TL;DR: Documentation automation only removes a bottleneck if it connects to the systems where client records live. For UK advice firms, that means back-office compatibility with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Iress Xplan is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have. Two platforms operating in this space are AdvisoryAI and Marloo. AdvisoryAI integrates natively with all four back-office systems, generates suitability reports from your firm's own templates via Emma, and checks documents against FCA Consumer Duty and COBS requirements via Colin. Marloo offers solid documentation capabilities and strong security credentials, with self-serve setup completing in under ten minutes, but does not offer native integration with UK back-office systems. For firms where that integration gap creates manual data transfer after every meeting, the operational cost sits outside the subscription price.

With 71.9% of UK advice firms spending one to seven hours producing a single suitability report, operations directors cannot afford platforms that automate one bottleneck while creating another. This comparison evaluates AdvisoryAI and Marloo across document processing, suitability report generation, compliance checking, back-office integration, pricing, and onboarding, so you can identify which platform fits your firm's operational reality.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Core Platform Differences

The primary constraint on UK advice firm growth is not a shortage of client demand. Paperwork is the bottleneck, and firms that remove it can pursue three paths: serve more clients with the same headcount, deepen service quality, or reclaim personal capacity for strategic work. Both platforms address this bottleneck through document automation. The difference lies in how completely each platform integrates into the UK advice workflow.

AdvisoryAI's Core Paraplanning Features

We built AdvisoryAI specifically for the UK market. Our founder, Alan Gurung, worked as a paraplanner and financial adviser and experienced the documentation burden first-hand. Atlas is the platform. Evie, Emma, and Colin are capabilities within it, accessible through a single conversational interface. You can explore how they work together in the AdvisoryAI platform walkthrough.

• Evie: Records and transcribes client meetings on Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet, capturing not only what clients say but how they respond, including tone, reactions, and passing mentions of health or family circumstances that seasoned advisers can miss under the pressure of a live conversation. Evie uses this to generate structured meeting notes with action items and a draft follow-up email, automatically populating fact-find fields from soft facts captured during the meeting, and pushes all outputs directly into back-office systems.

• Emma: Generates suitability reports and annual review reports using your firm's own templates, with every statement cited back to its source document.

• Colin: Checks documents against FCA Consumer Duty and COBS requirements across 42 automated checks, working on any suitability report regardless of which system produced it.

• Atlas: Atlas is the single conversational interface through which Evie, Emma, and Colin are accessed, alongside your uploaded client data. Advisers and paraplanners query client history, meeting transcripts, and reports in natural language across all uploaded data and client data held in the platform. AdvisoryAI was ranked number one in the AI-only category by FT Adviser for H1 2025. Fund and product research support is on the Atlas development roadmap, which would allow advisers to receive research-backed recommendations on investment options from within the same conversational interface rather than switching to a separate research workflow. Firms should confirm current availability directly with AdvisoryAI.

How Marloo Automates Paraplanning

Marloo provides meeting transcription and documentation generation through a browser-based platform. The platform's UK market presence is growing, but the platform was not built around UK regulatory requirements.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Key Differences

The central operational difference is back-office connectivity. For a UK firm running on Intelliflo, the absence of a native integration means manual data transfer after every meeting. The AdvisoryAI-Intelliflo integration eliminates that step with bidirectional push and pull data synchronisation.

Document Processing Capabilities

Document processing is only as fast as the data flowing into it. Both platforms face the same upstream dependency: if fact-finds are incomplete or provider documents are structured inconsistently, the automation output reflects that. Realistic time savings depend on data quality at input.

LOA Pack Handling: AdvisoryAI vs Marloo

Letter of Authority packs are among the most time-consuming inputs in a paraplanning workflow. Emma processes the LOA pack, extracts relevant provider data, and produces a structured summary with each statement referenced back to its source document. The Emma pension LOA pack review demo shows how this process works in practice.

Provider report extraction requires the tool to understand financial terminology in context, not just identify text. We trained Emma using input from ex-advisers and paraplanners. Each extracted figure is cited back to the source document, so the paraplanner reviewing the draft can verify every number without returning to the original pack. For a full walkthrough of how Emma generates reports from this data, the Emma suitability letter demo covers the process from document input to final draft.

