A key benefit of Dynamic Planner is the increased professionalism of reports for clients. Before, we were producing Word-based documents, which lacked that professionalism that a client feels they are paying for. With Dynamic Planner, reports are colourful, glossy, and full of detail and analysis. Clients see what they are paying for, which makes such a difference. They feel they are receiving value for money.
It is so much easier too, to create those reports. Before, trying to get data into a Word document, it was so time-consuming. And the quality of the output for the client was poor. Now, the time it takes to produce a report is minimal and the output is so much better. From where we were, it is unbeatable.
Key benefits
Improved presentation of client reports
Quicker creation of client reports
Better consumer understanding outcomes
Demonstrate value more clearly to clients
Quicker, more robust valuation integrations
Integrated cash flow planning
Efficiently delivering advice, at scale
It is difficult to realise how we ever did it before. For sure, I would not be able to look after 250 clients without Dynamic Planner. No way. And that is with a support team. We can all logon to Dynamic Planner and see what is happening, and where we are with completing reviews for clients.
99 per cent of clients love the new reports. The one per cent may say it is ‘too much information,’ but they do appreciate that it is there, whereas before it was difficult for them to understand what was being communicated. Whether a client is interested or not in that detail, they can see that we are as their financial adviser. That is what they are paying us for: to look after the detail. These reports now demonstrate that we are.
More dynamic reporting for client reviews
Before, it was around two hours’ work for us to produce a post-meeting review report. On our team, we had a member of staff and that was their sole job. Within two months of us using Dynamic Planner, they had left, because they did not have a job anymore. The time and cost-saving of Dynamic Planner is tremendous.
I can now have a meeting with a client; create the report while we are talking; talk through the report; download the report and send it to the client, all within half an hour of the meeting ending.
Before, we only ever produced reports for clients post-meeting. Now we create and share a version of the review report with the client pre-meeting and share with them an updated version straight after. We are beginning to complete a second annual review for some clients, and we can instantly see now what was discussed last year. The record is there in Dynamic Planner at a click of a button.
In reports we create for clients in Dynamic Planner, we have tailored them to include all our firm’s own images and branding. We now have a whole suite of documents we produce for clients, which flow together and is valuable for us as a business.
Better platform and provider integrations
A key timesaving with Dynamic Planner is getting client valuations directly from providers. Historically, we have had problems integrating with providers. They can drop out when you try. We sometimes then must contact the provider even simply to logon to their system. Now being able to get most client valuations, at the click of a button, within Dynamic Planner has helped a lot.
Yes, getting information initially over from our CRM into Dynamic Planner did represent a piece of work, but now it is in Dynamic Planner, which is where we focus – using that for valuation updates. It is quicker to login to Dynamic Planner to update your client’s information, than it is to login to the provider’s site and update it that way.
A lot of the client’s data comes in straight from a review to the cash flow planning in Dynamic Planner. We like that. It enables you to illustrate to a client what they are aiming to achieve. There was a period where we were getting used to it, but now we are, we have ditched the separate cash flow tool we paid for previously.
‘Change to Dynamic Planner. Change your life’
At a Quilter event, I recommend Dynamic Planner to anyone and everyone. It is one of the first things I ask, ‘Are you using Dynamic Planner yet? If you are not, change your life… because it will.’ People only have good things to say about it. It has made such a difference to us, in terms of enabling us to be efficient servicing clients. It is a great tool for looking after your clients and demonstrate that you are.
It was a big decision, to take on a new piece of software that we were going to be paying for. We were using another system, but the reports it produces aren’t really client-facing. It just wasn’t the output we wanted.
We wanted to replace some documents we were giving clients. Now, to be fully compliant, in terms of making clear what things like our charging structure is, it’s a very streamlined process. If I’m doing a review where not much has changed, a simple rebalance or maybe a fund switch, we can quickly turn that around for the client. Dynamic Planner has changed our business.
I’m a believer in technology and I invest money in technology, because I want to be as efficient as possible, with the resource I’ve got. Otherwise, do I take somebody new on to do that work? In that sense, technology enables us to punch above our weight, in terms of the volume of business we can do. Plus, with Dynamic Planner, it is the quality that we can now deliver to clients. I’ve been really pleased with it.
