We have all been grateful for a little help at some point this year. Whether it has been an understanding boss, or a driver delivering your weekly food shop – it has been very welcome.
We have also been happy to help others and it has felt good to give back, even in only a small way, when we have had the chance.
At Dynamic Planner, we have heard stories of advisers and firms extending that spirit and sense of community to clients – speaking to them at the start to lockdown, so that they can hear a friendly voice; or helping them get their head around Zoom, so that they can ‘meet’ with friends and family.
We spoke to people from 10 different advice firms this year, who have all adopted Dynamic Planner within their financial planning process and we asked them, ‘How has its technology helped you most this year?’ Below, is what they said.
1. Financial plan with your clients in real-time
“I started using Dynamic Planner’s Client Review at the start of 2020 and it has changed everything for me. It’s just brilliant. It makes my life so much easier, because now I can sit and go through everything with the client in real time, whereas before I was having to give my paraplanners so much paper work after a meeting for them to input.
“I now sit with the client and say, ‘This is where you are now. This is what your portfolio was worth a year ago. This is what you’ve done in the last 12 months. And this is what it’s worth today’. We can recheck their attitude to risk and the whole process becomes much more interactive.”
Louise Jones, Ivor Jones & Co
“The great thing about Dynamic Planner is it’s very easy to screenshare; it’s very easy to navigate; you can’t really go wrong; and the Client Review report – you can’t really undersell it. It allows advisers to articulate to clients their value, in a stylish way that appears like it has been completed by a team of 10 people, who worked for hours to create it.
“To be able to create a presentable report for a client, in a relatively short period of time; to share it with them via your screen; then to give the client the context and financial planning tips is brilliant.”
David Owen, Lifetime Connect
2. Improve your clients’ understanding of risk within their portfolio
“At the end of the day, everybody knows their investments are going to go up and that they are going to go down. But what is key is that it is communicated in a manner and in language that the client clearly understands. As an adviser, it is my job to do that and that’s what Dynamic Planner’s Client Review report allows us to do.”
Neil Gilbourne, 3R Financial Services
“It is up to the adviser to explain risk – because there is risk in everything the client does. Even in an old-fashioned risk profile 1, ‘Under the bed’ there is the risk of theft and of inflation. That is where Dynamic Planner helps us so much, in pictures and words, to explain that.”
Kevin Walsh, Home & Finance Ltd
“Where Dynamic Planner has been brilliant this year is if you are rebalancing a portfolio for a client. You can show them where their portfolio or where a fund sits on the ‘Efficient frontier’, in relation to the risk and return of the benchmark asset allocation for each risk profile. That can be a really important visual for a client.”
Serena van der Meulen, Van der Meulen Associates
3. Enable your clients to complete risk questionnaires on their own remotely
“Dynamic Planner has helped even more during lockdown this year. We’ve been able to send clients a link to complete their attitude to risk, prior to a meeting and people have had time on their hands, so they have been getting on with it. I sent one link out and it came back within five minutes.”
Susan Hill, Susan Hill Financial Planning
“That completely changes the conversation and allows you to go to that meeting with a risk profile report and talk it through with the client and ask them, ‘Are you comfortable with that level of risk?’
“It brings the whole conversation alive and makes it feel more real for the client, because they can see with their investments at a risk level, ‘Plan for this’, ‘Be prepared for this’ and ‘Be pleasantly surprised by this’. The client can see, ‘Okay, I’ve got £100,000. How is that going to perform at a risk profile 7, or a risk profile 4?’ It’s been really good.”
Jack Igglesden, Radcliffe & Co
4. Enable easy collaboration among colleagues and teams
“Using Dynamic Planner, advisers can complete reviews themselves or ask for help from Admin – who, in that instance, can produce the main part of the report before an adviser amends, where necessary.
“Working in that framework makes the process easier and, from a compliance perspective, we know reviews are covering everything necessary. It stops us having 11 different processes for 11 different advisers, which is difficult to monitor.
“Introducing change always has its challenges and if you try to introduce too much, you can get less buy-in. At any firm, you will always get early adopters of something new and others who will follow at the end. But once you have introduced change and people become used to a new process, it no longer becomes an issue. Dynamic Planner is easy to use and it doesn’t require a huge amount of training, because it is so user friendly.”
Clare Edes, Skerritts Chartered Financial Planners
5. Increase your firm’s capacity to service more clients
“I completed a review for a client the other day in about 20 minutes. Obviously, nothing much was required – and if a review is more complex, it will of course need more time. But what Dynamic Planner has allowed me to do is review around 100 to 120 clients each year and have greater capacity, definitely. The report itself is nicely presented; it keeps MiFID happy; and it’s extremely quick to produce.”
Nick Ryan, Yellow Bear Financial Consultancy
6. Match your clients with suitable investment portfolios
“It is about reassuring clients that they remain on the right track, with regards to risk and if there are changes to how much risk they want to take in future, we can use Dynamic Planner to map where they are now and where they need to be in future.”
Lee Waters, Barwells Wealth
If you are not already a Dynamic Planner user – and would like to find out more about how we can help you and your firm – please get in touch.