Evie reduced meeting write-up time from 2.5 hours to a 30-minute review at Brooks Macdonald, freeing 6,000 hours annually across 60 advisers. Marloo publishes UK case studies including Fidenti Financial Planning, which reported cutting annual review report time by over 90%. The distinction is that Marloo's documented time savings do not account for the manual data entry step that follows for UK firms on Intelliflo or Plannr, since Marloo does not offer native integration with those systems. Time recovered in document generation is partially offset by time spent transferring outputs into the back-office client record.

Suitability Report Generation

Suitability report generation is the highest-value documentation task in a paraplanning workflow. The operational change is shifting the paraplanner from author to editor: instead of writing a report from scratch, they review and approve a draft that already reflects the firm's document structure and draws on the full range of inputs a compliant suitability report requires, including meeting notes, fact-find data, LOA pack summaries, ceding scheme information, cashflow modelling outputs, and risk profile assessments. That shift changes the task from creation to quality control.

Tailoring Suitability Report Layouts

Emma's template configuration is handled by a dedicated team of ex-paraplanners and advisers who set up the firm's exact document structure within two weeks. Your layout, section order, heading styles, and firm-specific language are built into Emma from the outset. Reports emerge pre-formatted without requiring post-generation reformatting.

This bespoke approach directly addresses a common objection to paraplanning automation: the concern that using a tool means abandoning established document formats, particularly for firms with complex multi-wrapper client needs where standardisation is genuinely difficult. Marloo allows template uploads at any time via self-serve. Its setup is faster initially, but the depth of configuration and the ongoing learning from firm-specific edits that AdvisoryAI's ex-paraplanner setup provides is not replicated in Marloo's model.

Meeting Consumer Duty Documentation Standards

Because Emma generates reports from the firm's own compliance-checked document formats, the investment a firm has already made in building Consumer Duty-aligned templates is preserved rather than replaced. The structured output captures objectives, circumstances, recommendations, and next steps in formats the firm's compliance team has already validated.

Emma also works alongside Colin. As we describe in the Colin compliance checker overview, every time Emma produces a report, Colin checks compliance against COBS rules and Consumer Duty requirements. Compliance gaps are identified before documents are finalised.

Average Hours Saved Per Report

The documented time savings from named UK firms give operations directors specific numbers to use when building a business case. TFP Financial Planning Ltd reduced annual review report time from 1 hour 30 minutes to 30 minutes using Emma, a 67% reduction. For a paraplanning team producing ten reports monthly, the difference between a five-hour report and a one-hour report represents 40 hours of recovered capacity each month per paraplanner, or approximately one additional week of productive time.

Compliance Checking and Consumer Duty

Compliance checking that happens after the advice process is complete cannot undo documentation gaps discovered at audit. We designed Colin to catch those gaps before documents leave the adviser's desk, which means FCA-regulated issues are identified and corrected at the earliest possible point rather than flagged in a retrospective review. Colin's system-agnostic design means it works on any suitability report, fact-find, or file note, not only documents created within AdvisoryAI.

Meeting FCA Consumer Duty Standards

Colin runs automated checks on suitability reports, covering:

• AML documentation: Confirms anti-money laundering checks are evidenced in the file.

• Client profiling completeness: Checks identity verification, financial literacy assessment, foreseeable life changes, and health details.

• Risk assessment adequacy: Reviews behavioural bias identification and capacity for loss documentation.

• Recommendation suitability: Examines justification for transfers versus retaining existing arrangements.

• Report quality: Confirms executive summary presence and recommendation clarity.

For fact-finds, Colin runs multi-category checks across each of these areas, mapping statements to COBS requirements and Consumer Duty outcomes, and produces a pass/fail report with specific remediation guidance for each failed check. The Colin compliance checker demo shows how these checks run in practice.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Error Flagging

Colin produces a compliance report showing pass/fail status per category with a percentage score. Each failed check includes specific remediation guidance, such as "Add AML check documentation" or "Include executive summary with key recommendations," so the adviser or paraplanner knows exactly what to correct and why. For UK-regulated advice firms where Consumer Duty defensibility is a Board-level concern, the distinction between general compliance review and FCA-specific pass/fail verdicts is material.