I’ve never wanted my clients to just make do. I have always wanted to give them the best outputs I can. And I’m not just talking about the look of Dynamic Planner reports, which is really nice, and they’re easy to read, but it’s also the information that’s contained within them. It’s that education, that’s the important word, because with Dynamic Planner it is just saying to a client, ‘Look, this is where you are positioned in terms of risk, and if we go up a risk profile, or if we go down, this is potentially what it means in terms of returns and volatility’. You can hang numbers off that.
What I did with a couple of my bigger clients, who are more engaged with their money, before we took Dynamic Planner on permanently, was say, ‘This is a report I’ve given you in the past. And this is a report I could give you in future. Give me some feedback’.
I can’t remember any negative feedback. It was all positive, in terms of the fact that they really liked the style of the report. We get a lot from it. That was really my catalyst to go forward with Dynamic Planner. It was a vote of confidence from my clients.
The Consumer Duty has been all encompassing in 2023, but with any new regulation, I’ve always tried to look at it in a positive light, in terms of what you can get out of it, to improve the way you do things. It has been some of the documenting, the evidencing, which is what we’ve looked at. And it has helped streamline the business, in terms of the investments and providers we use.
I’ve always in the past tried to put the client at the centre of every decision I’ve made, but have I documented it as well as I could have done? Probably not. With Dynamic Planner, we’re much more confident that we are.
In Dynamic Planner, you can create a target market of clients, which has been incredibly invaluable, because it’s enabled us to do that research and have something on record. Of course, you don’t want to be inflexible, but it gives you like a decision tree, in terms of a client. What do they look like? Why have you ended up with this solution? Why that fund? I’ve got a lot more confidence that actually if I were to bring into the business another adviser, we’ve got a clear structure that I could quickly explain to them. I wouldn’t have been able to do that before.
It’s about having a client who comes in your door and you know what they look like, and the types of solutions you should be thinking about. I found that invaluable, in terms of being able to complete that research quickly and having something on record not only for regulatory purposes, but which I can refer back to and which makes sense, if I’m looking at in a year’s time. I can understand the parameters I’ve put in to get to that point.
For our target markets, we try not to group clients by assets under management. We group them by life stage. Plus, we factor in a discussion with a client, asking, ‘What sort of relationship are you looking for here?’ And if it’s ongoing advice, we would recommend a different investment solution.
Previously, you could complete a piece of research and put it on file, but you didn’t flesh it out as much as you should, putting in that detail. This is our due diligence; this is the provider we recommend; these are a panel of funds we’ve narrowed down, which have delivered well in comparison to their peers. Being able to do that through Dynamic Planner, has been really good.
If the client is not going to get a lot of benefit of me sitting talking to them once a year, because nothing’s going to massively change, what we’ll do is put them in a risk targeted solution, where you know it’s going to stay in that risk lane, so to speak.
In my experience, in terms of investment and product research software I’ve used, you can have so many options you can literally get drowned by it. What I like about Dynamic Planner is that you can quickly filter and focus your list: this is what’s important to the client. It focuses you. You’re not going off-piste and putting filters in which are more useful for you as an adviser, as opposed to useful for a client. That’s really valuable.
Six months ago, we were using portfolios run by another research provider, but we weren’t comfortable with their volatility, which was beyond what we expected, given even market volatility. By creating our target markets and narrowing our research in Dynamic Planner, we recommend other solutions, including say a lower cost solution if that’s important for a client. What I like is the confidence that we are recommending an appropriate solution. We know it’s going to keep to its risk profile and not drift.
We search for funds by their Dynamic Planner risk profile. Plus, we look for funds with a ‘Premium’ or a ‘Select’ Dynamic Planner performance rating. Even with the work we do with a DFM, they align their portfolios to Dynamic Planner’s risk profiles. In Dynamic Planner, it splits all the funds out within the portfolio, and that’s really quick and useful, because time is what we always struggle with.
We’ve been using Dynamic Planner for about 12 months and our experience with it has been really good. It’s easy to use, intuitive. I’ve not had any major issues, and my contact with Dynamic Planner has been nothing but first class.
I joined their ‘Early Adopter Group’ as well, which has been invaluable. The developers have watched me navigate the system live as a new user, to see how I use it. Then, if I started to go astray, they ask me, ‘What’s your thinking?’
It’s nice when you see the feedback you’ve given has been embedded in the system. That’s really important, because Dynamic Planner is similar to us. You design the system and we’re using it for the same purpose: increase consumer understanding and put clients in a better position to make decisions, in a way which is compliant and quick.
