In the creaky world of financial advising, where compliance paperwork devours hours and clunky software feels like a relic from the dial-up era, a New Zealand startup is deploying AI to free advisers from the drudgery. 

Marloo, co-founded by Hardy Michel, who cut his teeth as head of operations at Wellington-based share trading platform Sharesies, isn't building robo-advisers to supplant humans.

Instead, he is using artificial intelligence to free up advisors so they can focus on the trust-building conversations that truly matter to their clients. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Michel shares how his London-based venture is already winning paying customers across four countries, proving New Zealand fintech can scale globally from day one.

Relocating to London in 2022, Michel joined Estonian-founded investing platform Lightyear, helping it launch across 22 European countries amid regulatory mazes far more complex than New Zealand's. 

"I felt like I'd really rounded out probably the missing piece of my knowledge and learning, which was kind of how do you build the machine at scale?" Michel told me.

Freeing advisors from low-value admin

That experience, combined with angel investing via Blackbird Ventures, convinced him to co-found Marloo with fellow Sharesies alum Shakeel Lala.

Marloo’s mission? Financial advice is potentially transformational but inaccessible, the founders realised. Advisers spend 70% of their time on low-value admin, from anti-money laundering checks to 50-page suitability reports that gather dust. 

Existing tools are clunky, with Michel describing the "Windows 95-esque" systems financial advisors had to choose from before Marloo arrived on the scene. Marloo offers a hyper-specialised AI note-taker for client meetings. Unlike transcription tools, it sifts through hours of chit-chat to extract the 5% that counts – goals, risk tolerance, fees – and structures it for compliance or client follow-ups.

From there, the AI evolves into a full operating system, turning advisors into "reviewers, not doers", Michel said.

Finish a meeting, and Marloo drafts an annual review letter in two minutes, 95% ready for a quick edit. 

"You no longer have to take notes after the meeting, have a second person in the meeting taking notes for them, or rely on anything else other than our product," Michel explained. 

The result? Advisors onboard more clients without burnout, firms cut outsourcing costs, and the human element, crucial for navigating life's emotional money milestones like retirement or inheritance, stays front and centre.

Giving robo-advice a wide berth

This augmentation ethos sets Marloo apart from robo-advice hype. "If robo-advice was kind of as good as it was cracked up to be, we'd all be using it right now. And the reality is we're not," Michel told me. 

He predicts regulators will be reluctant to green-light fully AI-driven advice, given the trust factor. Instead, Marloo aims to overhaul unit economics: lower fees, drop minimum balances (now often $500,000+), and make quality guidance available to more than just the wealthy. 

"The mission is [to] transform the underlying [profit and loss]  in the unit economics of what it means to deliver advice to a customer so that we can actually reverse that," he said

Marloo recently raised NZ$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development. 

"We're going to raise a little bit of money to answer a true false question in 12 months... that we are confident we can spend the next 10 years working on this and it's going to be a massive business," he recounts of the Blackbird pitch.

As AI bubbles inflate, Michel warns against shiny tech without substance. 

"It's never been easier to build... [but] also... to deliver a really shitty product experience," he said. 

Marloo, he added, prioritises delight – a consumer-grade user experience in a B2B world. For an industry pricing out everyday clients amid rising fees (up 6% in the UK last year), this could be the reset financial advice needs.

Tune into episode 129 of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees, for the full conversation, where Michel dives deeper into Estonia's entrepreneurial edge, Sharesies' early battles, and why financial advice must stay human-powered. Available now on all major podcast platforms. 

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