Prospera Wealth Management
Using AI to eliminate manual document processing and free up capacity for client-facing work
Prospera Wealth Management is a St. James's Place Partner Practice providing tailored financial planning to individuals and families.
Operating in a regulated environment, accuracy, compliance and data quality are fundamental to every client recommendation. Advisers rely on complete and accurate information to deliver suitable advice, and that information must be captured and recorded to FCA standards.
As the business grew, so did the volume of client cases and supporting documentation. Maintaining the same level of service required the operational side of the business to scale alongside it.
One process in particular was becoming a constraint.
The Problem
Wealth management is inherently document-heavy.
Before an adviser can make a recommendation, they need detailed information from existing providers. This includes product terms, fund data, charges, performance metrics and other variables that differ across providers and products.
This information typically arrives in the form of multi-page PDF documents.
In most firms, extracting that information is a manual process. A member of the back-office team reviews each document, locates the required data and enters it into internal systems field by field.
At an individual level, this is time-consuming. At scale, it becomes a significant operational burden.
As Prospera grew, the volume of documents increased alongside the client base. More clients meant more providers, more documents and more data to process.
The implications were clear:
Processing capacity became a bottleneck
Scaling required additional headcount
Administrative effort increased without adding proportional value
The risk of manual error introduced compliance concerns
This was not a sustainable model for a growing, regulated business.
The Challenge
Variability in provider documents
Provider documents are not standardised. Structure, formatting and terminology vary widely, meaning the same data point can appear in different locations across different documents.
This variability makes manual processing slow and inconsistent, and difficult to systemise without technology.
Scaling without increasing operational overhead
As document volumes increased, the existing approach, managed by a single part-time team member, was reaching its limit.
Periods of higher demand placed additional pressure on the team, creating a clear constraint on how quickly cases could be processed.
The business needed to increase capacity without proportionally increasing cost.
Compliance and data security requirements
As a regulated firm, Prospera needed to ensure that any solution met strict requirements around data handling, storage and retention.
The Solution
The Curve designed and built a solution to automate and structure document processing, using AI to extract key information from complex provider PDFs while removing the need for manual data entry. This created a consistent dataset across all client cases, integrated directly into the advice workflow to ensure accuracy and usability. By combining automated extraction with human verification and embedding compliance into the system, Prospera replaced a manual, time-consuming process with a structured, scalable approach, reducing administrative effort and enabling the business to grow without increasing operational overhead.
Our Approach
We began by mapping the document processing workflow, prioritising structured data capture before introducing automation.
Combining automation with human oversight
Once captured, invoice and timesheet data is structured and made available through a central reporting layer.
This provides trusts with a real-time view of their agency activity and spend.
They can now:
Compare agency rates across similar roles
Identify higher-cost suppliers
Track spend patterns across the academic year
Understand how different schools within the trust are performing
This visibility is what enables better decision making.
Understanding and structuring the process
We worked closely with Prospera to understand how document processing fit into the wider advice workflow.
This involved mapping how documents were received, how information was extracted and where time and inconsistency were introduced.
Rather than starting with technology, the focus was on structuring a process that could be applied consistently and scaled as the business grew.
Reducing manual effort through intelligent document processing
The core objective was to remove the need for manual data entry from complex PDF documents.
We developed a solution that uses natural language processing to extract key information from documents as they are uploaded.
The system identifies relevant data points regardless of document structure or formatting and populates the required fields automatically.
This significantly reduces the time spent manually reviewing documents while ensuring data is captured in a consistent format.
Designing compliance into the solution
Data security and regulatory requirements were built into the architecture from the outset.
The system is designed to handle sensitive client data in line with FCA expectations, including controlled data storage and automated deletion after a set period of time.
This ensured Prospera could adopt the solution with confidence, without introducing additional compliance risk.
The Results
Since implementation, Prospera has tripled in size while maintaining the same resource for document processing. The business has absorbed significant growth without needing to expand the team responsible for this function.
During periods of high activity, the solution enables the team to process up to ten times the volume they could manage manually. This removes operational bottlenecks and allows the business to respond to demand without delay.
Manual document review and data entry have been significantly reduced. This frees up time for back-office staff to focus on activities that directly support advisers and improve the client experience.
Maintained accuracy and compliance: The combination of automated extraction and human verification ensures that data entering the advice process is both efficiently captured and consistently reviewed.
By introducing AI-supported document extraction and reducing manual processing, Prospera significantly reduced the risk of: inconsistent data capture, processing delays, manual errors and compliance exposure
“The solution took pages and pages of information and extracted the answers we needed with a level of accuracy that meant we could trust it. The business has tripled in size and we have still only needed one part-time person in that area. There have been periods where we have been able to do ten times the volume we could before. It has completely changed what we can handle.”