Previously, the work I would do after a client review would have taken us four to six hours. Now, it’s less than an hour, saving us a huge amount of time. Given the size firm that we are, that’s incredible value. I can now build the business. It’s helped create time that I can focus on going out and getting more clients, because we still have capacity to take on more.
We’ve been able to weather what has been a crazy passage of time. We’ve had 100% client retention over the last three years and part of that I think is that clients can see us investing in the business.
It’s nice to know Dynamic Planner is forward thinking, in terms of, ‘How can we do things better?’ It isn’t a piece of software, which just sits there. Even in the relatively short space of time I’ve been using it, there’s been a lot of new stuff that’s come online which has been really beneficial.
Technology is now a key part of the industry. I just can’t see how you can run a financial services company successfully or compliantly without it today. And competition is high, but I think Dynamic Planner is ahead of the curve. I’ve used a lot of software over the years, but then stopped using it, because it’s not really what we want. Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Absolutely.
Dynamic Planner has changed the way we do things. It simplifies your whole process. We were first just using Dynamic Planner’s client risk profiling process, but once we were introduced to all the things the system offers, within six months we had fully integrated it.
In our advice process, we use it from start to finish, collecting all the information about a client. Their experience around investing, how comfortable they are with taking investment risk, capacity for loss, and their values around sustainability. Before I’ve even seen a client, that’s collected via a link, which is brilliant. Easy and simple for the admin team without me having to get involved. Then I review that information and start to look at our propositions, and solutions.
90% of our clients complete the sustainability questionnaire we share with them from Dynamic Planner. It’s great. We were crying out for one, to give us a foundation to work with. We had been looking at creating our own.
The target markets we’ve created in Dynamic Planner make it really easy to see where a client is, compared to where they should be. We draft a review report and we talk a client through it, things like performance and risk. Then we follow up with a really nice, branded, clean, easy to understand report for a client to look at each year. Are their investments still suitable, or not?
The end review report your client gets is fantastic and communicates everything logically that you’ve gone through. And it’s the report’s visuals, especially in this world of assessing client vulnerability.
I think we’re only at the start of that journey, about understanding what vulnerability looks like for a client and where you might have clients who are happy to read a communication from you, but you might have a client who doesn’t take that in necessarily and instead need pictures, or a video to make a complex matter easier to understand. That’s where the value in Dynamic Planner, definitely.
We have a centralised investment proposition and we recommend a range of multi-assets for clients – hybrid, passive and active solutions; DFM MPS; and for the right client, bespoke DFM. We’ve recently engaged with a client where our centralised investment proposition didn’t meet their needs, so we’re building a bespoke portfolio for them in-house. Before, we would have outsourced that, which costs money. But now we can use Dynamic Planner for a range of research, which is really helpful.
Dynamic Planner has sped up our research process, for sure. All the funds we recommend to clients are risk profiled by Dynamic Planner, and we look if they have got a ‘Select’ or a ‘Premium’ performance rating.
We currently have four target markets of clients, grouped by life stage. For us, that work was already there in the business, but we never had a system like Dynamic Planner which enabled us to reflect that. Implementing it has given us confidence.
Bringing a new paraplanner or adviser into the business, they’ll be able to use our target markets straight away and know exactly how they work. They can login to Dynamic Planner and be directed to our centralised investment proposition, linked to our different target markets, rather than having the whole fund universe to look at and think, ‘Where do I go now?’
It’s why that portfolio fits that target market. It’s just putting it all together in one final step, which we probably haven’t necessarily needed to before, but Dynamic Planner allows us to do that.
At first I was thinking, why are we spending time doing this? What’s the benefit? We have the work done. Why are we repeating ourselves? But it is linking our research to our target markets. We were missing that step. By taking time to put our target markets into Dynamic Planner we’re going to reap the rewards, because of the efficiency and time saving for anybody new who comes into the business.
And if the regulator came in and said, ‘Show us your process. Take us through the sausage machine, so to speak’. They’re going to be able to see that the software we use talks in the same language and is built around us and our clients’ needs. Because there’s a danger if someone at the business has to manually do something, that could slip outside of what we would want to provide for our clients.
Building a portfolio ourselves, which we don’t on a regular basis, it was easy enough. Seeing how different allocations work, expected returns, volatility and value at risk was really powerful, and reassuring that we were moving in the right direction.