Atlas's Adaptive Thinking, released in May 2026, addresses adviser scepticism about black-box AI directly. When an adviser or paraplanner asks Atlas a question about a client file or meeting transcript, the platform displays live status updates for each step taken, for example analysing the request, searching for a client, or loading a profile, and stores a collapsible thinking block with the full step-by-step reasoning behind the answer.

The input locks during processing to prevent duplicate sends. This reasoning persists with the conversation, so older queries remain auditable for compliance review. For FCA-regulated firms where compliance defensibility is a Board-level concern, Adaptive Thinking means every Atlas output carries a visible, reviewable reasoning trail rather than a result with no audit path.

Back-Office Integration and Workflow Fit

The back-office integration question is where this comparison reaches its most operationally significant point. Documentation automation that does not connect to your back-office system creates a new manual task: copying structured data from the automation output into the client file. For firms managing 20 or more advisers, that manual step adds up to a material number of hours per week across the team.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo Back-Office Compatibility

AdvisoryAI connects directly with Intelliflo (Intelligent Office), Plannr, Curo, and Iress Xplan. For Intelliflo specifically, the integration offers pull functionality to extract existing client data into AdvisoryAI and push functionality to send updated fact-find fields back into client records. The AdvisoryAI-Plannr integration demo shows how Evie pushes meeting outputs and fact-find data directly into Plannr. The Intelliflo integration demo covers the equivalent workflow for Intelliflo users.

Marloo's publicly available documentation does not describe native integration with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan. For UK firms where any of these four systems holds the authoritative client record, Marloo creates a disconnected data silo requiring manual reconciliation after each meeting. Firms should verify current integration status directly with Marloo before making a platform decision, as this may change.

Automating Client Data Updates

When Evie processes an annual review meeting, it identifies fact-find updates captured during the conversation, including personal information, employment details, investment details, attitude to risk, and health and family circumstances, and pushes those updated fields directly into Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan. The adviser reviews and approves the proposed changes before they are committed to the back-office system.

Support teams can access structured, updated client records within minutes of a meeting ending rather than waiting for the adviser to complete manual updates later that day, as documented in the AI meeting notes overview.

Technical Resources Needed for Setup

AdvisoryAI's onboarding team handles Emma's template configuration. The firm provides its existing suitability report templates, and a team of ex-paraplanners and advisers configures Emma to the firm's exact document structure within two weeks.

Marloo's self-serve setup completes in under ten minutes for basic functionality. Deeper template customisation requires the firm to manage the process internally, which increases the internal resource requirement for firms wanting a fully configured platform.

Pricing Models Compared

Both AdvisoryAI and Marloo publish pricing publicly, placing them in a minority among UK adviser AI providers where most competitors require a discovery call before sharing costs. That transparency makes side-by-side cost comparison straightforward. The more material difference for UK advice firms is not headline price but what each subscription includes: AdvisoryAI's plans cover native back-office integration with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, and Xplan, while Marloo's plans do not, which affects the total operational cost once manual data transfer time is accounted for.

AdvisoryAI Pricing Structure

Evie costs £99 per user per month. Emma costs £299 per user per month. Colin costs £99 per user per month. Bundle pricing is available for multi-product deployments. All plans run on a monthly rolling agreement with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and annual plans carry a 10% discount. The 14-day free trial requires no credit card, allowing firms to evaluate the platform before committing.

How Marloo Calculates Fees

Marloo publishes four tiers: Free (first 10 meetings), Plus at £99 per user per month, Pro at £349 per user per month, and Enterprise at custom pricing. For UK firms evaluating total cost of ownership, back-office integration capabilities should be considered alongside subscription pricing, since the absence of native Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan connectivity adds a manual data transfer step not reflected in the headline price.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Cost by Firm Size

For a five-adviser firm using both Emma and Evie:

• AdvisoryAI: Evie at £99 per user per month and Emma at £299 per user per month total £398 per user per month, giving a five-adviser firm a monthly outlay of £1,990 before bundle pricing. That figure is higher than Marloo Pro's five-adviser total of £1,745, but the AdvisoryAI subscription includes native bidirectional integration with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, and Xplan and managed template setup by ex-paraplanners. The manual data transfer overhead that sits on top of Marloo's headline cost does not apply. Monthly rolling agreements apply, with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 10% discount on annual plans.

