory compliance. That’s kind of the sweet spot, I think.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And like you say, there’s, there’s, all of us with new habits need to start at a level that’s manageable? Because if you don’t, if you don’t get that, right, you can’t add the other layers, you know, you can’t dive into this top level with all sorts of things, you just get it wrong, you know, and it’s just a mess. And so I like the idea of having the foundational sort of level handled, structured, you know, really sort of bouncy ball approach, and then you can just start adding layers to that, and that those layers will probably be more personal, depending on your license, right? Yeah, you look,

Julia Vojkovic
I guess it and we always said that it doesn’t need to be your compliance program doesn’t need to be tailored to the size and nature of your business. And that’s what I seek expects as well. So don’t expect a one man band self licensed business to have the policies and procedures of say IWF, they just don’t expect that. So it can be very much tailored to suit the business.

Peita Diamantidis
So let’s talk about the user, then is the expectation that really your users of the app itself are just the RMS or do you see in practices as they get bigger? There’s other people in the team that end up utilizing it?

Julia Vojkovic
And that’s a really good question, because we have been really pleasantly surprised as to the broad demographic of the clients that we’ve got, right. So our primary users or a primary targets are, of course, AFS, licensees. And so the, it’s designed to be a very much a whole of firm platform. So we would expect in the firm that you would have everyone from, say, your RMS directors, if you’ve got an internal compliance resource or team, that they wouldn’t be users, and also your advisors, because it’s all underpinned by a task management system. So where there are actions that come out of, say, Representative PLANETFALL, reviews or complaints committee meetings, you can, and you want to allocate tasks to various users in the business, you can absolutely do that with everyone’s a user. And that way, also, when your advisors or users as well, and they get tasks allocated to them, the person who has ownership of that task, whether it’s a member of the compliance team will say RM, they can have oversight of where tasks are at and get status updates and have oversight of completion of tasks and alike. So it’s really designed to be a whole of firm. Platform. Yeah. Yeah. So

Peita Diamantidis
yeah. Okay. And so then in I, we don’t need to dive into the actual pricings. But have you then designed the pricing based on say, I don’t know the number of authorized reps or like, how have you done that to encourage team members to take a tick?

Julia Vojkovic
Yes, totally. Um, so we have got about four or five different tiers of pricing. So it depends on the number of users you want in the system. So yes, as I mentioned, we’ve designed the system to all of the members As of the license, we have access, but and that’s the way we’ve decided to be used. But, you know, obviously, that varies from licensee to licensee. And then we have, you know, for those larger licensees that say have over 50 users, we will have, we can come to a negotiation on pricing for them, because obviously, economies of scale and all that jazz left her

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, look, and I think it’s an interesting lesson that we’ve seen with all sorts of tech in our industry historically is, is we can resist folding out the, the tool to more people in the team because of the head per head, right. So it’s always that balance isn’t that you want to sort of embed some of these tools. And so making sure that we, we, we really do encourage different members of the teams to take take part, if that’s really going to enhance the use of the tool. Like that’s the point we’re aiming to

Julia Vojkovic
now. Yeah, and our direct subscription, we’ve really tried to price it to be really cost effective for a license if they don’t want to continue paying for, say, an external compliance consultant, we hope that the platform will make it more accessible to more licensees. So yeah, you’ll have tried to be really fair in that regard.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and that’s, that’s an interesting balance, isn’t it. So you could start to, you know, utilizing a tool like this to get that foundational level, and then, you know, it could be an issue issues based, that you use a consultant, you know, when you come across, you go to

Julia Vojkovic
find it. And we do have also got, we’ve also got bespoke platform offerings. So we do have other compliance consultants that use three lines, and they have it sort of enterprise level where they have their own branding. And they can use three lines to serve as their own compliance. Now clients as well. So we have many different ways that the tool can be used.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. And so in terms of then the practices that clearly, clearly you guys are serving, you know, with the tool, your smaller practices, right through to what I’m imagining is some bigger groups. We’ve got lots of different participants. So is there a way that it’s implemented or, or a type of business that works particularly well for or conversely, that struggle? Like is there any sort of heads up for people going, hey, you need to get this sorted first, to make sure you can take advantage of three loans.