The Client Success team at Dynamic Planner are always really supportive. If you’re unsure of where you need to go, which I was, they are able to direct you immediately. It’s great to pick up the phone and say, ‘Where do I need to go for this?’
It really comes across that Dynamic Planner’s door is always open. The Client Success team were always interested to hear the struggles we were having and I understand that it’s a big machine to move to make changes to the system. But any changes we asked for, they were able to implement. Dynamic Planner worked hard to get the system to where we wanted it to be.
They kept a dialogue open, checked in with us, and kept us informed of changes that were being made. It felt almost like a partnership. We’re a small firm, so for Dynamic Planner to take the time and listen. We were important to them. That was really powerful.
Dynamic Planner helps us add value for our clients. I know it does. It’s a one stop shop for everything an adviser would need, because every client is different. The report or the system may look the same for everybody, but Dynamic Planner gives you the ability to pick up on certain elements the individual client is more engaged with.
It is the people at our firm who add the value for our clients, but Dynamic Planner is supporting you in the background and providing you with confidence. It’s the advice process that you go through and taking the risk out of it. It helps you have better conversations.
Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Yes, I would. And I have. It helps us massively. It’s forever growing. It’s brilliant. It does everything we need it to, and sometimes it does things that we haven’t even thought about, which is reassuring that you guys have our back. It’s peace of mind knowing that.
At Tingley & Cooper, we are a small firm with two advisers in the pre- and post-retirement space. We have just under 200 clients in all.
We began using Dynamic Planner to implement a coordinated approach to reviews for clients. Be more efficient. Currently, we have business on four platforms with different products and are collating data around risk from multiple places; similarly, for fund manager charges. Collating all that represents quite a lot of work. We did trial another system, but we never went live with it because the portfolio valuation function never reconciled itself with our existing tools. That was a costly and disappointing conclusion.
‘More joined up process’
We wanted a proven way to collate correct valuations on data feeds, and we found, from our due diligence, that Dynamic Planner had experience here. We wanted a comprehensive suitability process for the review of clients’ investment portfolios, a system to take us through that journey.
Do your investments match your attitude to risk? If it doesn’t, why not? As long as the client is happy and it is documented, you’ve proved suitability. That hasn’t been done effectively before. Dynamic Planner is a very good, documented process which can be audited easily. I like that. Ultimately, we have a far more joined-up process, which saves us time and money, and it improves our presentation to clients. We are currently spending £2,000 to £3,000 a year on other tools, which will potentially become redundant using Dynamic Planner. I could use valuation feeds from my back office, but it comes back to presentation to a client.
‘A better, Dynamic Planner process’
We have all the valuation integration feeds set up in Dynamic Planner. They work very well. They’re very efficient. It’s excellent when you’re collating everything. Instead of logging onto four platforms, you log onto Dynamic Planner once. The process is better.
Yes, it’s been an investment getting information onto Dynamic Planner. We have had a paraplanner working to upload information and assets from our existing systems onto Dynamic Planner. But now we’re nearly there, we are finding we can produce a report in minutes. Before, it would have taken us one to two hours.
New clients joining us will then be immediately familiar with a high level of reporting. I’m excited about that. That will add a lot of value to our business.
We were looking at recruiting another member of staff, but now I don’t think we will. The financial savings and efficiencies with Dynamic Planner are very good. We’re happy.
I work closely with one of the wealth advisers here. We use Dynamic Planner around reviews for clients. My role involves preparing review reports, ready to share with clients digitally as PDFs pre- and post-meeting.
Clients have fed back and commented how smart and well laid out the reports are. I think their strength is how accessible they are for a client to read. You could compare them with a valuation report from an investment platform, which, in comparison, looks dull, arguably.
User-friendly technology
From the client’s information already in the system, I create review reports from scratch. Dynamic Planner is so easy to use. All of us who use it here picked it up quickly. It’s difficult to think of anything to fault.
Another adviser and I discussed what pages from the templated review report we wanted included and what we did not want included. In reports, we have uploaded our own front cover image and we have added the firm’s logo.
‘The big selling point is efficiency’
For an upcoming review for a client, we first send them a link to recheck their attitude to risk and to sustainability. The screens a client sees, to complete the questionnaires remotely, are laid out fantastically. As a firm, you can edit the screen colour, wording and add in a picture of the adviser. It personalises it and I think, in turn, makes it more likely for a client to engage with and complete.
