How Brooks Macdonald Freed 6,000 Hours a Year With Evie

Brooks Macdonald is a wealth management firm with offices across the UK, serving individuals, companies, charities, and trusts. All 60 of its advisers now use Evie for meeting notes. Three of them, each managing books of 100 to 150 clients and using Evie for two and a half years, describe what changed.

"I enjoy talking to the client. I don't enjoy all the admin that goes with it. So if I can do more talking to the client and less admin, that's a massive win."

Neil Sadler, Senior Adviser, Brooks Macdonald

The Challenge

Financial advice is an admin-heavy profession. Compliance requires detailed file notes from every client meeting, follow-up letters, provider chasing, and report writing. For the Brooks Macdonald advisers, the majority of their working time was spent not with clients but documenting what happened after clients left the room.

"It's always been a role where the majority of your time historically has been spent not in meetings but doing other things. You have to take notes in order to be compliant. You have to record what's gone on in meetings. You have to write a lot of reports. There's a lot of filekeeping or chasing of providers and investment managers."

Neil Sadler, Senior Adviser, Brooks Macdonald

One adviser was allowing 90 minutes for a meeting, then spending up to two and a half hours writing it up. The documentation took longer than the conversation itself, and the bottleneck was structural: an adviser giving advice can only be in one place at one time.

"Typically I normally allowed 90 minutes for a client meeting. It would almost sometimes take up to two hours or almost two and a half just to try and get everything down that we need to get down on a piece of paper. It was quite a long process, so really restricted me in terms of what I could do with my clients."

Freddie Gill, Financial Planner, Brooks Macdonald

The pressure built up. One adviser had four or five sets of meeting notes outstanding, was cycling home, and got hit by a lime bike. He broke his hip. Even from the hospital, the notes were on his mind.

"I remember literally going home to write all these notes and I was quite stressed out about it. It was just the stress of putting it together quickly before I forgot."

David Burden, Wealth Director, Brooks Macdonald

How AdvisoryAI Helped

Evie records the meeting, generates a structured summary within minutes, and produces a draft follow-up email ready for the adviser to review and send. The advisers still check every note for accuracy, but the starting point is a comprehensive document rather than a blank page.

"If you're doing, let's say, 200 in a year, that's a lot of time you're saving. And that can be put into other things: more client contact, better report writing, better research. It also helps in terms of staffing."

Neil Sadler, Senior Adviser, Brooks Macdonald

When that adviser has a client relationship manager or trainee in the meeting, the delegation shifts further: "They can take that meeting note, they can edit it, they can send it to me for final sign-off, and that speeds things up enormously as well because I'm not doing hardly anything at that stage."

"It cuts down my follow-up to about half the time I spend doing it, which for me is brilliant because it means that I get to spend more time dealing with my clients and understanding them and what actually matters to them."

Freddie Gill, Financial Planner, Brooks Macdonald

The downstream team benefits too. "Everything is captured in a very nice, neat, well laid out document. They can ask for as much detail or as little detail as they need." The sequential bottleneck, where the paraplanner could not start until the adviser finished their notes, shortened from days to minutes.

Evie also captures nuance that handwritten notes miss. One adviser finds the system picks up "not just the conversation but what the client is getting at, their inferences, their implications. It's actually very clever at doing all of that now." He gives the example of a client discussing retirement: "They might be saying I'd like to retire two years earlier but I'm not sure I can do it. The AI may sometimes think that as well, so that's clearly quite intelligent."

Another was struck by something more unexpected: "It'll pick up on things like humour and sarcasm, which is incredible. So it'll actually say things like, 'The client said something with a hint of sarcasm.' I know that he said it with a hint of sarcasm, but the AI has picked it up as well. It's incredible."

Before and after: How Evie changed the working day at Brooks Macdonald

From Note-Taker Back to Adviser

"At the end of the day, a client sits down with you and they want 100% of your attention. To have 100% one-on-one interaction with a client, for them it leaves the meeting feeling like, 'You know what? That was an hour and 90 minutes well spent.' The advisers understood what I need them to understand. The clients understood exactly what I'm asking them for off the back of it, and it just creates a very seamless process."

Freddie Gill, Financial Planner, Brooks Macdonald

"My focus isn't on a piece of paper in front of me. It's now on the client, 100%. I'm fully committed to having that conversation in the background, knowing that I've got a sort of support person there writing these notes for me."

David Burden, Wealth Director, Brooks Macdonald

File note quality improved as a consequence. "The quality of the file notes in general is better with AI, because if you're doing it shorthand you're going to miss bits here and there, probably even with experience. It does mean people with less experience can take the notes and do a good job as well."

The advisers have started using Evie beyond single meetings. One builds pre-meeting packs from historical summaries: "What did we manage to tick off from the previous meeting? What didn't we manage to tick off that we need to cover in this one?" Another has explored consolidating years of meetings into a single client summary, a feature he calls "an incredible bit of kit."

For all three, the work they entered the profession for has moved back to the centre of their day: "The satisfaction in the job for me is helping a client to progress, which might be that they can retire two years earlier than they thought, it might be they can afford to put their kids in the school they want to, it might be simply they want to move to the south coast and live in a house by the sea. And normally when they first meet us they don't know they can do those things."

"Since we started using AdvisoryAI, I'm enjoying the current period probably the most because it has made life a lot easier."

Neil Sadler, Senior Adviser, Brooks Macdonald

Visit advisoryai.com/demo to learn how Evie can help your firm's advisers spend more time with clients and less time on post-meeting documentation.