Marloo continues bringing in more financial advisers
AI platform Marloo has signed a strategic partnership with Pie Funds that will further broaden its reach across New Zealand’s financial advice sector.
Thursday, January 8th 2026, 8:16AM
Marloo allows advisers to automatically record, transcribe, and draft compliant file notes from client meetings.
Pie Funds chief executive Ana-Marie Lockyer said her organisation was committed to investing in tools to give its advisers more time and giving them access to Marloo was the next step.
“This is more than an efficiency gain - it’s a commitment to deeper, more meaningful client relationships. Our advisers can now spend their days doing what they are so talented at, advising our clients on growing and managing their wealth.
“It’s a tool that our wealth advisers now use in meetings with their clients and it just lets them be more efficient… be able to concentrate better on what they can do to create stronger and more meaningful client relationships - what they’re best at doing, which is advising clients on managing their wealth as opposed to sitting there taking notes in the meeting.”
She said it was “phenomenal” how a 60- or 90-minute conversation could be translated into a clear summary of what was discussed and what was important to a client, and in a way that met the adviser’s regulatory obligations.
Marloo recently secured $4.6 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of its platform.
Co-founder Shakeel Lala said the growth in the platform had been much faster than he had expected. He said, when he and Hardy Michel had worked at
Sharesies, they noticed problems with the financial advice space.
“The challenge with advice is that people who can’t afford it are often the people who can benefit the most from it.
“The economics of advice are broken in the sense that the only way advice firms make money is they charge a percentage … the amount of money someone has, has to be fairly large for that percentage to work out.”
He said through 2024 Marloo’s founders had spoken to hundreds of advisers and found that up to 80 percent of their time went into documentation compliance.
“It’s not actually advice delivery, it’s the formalisation of advice delivery. So we decided to build a product to transform that model.
“We spent 2024 in pure research mode. We spoke to so many people that it allowed us to build it so quickly, using AI tools to build it as well and then get it out to markets in Australia, the UK and NZ. Now we’re in those three countries plus Ireland and South Africa.
“The whole AI movement has completely changed my thoughts on how you would build a software business because you can build anything at the click of a finger. What matters more is, one, that you build the right thing and, two, you can’t have customers at the click of a finger. So we pre-sold it in 2024 and built a network, refined how it would sell so that when it came to selling it we were a few steps ahead than companies would normally be.”
He said a number of large firms had picked up Marloo, as well as independent advisers. AdviceFirst, Fidenti Wealth, and the Mortgage Room are among the businesses using Marloo.
Lala said many advisers had been working with technology that was “year and years” behind. “Their main cost for many of them was just compliance.
Their challenge was in many cases taking data notes. In manty cases they didn’t take notes at all and they are hoping they’re not going to get an audit from the FMA.”
Others were spending what should be their spare time working on notes for hours, he said.
“Anyone can write AI notes and there's good ones and there's bad ones…I think where we always intended to go was further and deeper into the advice workflow to take more of the work and sort of shift from helping an adviser to doing the work that advice firms do.
“A couple of big examples are we're generating the advice document now as a draft. It could [previously] take days or weeks to turn around a statement of advice that's available within 30 minutes now.
“That's starting to really transform how people are thinking about even delivering their own advice if they don't now have to pay for other staff or offshore providers to generate reasonable chunks of work.
“We’re going further down the advice workflow so that the adviser can focus on clients.”
He said it could mean an advice firm ended up with more staff who were giving advice rather than employed to work on administrative tasks. “Or the same staff doing more client engagements… the other challenge we observed in the sector was a lot of advisers would not love the fact that when a client reaches out, if they’re not an economical client they almost don’t like the fact they’ve reached out because they’ve got to reply to the client. There’s the perception or belief that not all client service is great for business - I think when client service is bad for business, something’s wrong here.”
Marloo was part of a wider change happening in the sector, he said.
“You’ve got advisers with tech stacks that they don’t love. And then you've got new players in the market generating a product experience that they do love.
“It sets up a really interesting next couple of years to see where the state of technology in the advice sector will actually end up because a lot of CRMs rightly or wrongly right now monopolise someone's data, it's very hard to move it in and out of it.
“And that's why organically a lot of advisers have kind of ended up in a situation where everything by default has to end up in the CRM in their minds. It doesn't functionally help them do their job any better. It's just in case the FMA asks. So I think with that being only true for a bit longer, I think there's a really interesting movement to play out in the technology space for advisers.”
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