Year end CEO message
2022 has been another big year at WLM. It started with Covid still causing concern, resulting in the continuance of remote working and remote meetings. As the year progressed, things returned closer to normal, along with increased face-to-face interaction between both our team and clients. However, like other businesses, Covid has shown the need for five days a week in the office may be a thing of the past. The ability to offer a more flexible working environment, along with evolving our systems and processes to cope with remote working, has been one of the positives from the Covid experience.
The year has presented significant challenges for our clients. The ending of Government Covid benefits, rising inflation, interest rate rises, volatile investment markets and tightening labour markets have increased the need for better thinking and forward planning across business and personal circumstances.
Being a combined financial planning and accounting firm, WLM is uniquely positioned to advise our clients on the variety of challenges and opportunities that we face. In the last 12 months, we have focused on further defining our Wealth Oneness offering to clients and potential clients and updated our website to reflect this.
If you haven't done so, I encourage you to try our Wealth Oneness tool. It helps you see which financial issues you should contemplate for your life stage in your business and personal situations. Your WLM Advisor is ready to help if you wish to learn more.
In addition to developing our Wealth Oneness services, we also implemented a new workflow management system, Karbon. It is helping us to improve the efficiency of data collection from clients and increase the visibility of client communications across the firm. We are excited that Karbon, which provides the infrastructure for our client portal and workflow systems, raised $93M earlier this year to improve the software further. We expect further advances in user experience for WLM clients over the next 12 months.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the team at WLM for such a fantastic effort this year. They have been remarkably resilient in another year of adversity. It's a testament to them the number of positive comments I receive from clients regarding the responsiveness and enthusiasm experienced when dealing with WLM.
Finally, thank you to our clients. It's been fantastic to work with you and help you navigate these testing times. We greatly appreciate your support.
I hope you all have a well-deserved break over the Christmas and New Year period, and we look forward to working with you again in 2023.