• Marloo: Marloo Plus costs £99 per user per month and Marloo Pro costs £349 per user per month, giving a five-adviser firm a monthly outlay of £495 on Plus or £1,745 on Pro before Enterprise negotiation. For UK firms on Intelliflo or Plannr, the absence of native back-office integration adds manual data transfer time per meeting across all five advisers, an overhead that does not appear in the subscription cost but affects total operational cost of ownership.

Implementation Timelines and Onboarding

Failed technology implementations in advice firms almost always share a common cause: the tool was deployed before the team's existing document formats and workflows were mapped into it. AdvisoryAI's managed onboarding directly addresses this by putting configuration work on our team rather than the firm.

Time to First Value

Emma's template configuration completes within two weeks, which aligns with the 14-day free trial period. Firms can begin the trial, have their templates configured by AdvisoryAI's ex-paraplanner setup team, and produce their first live report draft before the trial expires. This means the evaluation includes a fully configured experience rather than a generic demo.

Evie's back-office integration setup follows a similar timeline, with direct connections to Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, and Xplan established as part of onboarding. The Evie meeting notes demo gives a clear picture of what advisers experience once Evie is live.

Time to Master the Automation Tools

The author-to-editor shift is the most useful frame for setting team expectations. Before AdvisoryAI, the adviser or paraplanner writes from scratch. After AdvisoryAI, they review a structured draft. That change simplifies the learning curve considerably, because reviewing and approving a document requires less training than learning a new authoring system.

Evie captures meetings and generates structured outputs. Emma produces drafts using the firm's template configuration. The AdvisoryAI platform overview covers the full user journey for new users.

Ensuring Firm-Wide Platform Adoption

For paraplanners, Colin's compliance checks provide a practical safety net during the adoption period: every draft is checked against FCA Consumer Duty requirements before submission, so the quality bar is enforced by the tool while advisers and paraplanners calibrate their review process.

Which Platform Suits Your Firm?

The right platform depends on your firm's size, back-office system, and whether you operate dedicated paraplanning teams. The decision framework below matches firm characteristics to the platform that delivers the strongest operational return.

For consolidators, networks, and multi-adviser firms, AdvisoryAI's documented productivity gains compound across the team: recovered hours per adviser multiplied across a 20 or 50-adviser practice produces a measurable firm-wide return. Evie costs £99 per user per month and Emma costs £299 per user per month, with bundle pricing available. Evaluate break-even thresholds based on your firm's typical report volumes and time requirements. All plans run on a monthly rolling agreement with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and annual plans carry a 10% discount. For smaller practices, the same per-user return applies at a proportionally smaller scale.

For consolidators and large networks, AdvisoryAI's co-creation approach is a central differentiator. Emma supports bespoke template configuration, allowing consolidators to work with member firms using different document formats. AdvisoryAI works with the majority of the UK consolidation market and several top-five IFAs.

Dedicated paraplanning teams benefit most from Emma and Colin working in combination. Emma removes the drafting burden and produces a document matching the firm's established format. Colin checks that document against FCA Consumer Duty requirements before it moves to the adviser for sign-off. The sequential bottleneck, where paraplanners wait on adviser notes before starting work, is broken by Evie's post-meeting structured output.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Key Decision Factors

Comparing LOA Pack Automation Features

Emma's LOA pack processing delivers time savings for UK firms. The platform extracts provider data, produces a structured summary, and cites each data point back to its source document. Paraplanners can verify accuracy without returning to the original pack. The LOA pack review demo shows this process in full.

Marloo supports document uploads and document retrieval. Contact Marloo directly for details on LOA pack processing capabilities and back-office system integration.

Which Platform Integrates with Intelligent Office?

AdvisoryAI integrates directly with Intelliflo (Intelligent Office), offering pull functionality to bring existing client data into AdvisoryAI before a meeting and push functionality to send updated fact-find fields back after the meeting. Full details are covered in the AdvisoryAI-Intelliflo integration post and the Intelliflo integration demo. Marloo does not list native integration with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan in its publicly available documentation.