When you’re requesting latest valuations for a client, it couldn’t be simpler and saves you having to manually source and then input, which takes time.
Dynamic Planner’s big selling point, for us, is efficiency and pulling together a review report, which previously would have taken one hour or two hours and now takes maybe 10 minutes. It’s so much quicker. I couldn’t speak more highly of Dynamic Planner. There isn’t someone I wouldn’t recommend it to.
I was on the Dynamic Planner – Quilter pilot and have been using Dynamic Planner for it must be more than two years now. It’s fantastic.
In 20 minutes, you can produce a decent report, which is editable; looks good; is accurate; and it has enough weight and detail to keep every type of client happy. That’s ideal, especially as a sole trader. I wouldn’t be without it. Any issues you have are far smaller than the eventual outcomes – good reports and messages going out to clients in a consistent manner. How long was it taking me to produce a report previously? A couple of hours.
Dynamic Planner does what it says on the tin – from the point of view of producing something for a client, in a timescale which is appropriate. And if you want to expand what you do for a client, you can. But two hours compared to 20 minutes? That’s huge.
Managing your advice gap
Dynamic Planner allows you to do quick reviews for certain clients. It’s allowing you to broaden your scope. It’s positive. If a client, say, just has an ISA, £50,000, you can quickly produce a report for them, and that client, who was non-productive, perhaps you’re waiting for them to downsize or retire, you can keep them involved. Before, you would have had to say, ‘I can’t afford the time to keep in touch’.
Cash flow projections are included in the review report. These are your aims, as a client; your objectives; and currently you’re likely to achieve them.
From a firm’s point of view and a firm like Quilter, because everyone is using the same style of reporting, it sets a benchmark which they can reference against. This is our standard, all within one package.
Real-time, half-the-time cash flow
I’ve had the time now to introduce cash flow planning, for more clients. In Dynamic Planner, once you’ve imported the information, you can generate a cash flow within about an hour. Previously, that would have been a separate piece of work, and another two, 2.5 hours. In Dynamic Planner, it’s literally halving the time for a cash flow. And because the information is there, you can produce something quite quickly and get it out to a client within half an hour. That’s real-time advice, which is great. I like that.
For some clients, the intricacies of a cash flow are nice to have rather than a must-have, but Dynamic Planner allows you to offer that. It opens up the range of advice you can give – and its complexity.
The Consumer Duty audit trail. And addressing the advice gap
Dynamic Planner proves your work. And the Consumer Duty, proving your fee. I haven’t had to change anything, leading up to the Consumer Duty, because it’s always been there. That’s been really useful. It’s a clear audit trail showing I’m fulfilling my duties.
For the Consumer Duty, Dynamic Planner allows you to show consistency, which is a big thing – a consistent service and pathway for your clients. I’m doing the job I said I would, within the tram lines of my advice fees.
The major way Dynamic Planner helps us is the time saving, regarding the client review process. And the look of the reports. Much more professional than what we were producing.
Before, we used our own templates, a one-pager on the valuations and what information we could extract from places on performance. We cribbed it together ourselves. It was time consuming and took us a day at least to produce for a client. Now in Dynamic Planner, producing a review report, it’s probably about half an hour.
Growing clients by 20%
That saved time has allowed me to focus on the Consumer Duty. And it has enabled us to grow our client base, because we can be smarter around existing clients. We’re not a massive business. There are only three advisers, but we have been able to grow our client base by around 20%. Going forward, if we can do that year-on-year, that would be great.
We’re looking forward to transferring all our target market segmentation to Dynamic Planner. Again, it will be time saving and once everything is in Dynamic Planner, it’s in there. It will match with our back office, and with our CIP and CRP.
Time-saving recommendations
We have started to produce some recommendation reports in Dynamic Planner, mainly for fund switches and the odd, ad hoc lump sum top-up. Again, the reports are much more professional than what we were producing before, and really quick to produce, half an hour probably for a fund switch. Before, that would have that been maybe a couple of hours of work, or more.
Consumer Duty. Client profiling
We use Dynamic Planner’s risk questionnaires with clients and we’ve started using the ESG and the vulnerability questionnaires as well. Those are all going out to clients, where we can, by email prior to meetings. We have to be careful not to bombard a client, but Dynamic Planner’s questionnaires tick all our Consumer Duty boxes. It’s a lot more thorough. Before, we had just a couple of questions in an internal questionnaire for a client on ESG.