Julia Vojkovic
I think if you are a responsible manager or manager or director of an AFS license, no matter what size, the license is, three lines can be a great tool to use. For smaller licenses, what I mentioned before we have a direct subscription, and that will address all of your base level regulatory requirements. And that’s really, as I mentioned, tailored, tailored to the size and nature of your business. So then for mid tier, and larger licensees who may have certain internal sense standards, they want their advisors to meet as where we can offer the bespoke platform. So we have options under our bespoke platform where we can tailor the system to their specific needs. So for example, they would might be able to bring their own audit question set, if they’re already using a question set for compliance file reviews, for example, if they wanted to have their own Compliance Committee meeting agenda, or if they wanted to take house and kind of amend it to suit their own needs, and we can also offer or facilitates a multi tenancy architecture as well. So that’s just a few examples of how we can tailor the platform to meet the needs of specific licensees. And I guess, I guess the good thing is that if licensed is one licensees want to make a change, it’s really easy to start using freelance straightaway, you can start today, you can go to our website and sign up for a direct subscription. So we’ve built the platform to be as intuitive as possible. So there’s a lot of it’s very user friendly, and it’s very easy to navigate. And there’s a lot of regulatory guidance built into the system. So you don’t have to be a compliance expert to log in and sort of have an understanding of what you need to do. So we’ve built it so that you can use it on a self guided basis. And we always set up our users with a demo as well. So if somebody registers an interest or signs up for a subscription, we’ll get in touch with them and give them a demo so that they can see the full functionality of the platform and how to use it and how to kind of incorporate it into that business for from a day to day perspective. And I mentioned three lines consulting before as well. So, um, which is access to consulting firm, we also have a module in the system called logger ticket. So if any ad hoc or Kelly compliance queries come up along the way that a licensee wants to an extra help with or an extra pair of eyes to look over, and they can log a ticket that goes through to freelance consulting, and one of our consultants will get in touch with the licensee to understand and maybe chat with them about what the theory is, and just so that they have an extra helping hand along the way. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
perfect. And I think, you know, that’s in the category of not knowing what you don’t know, isn’t it? So it’s just saying, hey, this has come up, and then your team can Well, the three lines consulting team can quote, they can go, Hey, look, if we were to do this, but at least you’ve taken that next step, you know, absolutely.

Julia Vojkovic
And 95% of the queries are just quick five minute phone calls, just to quickly answer something. Sometimes it does sort of go down the path of turning into a bigger project. And in that case, then obviously the team at freelance consulting will work with the client to scope out the project and obviously, help them solve it. Well, so, yeah, there’s lots of there’s lots of support along the way No one’s ever left sort of, by themselves, there’s always a helping hand if they need it.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. So then, I mean, I’m assuming then really, I always ask this question. But for tools like this, it generally doesn’t apply is that this is not something that the end client, Aaron client, you know, is interfacing with, clearly, but I’m betting that I mean, there, there is an extent to which in an in client could or their situation could be in there that might be remediation or a complaint, clearly, that could be captured within the tool.

Julia Vojkovic
Absolutely. So we have all of the compliance registers built into the system. So yes, it can manage incidents, breaches, complaints, all of those types of things. And, you know, you talk about that not the end client not having access. That’s absolutely true. It’s really designed for licensees, but I guess what we always try to tell clients is like, I know, we’re just talking about compliance is boring to most people, except for me, I like to nerd out on compliance. But when a business invests in a, in a platform, such as three lines, I know what they’re really investing is in is their competitive advantage. And I guess what I mean by that is when all of your advisors are on the platform, and using it, it drives not only a culture of compliance, but also a culture of freedom and enjoyment and giving financial advice again, because they’re no longer being bogged down in say a scattergun approach to compliance, there’s a process in place, everyone knows what they need to do to address compliance efficiently and effectively. And it means they’ll spend more time getting better clients and serving them, which will obviously do great things for our licensees brand, and reputation. And we all know with a great reputation, you can attract better talent, you can have better clients, all of those things. So it’s kind of all works together to help the licensee in the long term.

Peita Diamantidis
And there is a capacity, you know, this is potentially unlocking some capacity for advisors, because like you say, let me I mean, a lot of what what tape does is simply do the thing that we all put off, and then do it and gripe about, absolutely.