AdvisoryAI vs Marloo: Setup Timelines

AdvisoryAI's template setup is managed by a team of ex-paraplanners and advisers and completes within two weeks. The result is a fully configured platform ready for live use from the first report.

Marloo's self-serve setup completes in under ten minutes for basic functionality. Deeper template customisation requires the firm to manage the process internally. For operations directors who want a configured, ready-to-use platform rather than a self-build tool, AdvisoryAI's managed onboarding reduces time to value and decreases implementation risk.

How to Access Proof-of-Concept Trials

AdvisoryAI's 14-day free trial requires no credit card. All plans run on a monthly rolling agreement with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and annual plans carry a 10% discount.

Paraplanning automation is only as operationally effective as its data connections. A tool that generates a well-structured suitability report but requires manual back-office entry afterwards has not removed the bottleneck, it has moved it. For UK firms on Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan, that distinction determines whether documentation automation delivers the productivity return the business case requires.

Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required, or request a demo configured to your back-office system (Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan) and primary documentation task. For operations directors building a business case first, the advice gap and capacity constraint analysis covers the operational economics behind documentation automation investment in full.

FAQs

Does AdvisoryAI integrate with Intelliflo?

Yes. AdvisoryAI integrates directly with Intelliflo using bidirectional push and pull functionality, allowing fact-find data to be extracted from Intelliflo before meetings and updated fields to be pushed back into client records after meetings. The integration also covers Plannr, Curo, and Iress Xplan.

Does Marloo integrate with UK back-office systems such as Intelliflo or Xplan?

No. Based on publicly available documentation, Marloo integrates with calendar tools and video conferencing platforms but does not offer native integration with Intelliflo, Plannr, Curo, or Xplan, requiring UK firms to transfer meeting outputs into their back-office systems manually. Firms should verify current integration status directly with Marloo, as this may change.

Is Colin's compliance checking system-agnostic?

Yes. Colin checks documents against FCA Consumer Duty and COBS requirements regardless of which system generated them, meaning it works on any suitability report, fact-find, or file note, not only documents created within AdvisoryAI.

What time savings do UK firms report with Emma?

TFP Financial Planning Ltd reduced annual review report time from 1 hour 30 minutes to 30 minutes using Emma, a 67% reduction. Industry research from Jigsaw Tree Research documents a 65.48% reduction in suitability letter time across the sector, from 4 hours 45 minutes to 1 hour 38 minutes.

What does AdvisoryAI cost per user per month?

Evie costs £99 per user per month, Emma costs £299 per user per month, and Colin costs £99 per user per month. Bundle pricing is available for multi-product deployments. All plans include a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, run on a monthly rolling agreement, include a 30-day money-back guarantee, and carry a 10% discount on annual plans.

Key Terms

Suitability Report: A formal document produced by a financial adviser or paraplanner that records the basis of a personal recommendation, including the client's circumstances, objectives, attitude to risk, and the rationale for the recommended course of action. Required under COBS 9.4 for advised sales of retail investment products.

Letter of Authority (LOA) Pack: A bundle of documents sent to product providers authorising them to release a client's policy or pension information to the advising firm. Processing LOA packs is one of the most time-intensive recurring tasks in a paraplanning workflow, requiring extraction of valuations, fund holdings, and charging structures from multiple provider responses.

Consumer Duty: The FCA's regulatory framework, in force since July 2023, requiring firms to deliver good outcomes for retail customers across four outcome areas: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support. Firms must be able to evidence compliance at the level of individual client files and at the point of each recommendation.

COBS (Conduct of Business Sourcebook): The FCA's rulebook governing how regulated firms must conduct investment business with clients, covering suitability assessments, disclosure obligations, and the evidencing of advice. COBS 9 and 9A set the specific requirements for suitability reports on personal recommendations.

Back-Office System: The practice management and back-office platform used by UK advice firms to maintain client records, manage workflow, and store compliance documentation. Common back-office systems in the UK include Intelliflo (Intelligent Office), Plannr, Curo, and Iress Xplan. Native integration between a documentation tool and the firm's back-office system determines whether data transfer after client meetings is automated or manual.