This month we are speaking to Tweed Wealth Management, a senior partner practice of St. James's Place Wealth Management based in Edinburgh, Inverness and London, about their decision to adopt DocPortal for their practice.

Tweed WM is currently in the onboarding process with DocPortal, so we spoke to Co-Founder and Managing Director Alison Welsh about the importance of client relationships, business strategy and making life easier for everyone with DocPortal.

Alison, you’re currently in the process of onboarding your practice with DocPortal, what was it that initially attracted you to the product?

It was a couple of things really, from a personal perspective we really see the benefit to our clients, and not necessarily just from the wealth management point of view, but in general for day to day life I think having DocPortal is an absolute game changer when we’re thinking about organisation, storage and just ease of use as well. Then obviously going forward, it does make sense for us to integrate it into our practice as well. Being able to store all our clients’ wealth management documents into one portal is just really slick and it looks good, it looks professional. It also shows we are moving with the times - instead of sending out so much post all the time, if we as a company are cutting down what we physically have to send out to our clients then that’s got to be a good thing.

From an advisor’s perspective it’s also a really cost-effective way when you look at it on an individual client basis. We obviously see a massive benefit to having the digital executor function as it’s such a nice, easy and gentle way to reach out to those digital executors. It will help us start building up that goodwill with them, and building relationships in the future. It’s interesting because you can spend a lot of money and time on leads and prospects, and that does make sense being an aspect of people’s business. But actually in our practice, and probably in the industry generally, word of mouth and referrals are still our main source of business. So this feels a lot closer to that, in terms of being a more natural way of building up connections. Any tools to help referrals is definitely worth its money and DocPortal is one of them.

What made you finally decide to adopt DocPortal for your practice then?

It probably came down to that cost-effectiveness and it being something we can roll out to our whole client bank pretty feasibly. There’s also the possibility of rolling it out to potential clients, like giving digital executors their own DocPortal. So it’s a really strong business tool because there are no cost restraints on it really when it comes to your number of users, so that was definitely one of the main aspects of it. Because it’s so cost-effective, DocPortal is a tool that everyone can use, and should be using with their clients.

What other DocPortal features stand out to you?

From the advisor side the digital executor function is the main thing for us. It would be nice to also see the potential for being able to do all our business and communications within DocPortal be developed in the future, and something like that would just add even more to the product. So in terms of features - the communication, digital executors, and then from a personal perspective I just think it makes my life as an individual so much easier, so why would our clients not like to have that. And actually a big part of some advisors’ meeting time is going to people’s houses to literally hand over loads of paperwork and say “here’s everything I’ve got to do with that, do we need to keep it all”? So it would be so much easier for everyone to be able to just take a picture of it and get it in your DocPortal. Once it’s in there we don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Tweed WM recently won the Excellence in Business Strategy Award (Best Practice Adviser Awards 2021), how do you see DocPortal aligning with your business strategy going forward?

I guess we’re always looking at ways of building our client bank. So we see this as a really good acquisition tool with our current client bank and we do see business coming in off the back of this for sure. Over the last couple of years we’ve also been building up our own brand with our clients. We’ve been building up communications; we do quarterly client newsletters, we have our own branded christmas cards and birthday cards, as well as our own website.So it just feels like it’s a nice extension to that brand relationship and recognition as well.

Being among the somewhat younger practices it also aligns with our brand in a way that shows we are investing in digital and forward-thinking solutions and it helps us stand out. We don’t want to be deciding that we’re comfortable with hundreds of pages of paper all over the place all the time. So anything that can make that better we’re really happy with!

What are you most excited about as you roll out DocPortal to your practice?

From the practice perspective we’re most excited about the digital executor function, I think it will be really good for the advisors and the relationships they build from that and seeing what comes from that. But from a client perspective, I think it will be so nice being able to go to them and say “we are coming to you with this document storage and it’s going to make your whole life more organised” - and not just the wealth management side of it! The fact that it will be us in that position also rather than their solicitor or accountant I think is going to build up significant goodwill, and I’m definitely looking forward to that.

Thank you so much to Alison at Tweed Wealth Management for making the time to catch up with us about their DocPortal experience.

If you’d like to find out more for your practice please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team, or discover more here about how and why our product works.