Julia Vojkovic
That when you know that not everyone else compliance like we do. So we want licensees to save time we want, we want like to spend more time on doing what they love, which might be seven clients, it may even be leaving the office early and going and doing something they really enjoy in their free time. But because of a program like three lines, they’ll be able to do that rather than spending time on admin and compliance, you know, after hours. So the other great thing about it is that because it has all of the regulatory guidance built into the system, and we update it regularly from the back end, licensees or you know, RNs or directors don’t have to worry about trawling through the corpse act and read guides, in order to understand what they need to do to remain compliant. It’s all in there for them. So again, that’s hopefully saving time, saving money for them, and hopefully mitigating risk as well. So there’s a hopefully a lot of benefits to clients by using that.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. Because I think, you know, there is, certainly there was a lot of responsibility when you have say you’re an AFSL, as opposed to the bigger group. But but the truth is, there’s at at its heart wanting to do the right thing is the first point like it’s like the anchor point, and then it’s being organized enough to do the right thing didn’t mean like, it’s yeah, it’s sort of two stages. So yeah, the second part hasn’t always been easy.

Julia Vojkovic
Oh, I completely agree. And I guess that’s why we love what we do, because we love helping licensees. You know, even from our time just doing consulting work. We love helping licensees to get to that place where they understand what they need to do, and they are actually doing it, I think what we really need for clients or subscribers to be successful in using three lines is that attitude and that the investment in wanting to be compliant. So that’s where we see the best results, it doesn’t matter if licensees come to us and they have nothing in place, as long as they’ve got that attitude and that wanting to commit to being compliant. And they have a commitment to using the program day to day and making sure that each module is completed. That’s where we see the best results for our clients. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
and it is the you know, can see with a lot of these tasks, we’ve learned it all with even with say advice is if you have a task, create advice for this client, then that’s a massive thing, and it feels like really big to embark on. Whereas if you can microtasks everything, you can always knock off things in little, little bunches, you know, we can you can knock off this thing here. And tools like this will help with that, because it’s sort of breaking it down into the individual elements.

Julia Vojkovic
Yeah, and even, um, you know, with a monitoring and supervision program for representative. So, obviously, when an advisor receives a tasks, that’s a that is a remediation task from a, from an audit outcome rather than something that’s quite actively helping clients. It can feel it can I think those types of tasks can get very much lost and, you know, pushed to the wayside because there’s more pressing things to do, which Reliance we have designed the system again, that the tasks you say are very specific to each client file in terms of remediation. So that advisor will know exactly what they need to do for that client file to make it compliant. And then yes, they can obviously the to the Management tend to have oversight of the adviser completing that task so they can follow them up. You could change deadlines and things like that. So it’s yeah, it’s trying to give that advice at every opportunity to make sure that they are up to scratch with each client file.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, perfect. So do you guys integrate with any other any other tools or any other apps?

Julia Vojkovic
So no, currently, we do have an open API. So we are always willing and happy to talk to people about about integration, we haven’t come across anything to date that has been the right fit for us. And being a compliance software, we’re very weakened bit the second hence our name, second or third line of defense for a licensee in terms of managing their compliance. So we’re very conscious about the need to remain independent. So we have to be careful about who we are going to integrate with, but we’re certainly open to it. Where the fits, right? Yes.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so therefore, is this something that would be part of a process for within the practice would be what they need to update in the tool or what they need to have as tasks? Because clearly, they’re not going to necessarily be living in it all the time. It will just need to be a sort of a rigor Ori, or does the tool actually say, maybe send an email or something that nudges the advisor when they’ve got to do so? Absolutely.

Julia Vojkovic
So when a task or there is where the advisor or any of the users in the system need to action, anything in the system, they will get an email notification. So it will speak to that email as part of the the sort of log on processes to provide the email address of each user? And so yes, where there are tasks or actions to complete in the system, every user will be notified so that they know that they have to log in and do something.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect, perfect. Okay, so is there any, are there any elements of the tool that you think, you know, has real value but you find people haven’t quite taken advantage of yet? You know, it’s sort of that maybe a few have gone all that gold, and they’ve implemented it, but they haven’t, you know, there’s others just haven’t taken advantage of those features.

Julia Vojkovic
Yes, there is. I think the best part about three lines from a subscribers perspective is that because I’m keep mentioning it, but we update the platform regularly from the backend. So any regulatory updates or industry updates that licensees need to be aware of, we’re always updating those and they’re flowing through to the advisors. And I think the best part is that we tell them not only what that is, but also how they need to action in their business. So if there is a requirement to update a policy or a procedure, we’ll update that for them, we’ll tell them that they need to do it. And then they can add it as a task for the relevant person to do about, they always know specifically what they need to do. And also, then why they need to do it as well. One of the best ways they can keep informed is to hold regularly, or quarterly Compliance Committee meetings. And that’s where we update those regulatory updates normally, for licensees to know what they need to action.

