You record every client meeting. Who reviews them?

Many firms now record and transcribe their client meetings. Then the transcript sits in a folder, untouched. Did the adviser do most of the talking? Were the questions open enough? Did the client get a chance to ask their own? Nobody knows, because nobody has an hour spare to find out.

So coaching runs on memory and the occasional sat-in meeting. It is subjective, it is inconsistent between supervisors, and it does not scale past a handful of advisers. Reviewing client meetings properly is the missing step between recording them and learning from them.

Why reviewing client meetings matters

The meeting is where the advice relationship is built, and where much of what the firm learns about a client's needs is first heard. Three parts of the rules make it worth looking at closely.

• Competence. Firms must "review on a regular and frequent basis employees' competence" (TC 2.1.12R). Real meetings are the most direct evidence of how an adviser works.
• Outcomes. Under the Consumer Duty, firms must "regularly monitor the outcomes retail customers receive from" their products, their communications and their customer support (PRIN 2A.9.8R). The meeting is one of the most important communications a client has with the firm.
• Vulnerability. FG21/1 defines a vulnerable customer as "someone who, due to their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to harm, particularly when a firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care" (FG21/1). Characteristics of vulnerability can come up in conversation, which makes the meeting a natural place to look for them.

It is also worth being clear about what the rules do not say. The recording rules moved from COBS 11.8 to SYSC 10A, which allows that "the content of relevant face-to-face conversations with a client may be recorded by using written minutes or notes" (SYSC 10A.1.13R). Recording meetings is a choice many firms make. Once you have made it, the recordings are a resource worth using. See the rules on recording client meetings.

Where the hour goes

Reviewing a meeting properly means reading or listening to all of it, then working out:

• how the talking was shared between adviser and client;
• which questions were open and which were closed;
• where the adviser held the floor for too long;
• what the meeting did and did not evidence;
• what to say to the adviser about it.

Our estimate is around an hour a meeting, which is why so few get reviewed at all.

A worked example

A supervisor wants to give an adviser feedback on a recent review meeting. By hand, that means finding the recording, listening to the whole meeting or reading the transcript, noting each question and whether it was open or closed, estimating who did most of the talking, picking out the moments worth discussing, and writing it up. The estimate of who talked most is usually a feeling rather than a measure, and the moments chosen depend on what the supervisor happened to notice.

What Asclto does

Asclto turns every recorded meeting into a structured, scored report.

• It connects to Fireflies. Every recorded meeting is pulled in automatically. One click turns a meeting into a full report.
• It measures the conversation. Talk share, open and closed questions, questions the client asked and the longest adviser monologue, all counted from the transcript and checked word for word against it.
• It reads the room. Tone of voice from the audio itself, covering volume, pitch, pace and raised moments, plus a read of how each person came across.

Each meeting is scored across nine dimensions, covering questioning, listening, clarity and control of the meeting, with a meeting score and an adviser score out of ten. Key moments are pulled out with the exact words that earned them.

From a report to a coaching plan

A score on its own does not change anything. Asclto writes a coaching plan a supervisor can act on straight away, alongside an FCA checklist of what the meeting did and did not evidence. A score trend across meetings shows whether an adviser is developing over time. Reports export to PDF as an internal coaching record and are never shared with the client.

That gives supervision a shape. Rather than the occasional sat-in meeting, a supervisor can look at every meeting, pick the ones worth a conversation, and track whether the coaching is working. Our guide to coaching financial advisers goes further into building a programme around real meetings.

How a supervisor should check the report

1. Read the key moments in context. Each comes with the exact words, so check one or two against the transcript.
2. Look at the shape before the score. Talk share, question counts and the longest monologue explain why the score is what it is.
3. Listen to raised moments. The tone of voice read points to parts of the audio worth hearing yourself.
4. Use the FCA checklist as a prompt. Where the meeting did not evidence something, check whether it is evidenced elsewhere in the file.
5. Agree one or two actions. Pick the points from the coaching plan that matter most, then compare the next score.

The numbers

By our estimate, a meeting review drops from around an hour to a few minutes. At six meetings per adviser a month, that is roughly six hours back every month. And because it costs minutes rather than an hour, every meeting can be reviewed, not just the one a supervisor happened to sit in on.

Asclto costs £59 per adviser per month, excluding VAT, with no contract. At the £150 charge-out rate our homepage calculator uses, the first hour it saves each month more than covers it.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Asclto report shared with the client?

No. It exports to PDF as an internal coaching record and is never shared with the client.

What does Asclto need to work?

Recorded meetings in Fireflies. Asclto pulls them in automatically, so nothing is uploaded by hand. The AI work runs through your firm's own Claude or ChatGPT account.

How do we know the figures are right?

Every figure is checked word for word against the transcript, and key moments are quoted with the exact words that earned them, so a supervisor can see the evidence behind each score and check it.

See Asclto review a meeting on a demo firm in twenty minutes on Microsoft Teams with Adam Booth, with nothing to prepare. Book a demo, or read more about Asclto.