If you've started looking for a Marloo alternative, chances are you've just come out of a client meeting with a page of scrawled notes and a growing pile of things to write up. Marloo and tools like it promise to fix exactly that: record the meeting, get a transcript, get a drafted file note. It's a genuinely useful idea. The real question is what happens five minutes after that draft lands, because for most advisers the meeting note isn't the last step, it's the first one.
What Marloo and similar AI notetakers actually do
Marloo is a mobile-first meeting assistant built for financial and insurance advisers, with a presence across the UK, Australia, New Zealand and, more recently, the US. You record or upload a client meeting, and Marloo transcribes it, pulls out the structured detail, cover, income, goals, what was actually discussed, and drafts a file note or follow-up correspondence from it. Marloo itself frames what it does as sitting beyond, or even replacing, the traditional CRM rather than being one. For an adviser staring down a stack of write-ups after a full day of meetings, that pitch lands.
None of that is a knock on Marloo. Capturing a meeting the moment it happens, straight from a phone, without fumbling for a laptop, is a real problem worth solving well, and a purpose-built app will often nail that capture step better than a CRM that bolted recording on as an afterthought. The question isn't whether the notetaking is good. It's what happens to that note once it's written.
Do you still need a CRM if your notetaker already does the writing?
Here's the catch. A meeting note doesn't live in isolation. It needs to sit against the client's actual policies, their renewal dates, and everything you've told them before. A standalone notetaker like Marloo still has to connect to, or sit alongside, whatever system holds that information. In practice that usually means two tools instead of one: one login for the AI assistant, another for the client record it's meant to be replacing.
That split costs you more than an extra password. A renewal tracker, a segment for a bulk email to clients renewing in the next 90 days, a running history of what's been disclosed and when, none of that is visible to a tool that only ever sees the meeting. Someone still has to carry what the notetaker produced across into the system that actually runs your book, or trust an integration to do it quietly and correctly every single time, meeting after meeting, client after client.
What that split tends to look like day to day:
- Copying or exporting drafted notes into your CRM by hand, or trusting an integration to keep the two in sync
- Two logins, and two places to check before you have the full picture on a client
- A compliance trail split across systems, the meeting note in one place, the policy and renewal history in another
- No automatic link between what a meeting note says, a new mortgage, a new baby, and what your CRM already knows about that client's cover
What changes when the AI notetaker lives inside the CRM
A CRM built for life & risk advisers can close that gap instead of creating it. AdviserDesk's AI meeting notes work from the same kind of recording or transcript, but the draft lands straight inside the client's existing record, the same file that already holds their policies, renewal dates and every note you've made before. From that one transcript, AdviserDesk turns out a drafted Statement of Advice and a follow-up email in your own tone, ready to check over rather than write from a blank page. There's no second system to reconcile, because there was only ever one.
That matters most on review day. If a client's mortgage has changed or a new baby's arrived, cover-gap detection can flag it straight against the policy already sitting in the file, something a standalone notetaker has no way to do, because it's never seen the policy at all. One login, one client history, one place where the note, the cover, and the next action all line up.
Switching from Marloo, or from your current CRM entirely
If you're already on a CRM like TAP or Adviser Plus and just wanted an AI layer on top, it's worth weighing up a straight switch instead of adding a third tool. Moving CRMs sounds like the harder option, but the migration itself, clients, policies and renewal dates, gets handled for you within 48 hours at no extra cost, and you can try the whole thing free for 30 days before deciding either way.
There's a compliance upside too, in general terms. Notes timestamped as they're written, sitting in one chronological thread per client, support the kind of contemporaneous record-keeping the FMA expects advisers to be able to show. Exactly what your own licence or FAP requires is worth confirming with the FMA, your licensee, or a compliance adviser, not a blog post.
That's really the choice in front of you. Marloo and tools like it are a legitimate way to speed up the writing. A CRM with AI notetaking built in does the same job, then keeps the note sitting next to the policy, the renewal date, and the rest of the client's history where it belongs, with nothing to copy across and nothing to reconcile later. Pick whichever gets the meeting written up properly, just go in knowing whether you're buying one system or quietly setting up two.