O'Brien Financial Services

As a very successful Financial Services Provider, O’Brien Financial Services believes in providing a full service to its clientele.

Imran and Clint O’Brien took over the business from their father in 2001. Says Clint, “all the growth that we have achieved has been entirely organic. So we have made some good decisions since we were called to take the reigns of this company.

To survive the initial challenges of shaping the business we have not elected to downsize and focus our business on the highest margin areas of our operations. But we have instead elected to maintain our widely diversified range of financial services, unlike most FSPs”, continues Clint. His brother Imran adds, “through diversification we accepted the short term sacrifices in anticipation of earning the long term rewards!”

Diversification plays a pivotal role in their business: clients not only receive the typical financial risk advice and planning. O’Brien Financial Services decided to also specialise in personal income tax solutions as well as corporate accounting & bookkeeping, payroll and secretarial services.

Financial Planning & Risk Management

“That is why we choose PROFIDA Professional Edition, the financial planning and practice management software that drives the entire office environment. It contains the records of all clients and everything related to their financial planning portfolios. It is capable of real time updates via the Astute Financial Services Exchange. It controls all the activities and scheduling related to client affairs, as such it is essential to the financial planning aspect of O’Brien Financial. It is a truly capable application”, says Clint.

Administration of Funeral Schemes

“In addition to that,” says Daniel Putra, Managing Director of the PROFIDA Team, “O’Brien Financial Services seamlessly combined the PROFIDA Professional with the Administration Edition. This enables the administration of schemes with more than 3500 lives on their funeral group scheme. PROFIDA reconciles premium collections, client movements, and enables the communication of this data with their underwriters and debit order bureau.”

Clint and Imran believe that with the right systems, and the right combinations of technology, the possibilities to use the business to leverage their position as an Authorised Financial Services Provider become endless. “Hence PROFIDA is also employed for our tax-advisory business”, says Imran.

Tax Services

“All clients marked with “tax service” are assigned various levels of tax services by means of billing templates. This process automatically generates the bank collection of our tax service fees. With the auto-generation of letters it is possible e.g. to notify clients of missed double debits or about changes in the tax legislation”, explains Clint. “While we are adding value to our product offering for our clients the administration effort is minimal through PROFIDA.”

Cross Selling

PROFIDA not only manages clients’ portfolio and the billing process. Holistic reporting and drill down capabilities are possible to assess performance, marketing information, or to construct data for exporting or further manipulation. “Mail Merge integrated within PROFIDA informs our clients about our other services available and keeps us in touch, a vital part of our strategy”, explains Imran.

Record Keeping

Record keeping is managed via PROFIDA as well. All documents that are necessary to be maintained can be easily attached to the client record for future use or reference, and for further integration into the financial planning area of service. Paperwork within the client tax file is scanned into PROFIDA as a single document – the hardcopies of such information is filed off-site.

Future Use

“We have great plans for the future and we are not resting on our laurels, exclaims Clint. “Although not used at present, commissions are capable of being calculated and reports generated, and we are looking forward to using this PROIFDA facility in the near future.”

“O’Brien Financial Services is also investigating the possibility of customising PROFIDA to integrate their new product range of gold account management,” says Daniel Putra. “PROFIDA’s underlying programming language JAVA makes customisations for any kind of business use, model and products affordable and speedily available.”