He interviewed 800 advisers around the world. Here's the one thing they all got wrong

Financial advice has a fundamental structural problem. Millions of Australians are desperate for financial advice, but can't afford it. Advisers want to scale their businesses, but instead are bogged down by administrative tasks, spending just 20% of their time with clients.

Take Shak Lala, for example. While working at Sharesies, he realised investors were desperate for guidance. He even tried to find a financial adviser himself. He tried for four or five years. Shak had a good salary, but couldn't find a firm that would onboard him as a client. He didn't have sufficient liquid savings. He was dismissed for being too young.

He took that personally, channelling this frustration into building a service for financial advisers that, he hopes, will see more and more Australians receive quality advice.

In the process, Shak and his team spent two years flying around the world to speak with financial advice professionals to learn about their pain points. After 800 interviews, he realised that every adviser - no matter where they were from - was facing the same challenge.

"This is just a straight cost, efficiency and compliance problem. Advisers are spending more time trying to prove their compliance with the law and how they deliver their advice than actually just advising clients," Shak explained.

And AI, according to Shak, is the answer.

Marloo started as a note-taking assistant, providing advisers with personalised summaries of meetings. Today, it's an adviser's "AI partner", preparing advice documents, completing tasks, pulling in emails, and filling out forms on their behalf - used by support staff, compliance, operations and advisers themselves. The first version alone saved advisers a day a week. Today, Shak puts the value at $50,000 to $100,000 per adviser per year.

Interestingly, when Shak recently spoke at a conference in Melbourne, he asked the room of 300 to 400 advisers to raise their hands if they were using AI. Around 90% did. Then he asked them to keep their hand up if they were using it for three or more tasks. Almost every hand went down.

That's the one thing advisers are getting wrong. Adoption is high, but the actual depth of usage is low. Most advisers are stuck at note-taking - the very feature that, as Shak puts it, has now been completely commoditised. The real question for advisers is no longer whether they should use AI, but whether they can find a tool that does the actual work of advice, so they can get back to the 20% that matters most.

In this interview, Shak shares what advisers can expect next from Marloo, the main pain points he discovered from 800 interviews around the world, as well as how advisers and their teams can start pushing AI deeper into their businesses.

5 key lessons from Marloo’s Shak Lala

1. Compliance doesn’t have to be painful

Most advisers see compliance as an expensive, time-consuming burden, but Shak believes that AI will help to reduce the cost of compliance, while also actively catching things we humans might miss. For example, a client who seemed nervous about a recommendation or a question that wasn't handled well, and needs follow-up.

2. The SOA is the industry’s biggest missed opportunity

60-80 page templated documents that some advisers tell clients not to bother reading aren't serving anyone. Shak questions whether copied-and-pasted templates are genuinely client-fit documents at all. A truly personalised SOA built around how a specific client consumes information would, in his view, be more compliant. And there are now tools that can help advisers do this.

3. Adviser education has a blind spot

Shak completed a financial advice course, and while he found it to be incredibly thorough on regulation and formal process, it lacked insights into technology, evolving client engagement models, and how firms are innovating. Those insights only come from networking, he’s realised. He thinks there's a real opportunity for that kind of education to enter the formal training curriculum.

4. General AI and advice-specific AI are not interchangeable

General AI handles research and open-ended questions well. Shak uses Claude himself for this. But producing client-ready, firm-specific, compliant outputs requires something built for the context of advice. Conflating the two is where most advisers are currently getting stuck.

5. AI agents will triage client calls, but not replace the hard conversations

Shak sees a future where AI agents will triage routine client queries like "why is my portfolio down?” It's central to his belief that advisers could realistically move from 100-150 clients today to 800-1,000. But he's equally clear that a panicked client during a market crisis will still require a human conversation.

This week’s chart outlines the differences in AI usage in enterprises. Around 40% of the firms that investigate and trial generic LLMs, the likes of Claude and ChatGPT, end up actually implementing them successfully into their businesses. However, only 5% of the firms that do the same with task-specific tools end up actually using them.

“Generic AI solves generic problems, but advice is not a generic problem,” Shak says.

“It's a regulatory problem, it's a compliance and engagement problem, it's a firm economics problem. It's not something generic AI can solve. And so adding value very quickly in a complex environment takes a way more powerful and contextualised tool.”

The main takeaway is that AI is moving incredibly quickly. Marloo’s first iteration, its note-taking assistant (launched only a year ago), is proof of that.

“The real question for advisers thinking about the next stage of their technology stack and their practice management is, ‘How can I find a tool that'll actually start to do the work of advice so that I can be more client-facing?”

He believes that Marloo is the platform that advisers, support staff, compliance, and management can use to do that.

In case you missed it, we were recently joined by David Cassidy, the CIO of Canaccord Genuity. We talked about all things macro, including the US/Iran conflict, oil prices, equity market rebounds, the soaring Aussie dollar, and what this means for how Canaccord is positioning portfolios.

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In what is surely the easiest way to tick off your ethics CPD requirements, we also recently spoke with ethical client experience authority Dr Katherine Hunt. If you are interested in learning how advisers can use client psychology and AI to scale trust, deepen relationships, and build a practice that compounds over generations, this episode is for you.

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