Peita Diamantidis
Interestingly, you could also, if the idea is that the appropriate person is getting sort of nudged effectively, of these updates, then they could also then use that as a trigger to do a retraining with the team or to do it like you could use it as your way to sort of training through to the rest of the business.

Julia Vojkovic
That was the other thing I wanted to mention as well, in terms of things that licensees can utilize in order to get the full potential of the platform is that we do have a trend analysis module as well. So as a licensee, once you’ve conducted representative client file reviews over your advisors, you and you build up a bit of data in the system, you really can pinpoint the problem areas that are identified across those advisor audits. And then you can use that information as a coaching tool as well throughout the year. So licensees can use that. And they can also compare how their license is performing against our global subscriber base as well, which is also a really insightful tool to see just to get an idea of broadly where they sit in the industry. So across our subscriber base,

Peita Diamantidis
absolutely. And that would be an interesting tool as well to help you potentially prioritize where your energies sits, you know, you could sort of look and go, Hey, well, we, you know, not quite as high as we’d like to be compared to that, right, let’s just, you know, work on that solution, because you can’t fix everything straight away. Right? You’ve got to,

Julia Vojkovic
yeah, absolutely. So you can see where you’re kind of your most limitations have been identified in which areas of the advice process and then also, internally just for your license, you can see who your more risky advisors are, by way of who’s had the most limitations identified in their reviews. So they might they might be because they have like a sort of riskier authorizations as part of their service offerings, or they might have MBAs and things like that. Or it might be because they’re just a bad advisor, or there’s a lot of areas that they’re there they need to improve on so and that’s a great opportunity for coaching and training, you know, to help somebody so Got to scratch. So you can see also not only the areas of advice, but also the individuals who might need an extra bit of support in their business.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and I think sometimes, when we think about some of the areas that compliance covers too for, for an advisor that might have, you know, something that we get, you know, somebody can get a look at, or, you know, this is an area you’ve got to focus on the hard thing is translating that into change behavior, that’s actually not easy to do, right. And so, you know, sometimes it’s giving them another step in a process, it’s of a form or a checklist to to review. It’s like all sorts of things that they can still, you know, essentially have the skills they need. It’s just the way that they’re applying them that can improve. I mean, they did that in surgery years ago. And the the risk rate dropped rapidly because they applied checklists across surgeries. Like it’s saying, it’s often just that it’s giving some structure to just help somebody go up. That’s right, I just need to check that thing.

Julia Vojkovic
Yeah. And that’s the other beauty about having three lines consulting as our sort of going hand in hand with three lines, the platform is that we’re licensees do need that extra support, but there might not be sure how to how to give that extra support. They can look like a ticket. And our three lines consulting team can help with the product support like that.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. So then what’s on the you know, what’s on the development plan, what’s into the future is there there’s probably some things that are coming up in the near future, but is also love to hear if there’s anything war, we’d love to, you know, down the track. Maybe not certain, but certainly, you know, that you’re a bit excited about.

Julia Vojkovic
Yeah, so we’ve got a lot planned the next 12 months or so. So first up, the first cab off the rank is that we’re building out an attestations area. So that will allow licensees to send out regular attestations to their adviser base. So that’ll be based on their specific requirements. So it could include things like having a testing, having advisors attesting to their understanding of policies and procedures, and perhaps declaring conflicts of interests or managing their AML, CTF obligations, those sorts of things. So it’ll be a kind of build your own attestation. And then you can send it out to your advisers. So we’ve had a lot of requests for that. So that’s the next sort of priority. And then as the volume of data in the system grows, or continues to grow, we’re looking to add functionalities to that trend analysis that I just spoke about. So there’ll be more data available for licensees to take information for their training and coaching in the business. So that might relate to complaints, incidents, and breaches, and more of those sorts of more specific things. And then you’ve talked about as this sort of blue sky idea. So a little bit, I guess, further down the track, we’re looking at adapting freelance to service, the credit market as well. So credit providers and credit intermediaries. So there’s a lot of businesses out there who hold AFSL and ACLs. So they hold a joint license. So then three lands would hopefully be really helpful to those businesses that are trying to make two sets of obligations. Yeah, so that’s sort of the longer term vision. And then in the, in the shorter term, we’re continually improving the user interface and the user experience, I guess. So that’s, we’ve got a few smaller projects in the pipeline for that. And then you mentioned our RM bootcamp earlier, two minutes, an hour other baby at the moment. So we’ve just launched that a few months ago, but we’re continually updating that as well. So as I mentioned, it’s an online course with nine lessons that are sort of the base lessons for the RM. But we continually update that to with bonus lessons when there are regular updates that need to kind of be communicated across across the industry. So we are continually updating that as well. So that’s our other project at the moment to

Peita Diamantidis
look at it’s, it’s, it’s really valuable because the problem with the all the information out there is we then need to discern amongst it, you have to take time to discern what you need to update yourself on and then update yourself.

