Advice lived in nineteen advisers heads and the compliance file was always behind. Meetings are now recorded, summarised and turned into a follow-up plan within the hour.
Hugo takes the project apart on screen: the bottleneck we found, the system we shipped, the number it moved.
No walkthrough yet. The written case below carries the same numbers.
Kessler & Roth advises 640 private clients from Frankfurt and Munich. Nineteen advisers, four paraplanners, a little over one billion euros under advice.
Advisers took notes on paper and typed them up when they could, usually on a Friday. Two days was the normal gap. Some notes never made it into the system.
That gap cost the firm twice over. Compliance chased files before every quarterly review. Partners had no view of what had been promised, so cross-selling depended on whoever remembered.
Quarterly reports were assembled by hand from four systems. In one quarter of 2025, eleven of them went out late.
Two days of interviews and one week of their own data. Here is what was actually going wrong, told the way the people living with it told us.
The best thinking in the firm happened in meetings, then stayed in the room. Advisers wrote on paper meaning to type it up, usually on a Friday that never arrived.
What an adviser promised a client on Tuesday was invisible to everyone else. A partner could sit with the same family a month later without knowing what had already been agreed.
Compliance felt it first, rebuilding files from fragments before every review. Advisers felt it too. Each of them carried a private list of commitments only they could see, which is a heavy thing to carry for 640 clients.
Built inside the tools the company already paid for. Every workflow, credential and prompt was handed over at the end.
Every client meeting is recorded with consent. A model writes the summary in the firm house format, in German or English, and the adviser approves it before anything is filed.
Fathom
Claude
n8n
PipedriveActions are pulled straight from the approved summary, each with an owner and a date. Outlook gets the reminder, the partner gets the exception when a date slips.
Pipedrive
Baserown8n
Microsoft 365Every advice record feeds a nightly build that scores clients on life events, portfolio drift and unopened products. Partners read one dashboard on Monday morning.
Baserow
Looker Studion8nPipedriveBefore figures come from the company's own records, pulled during the audit. The after column is the ninety day average once every system was live.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting to written summary | 2 days | 5 min |
| Agreed follow-ups completed | 68% | 96% |
| Quarterly reports on time | 82% | 100% |
| Compliance hours rebuilding files, weekly | 6 h | 20 min |
| Cross-sell conversations per quarter | 148 | 188 |
| Adviser admin hours, weekly | 7 h | 2 h |
Our regulator asked for two years of advice records. We produced them in an afternoon. That request would have cost us a month before this project.
Every project has them. Writing them down is how the next one gets shorter.
Compliance should have been in the room in week one, not week four. Their sign-off changed the summary template twice, and both rounds landed on advisers who had already learned the old one.
We also let advisers opt in, which left four holdouts and a hole in the data.
The partners made it standard in week nine. That decision should have come first.
First system in production inside a month. Everything after that is iteration with the client in the room.
Back per week: 22 h
Read the caseEnquiries fully handled: 68%
Read the caseThe AI and Operations Audit finds it, prices it, then hands you a plan in two working days. Your fee comes off the first thing you build with us.
