Builtbysomeonewhounderstoodthegap.
Prospo exists because too many Australians are navigating their financial lives without professional guidance — not by choice, but because the system makes it difficult for advisers to reach them.
Alan Hsiao
Founder & CEO · Senior Visiting Fellow, UNSW
"AI shouldn't be a competitive advantage for the few. It should be the infrastructure that lets good advisers do more good work."
The problem
Australia has a financial advice gap that numbers make plain
Millions of Australians are making consequential decisions about retirement, insurance, and investment without ever sitting across from a qualified adviser. The economics simply don't work — there aren't enough advisers, and the compliance burden on those who do practise has grown to the point where serving more clients becomes genuinely difficult.
Australians without access to financial advice
Registered financial advisers currently practising in Australia
Administrative overhead per client engagement that AI can reclaim
Alan's perspective
Why commoditise AI for professionals?
Alan spent close to two decades working across financial institutions, non-bank lenders, and technology firms — long enough to see the same pattern repeat. Capable people, buried in process. Whether it was compliance reporting, data reconciliation, or documentation, the work that consumed most of an adviser's day was rarely the work they trained to do.
His academic work through UNSW and the Fintech AI Innovation Consortium deepened that conviction. The research was clear: AI could meaningfully reduce the administrative load on knowledge workers — but only if the tooling was designed with their specific workflows in mind, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Prospo grew from a straightforward question: what would a platform look like if it was designed specifically so that a financial adviser could take on more clients without compromising the quality of advice or the depth of client relationships? Not a generic CRM with AI features added. Something built from the ground up around how advisers actually work.
The belief driving Prospo is that AI should be infrastructure, not a differentiator. The competitive advantage for an adviser shouldn't come from having better technology than the firm down the street. It should come from the quality of their judgement, their knowledge of their clients, and the trust they build over time. Prospo's job is to remove the friction that gets in the way of all three.
What guides us
Principles that shape the product
Access, not exclusivity
Powerful tooling shouldn't require enterprise budgets. If Prospo helps a small practice operate with the same capability as a large firm, that's a good outcome — for them and for the clients they can now reach.
Time returned to advice
Every hour saved on administration is an hour available for a client conversation. We measure our success not by feature count but by how meaningfully we reduce the non-advice work in an adviser's day.
Compliance by design
Regulatory requirements aren't obstacles to work around — they're the baseline. Prospo is built so that compliant behaviour is the path of least resistance, not an additional step at the end of the process.
Alan's background
Nearly two decades working at the intersection of financial services and technology — from product origination platforms to large-scale data transformations and AI-driven automation.
His academic and industry research focuses on responsible AI deployment in regulated environments.
IT advisory and software development
Worked across Fintech startups, non-bank lenders, and large banking institutions on product origination and data risk management systems.
Founded AI consultancy
Established Cognitivo to help financial services firms navigate large-scale data transformation and AI-driven automation — working with institutions that needed it done responsibly.
Senior Visiting Fellow, School of Computer Science & Engineering
Academic partnership focused on responsible AI systems in regulated industries. Co-hosted the FAIC AI Regulatory Roundtable examining how Australia should approach AI governance in financial services.
Lead, Fintech AI Innovation Consortium
Bridging industry and academia across AWS, Databricks, Westpac, UNSW, and UTS — working on AI applications that are practical, governed, and deployable in financial services contexts.
Founded Prospo
Applied everything learned about AI, financial services, and compliance to a single problem: giving financial advisers the infrastructure to serve more Australians, better.
See it in practice
If you're a financial adviser, we'd love to show you what's possible.
No pressure, no script. Just a conversation about whether Prospo fits your practice.
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