Julia Vojkovic
Exactly. So we’re trying to remove that and just spoon feed it to license.

Peita Diamantidis
The update on time and effort

Julia Vojkovic
spent trawling through read guides and cops act and God knows what. Yeah,

Peita Diamantidis
yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. So it’s, yeah, I can see some some real value in, in being able to get those updates. And I mean, I think it’ll be interesting to see down the track way down the track. And I know this doesn’t really exist now. But sort of the pre emptive compliance environment where tools like us, yours could almost be monitoring what’s happening, you know, maybe pieces of advice so that then they can be fixed before they go out. You know, remediation becomes zero because we’re catching them before they go.

Julia Vojkovic
Absolutely. And we do have a, what we call a pre vet component to the system as well. So that is purposefully designed to review give a quick check to advice before it goes to the client so that any of those small issues can be nipped in the bud before they become bigger issues retrospectively So, yeah, we we have that in place. And we are always looking to expand on on helping proactive compliance rather than being reactive all the time.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. Is there anything else? We’ve missed? Any features we haven’t covered?

Julia Vojkovic
Oh, I feel like we’ve covered a lot. And there’s probably Yeah, they reached your compliance threshold for the day painter. So we’ve covered everything. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Give us an interesting. It’s an interesting balance, isn’t it? Because what we’re all aiming to do is be compliant. But what we have to spend a lot of time on ease compliance. And I think any tool that can get us closer to just constantly being compliant is a better a better place to be, rather than a Yeah, feeling like, oh, now’s compliance time, you know, I just don’t think that’s the way to operate going forward.

Julia Vojkovic
100% agree. And that’s why we exist is to try and take the pressure off and make it as simple and easy as possible for licensees to become compliant and remain compliant so that they can do the things that they want to do, which is service clients provide great quality advice, and then leave the office early and go and have some fun.

Peita Diamantidis
I love it. All right advice explores if you’d like to find out more about three lines or perhaps nudge your your business owner or say go do this would be really good guys, then the website link is in the episode show notes along with Julie’s LinkedIn details, I’m sure she’ll point you towards the right person, if you want to reach out to her, thank you so much for joining us here today. And sharing sort of how three lines can just help make all of these sort of compliance and AFSL handling things manageable. And so we can get busy, you know, engaging with the public. Thank you so much for your time.

Julia Vojkovic
Thank you, Peter, thanks so much for having me.

Peita Diamantidis
So are you a current user of three lines? Now, the truth is that often advisors won’t be necessarily aware of these tools as much as they’re responsible manager or client manager might be. But I am curious if you’ve utilized a tool like this and are finding it beneficial and adding real practice value, sorry, to the practice. So if that’s the case, please put your hand up on the Ensembl community platform, post, let people know how you found it and what your experience has been. In terms of my thoughts on this stuff, I think what’s interesting is, you know, there’s a need for us to be compliant, right, that’s sort of the first level let’s be compliant. But then there’s also the need to capture that activity and record it, right, we’ve got to provide a trial provide evidence. And that’s when things can become clunky and awkward, rather really become difficult. And you can spend an inordinate amount of time, I’ve got a good friend of mine who’s worked in outside this industry and has worked in very senior positions in marketing. And I remember her saying that, you know, nearly one week out of every month is spent by the executive team collating reports for the monthly executive team meeting. Now, you’ve got a question. That amazing that requires one week out of four in just producing the reports for the meeting, right? That just seems crazy making and certainly not a good use of your executive team’s time. Imagine the bandwidth that could be unlocked by 52 extra weeks of activity from your executive team. And I guess that’s what tools like three lines are trying to do is take out the manual nature of the compliance reporting and collation and tracking and prompting so that you can get busy just being in the business, yes, you’ll apply the time you need to apply. But you won’t spend a whole lot of time just trying to keep on top of things. So I think it’s just an interesting approach. And I certainly think more tools would add value in this area without a doubt. And so, you know, as we sort of go forward, I think there’s an opportunity to therefore, instead of seeing compliance as, like, we’ve got to do some compliance, right, we can just be compliant. And that and the system will tag it, the system will track it. It’ll note all the activity and all the wonderful advice and wonderful work that we will do, will get recorded accordingly. So it’s certainly heading in the right direction. Tech is perfect for this type of stuff. And so personally, I’m excited about seeing where tools like three lines can go. Now, you know what’s coming next, we’ve got to do our curiosity corner up, don’t worry, we’ve got to keep on developing that curiosity muscles so that we can become super duper bionic advisors. Now, the one I want you to take a look at this week is called folk. You can find it at folk dot app, that’s fo LK dot a double P. And this is another CRM, right so I can imagine for advisors, it’s not that you’d necessarily use Well you certainly wouldn’t use this for your day to day clients. But if you are undergoing some prospecting activity right now Maybe you’re interacting with people on LinkedIn, you’re, you’re nurturing relationships, you might be going to business networking events to start to build a prospecting funnel, then this could be an interesting tool to check out, because what they’ve done is amplified the tool with AI. So they’ve got the normal CRM fields that you would see in every here name, address, business, you know, all those sort of things in there. And they’ve got all sorts of clever ways for you to engage with that. So certainly, it’s got all the things you might expect. But what it’s also got is something called Magic fields. So you can be looking at the data and you could say, I’m going to add a magic field. And what you do is a magic field is a field where you ask AI via a prompt, something that you want it to generate. So it could be a piece of data you want it to collect or generate, or it could even be some text you want it to generate. So let’s just run through what I mean by that. So if you’re looking at a table of prospects, and you say, all right, for all these prospects, I’m tidying up the data. And I can see ah, there’s Look, they’ve Some of it’s capitalized, some of it’s not, it’s really messy, then the prompt in the magic field could be changed the formatting for first name as a field and last name as a field, adding only a capital letter for the first letter, right. So it will just tidy that for you done, generate tidied for the whole list that you’ve got. Or it might be that you’ve collected job title is one of the things that you’ve put in the in the, in the database or in the CRM, but you want to sort of categorize it a bit better. So it could be categorize the field job title into one of the following categories. And you tell it what four categories you want to put it in. And once it’s and you generate. Now, once it’s done that, you could just use that as a tag, which means you can then filter how you talk to those different categories and the columns you use. It could be you could ask it, if you’ve listed the company name that the person works for, you could the prompts you could put in for the Phillies in which industry is company name operating, then once again, it’ll pick an industry and you could use that as a tag, right. So it’s just any that digging you might otherwise manually do, you could use the AI prompt to do it across a full list of clients. This next one is interesting. And I think this is where it could get really smart. So we’ve all probably heard of campaign email campaigns, right where you send email one, then wait three days send email to write, and there’s a certain ability to customize, but they all will generally feel the same, right? And can be repetitive If then, you know, three months later, the same follow up happens, the client gets the same follow up right or sorry, the prospect so it can get a bit clumpy what this could be is the magic field could actually be to generate text and the text could be an email. So write the body of recruitment email, say this might be a recruitment list, people applying for a job to first name that’s currently working at company name, as job title to express interest in their profile for a potential position at your advice company, make it feel professional, but relaxed, right. And now what’s interesting about that is it’s it’s creating a template, essentially, but it’s an entirely different one per entry. So the AI will generate this relaxed, professional email using the fields you asked it to use. But every one of them will be different. So it’s still batch. It’s still an element of automation, but it’s got some nuance and some difference. And I just think that’s going to start to be interesting. If we’re reaching out to people, if we’re just, you know, dropping them online, it stops it being that same generic thing that we’re sending out. So it just like I’m not quite don’t quite have a handle on the best way to use it just yet. But I do think it’s worth taking a look to see how AI is now being used within these tools as just a clever way to get some real smarts. Let me know if you check it out. And if you find a great use case, because I’m certainly curious myself. Welp, that’s all we’ve got for this week, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’re stuck in a rut, your processes need some work or maybe you want to collate the team together to get them revved up for the second half of the year. Do some planning do some brainstorming. Even you know, maybe get some insights on some tech that might help then I’d love you to assist by facilitating a workshop. So please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Forward slash PEITA, MD otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.