For vulnerability, it’s good to know, because some of the answers to questions you didn’t necessarily know about a client. As a firm, it gives you a chance to explore further. Clients can be embarrassed about telling you about a potential vulnerability, so I think the questionnaire gives them the opportunity, in the comfort of their own homes, to answer it – and not have to face you.
Dynamic Planner – ‘Everything we need’
Dynamic Planner absolutely helps us add value for clients. It makes us look a lot more professional. Our competitors are some of the biggest UK firms and I feel like with Dynamic Planner, even though we’re a small firm, we’ve got the tools to stand out from the crowd.
Before, it was all pitched together from our own resources and didn’t look as professional. It was all there. It was just the paperwork which wasn’t supporting what we had in the team. But it is now.
I would absolutely recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm. It’s one of the best subscriptions we pay each month. I don’t know what else is out there. I’ve never looked. I don’t feel like I need to. Dynamic Planner is giving us everything we need.
I went to an industry event and I saw Dynamic Planner’s Client Review and an example of a report, and it was night and day and miles ahead I thought of other reports. It was that review process which brought me to Dynamic Planner because it works so well. I like the report. It’s very comprehensive and covers all the salient points.
I risk profile clients in Dynamic Planner and also carry out my fund research in it, to find investments to recommend to clients. You can email clients a link to complete the risk questionnaires on their own, ahead of a meeting and you receive an alert when they have completed them.
For a typical review for a client, I will prepare the report ahead of the meeting and send it to the client beforehand so that they have a copy. We’ll then go through it together at the meeting, not word for word but broadly so we cover where the client’s attitude to risk sits, where their portfolio sits risk-wise and how their portfolio has performed over the last 12 months. In the meeting, we’ll also have a conversation to discover if the client’s overall objectives have changed and then I’ll go back into the report and complete it after the meeting and reshare it with the client.
What Dynamic Planner does is create an agenda for review meetings, allowing you to follow the same process each time: risk profile, asset allocation, portfolio performance and next steps. And that’s how I frame it to clients, ‘This is what we will cover each year: has anything changed? Are we on track? And do we need to change anything?’ The report from Dynamic Planner drives everything, in that sense.
Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Yes, absolutely. I think Dynamic Planner is the most recognisable brand out there, as far as risk profiling is concerned.
I really offer my clients a financial plan and strategy, so that they can enjoy the lifestyle they want and that they don’t run out of money in their lifetime. Sometimes you have to rein clients in and say, ‘Look, you’re spending too much money’ – because worrying about money can be stressful, so I see my job as an adviser as taking that stress away.
For me, Dynamic Planner really works. There is so much regulation involved today with ongoing service for clients, which is why Dynamic Planner’s Client Review is really good.
I was at Tenet’s head office last year and they were talking about formalising your firm’s review process for clients and making it auditable. I was speaking to someone and they simply said, ‘Have a look at this’ and it was a copy of a Dynamic Planner review report. I looked through it and thought this is exactly what I’m looking for.
I love technology and love the way it integrates with other systems, so I don’t have to rekey figures. I was slightly behind with my annual reviews at the time, so I started using it and I was suddenly completing about 10 reviews a week and was able to complete all my annual reviews in two months.
I put my own spin on the reports and make it very personal, and I say to clients, ‘Do you like it?’ And they say, ‘Yes, love it’.
The client review process
First thing I would do for a review is go into Dynamic Planner and send the client a link and an invitation to complete the risk questionnaires. Clients normally do it within 24 hours. Once I have their answers back, I can then start to put the review report together.
It gives you a framework for reviews for clients; it allows you to demonstrate your value to a client, who has a high net worth; and, gosh, does it save you time. You’re not looking all over the place for information to include – it’s there all in front of you; you just drag it in.
Before I used Dynamic Planner, it was taking me about six hours to do a review for a client. Now, Dynamic Planner is saving me two hours per client – at least. For 60 clients, that’s 120 hours over the year. That’s three weeks’ worth of work.
Clients like the format of the report and they like the fact that they know now what they’re getting. It comes out as a really nice document and just makes everything really easy. The report also allows you to put your charges in and for smaller clients it can highlight to you that they’re not as profitable. They may be taking up too much of your time – and I have now reduced the number of clients I manage, as a result.
Lockdown help and customer support
Dynamic Planner has helped even more during the 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! Any technology today which is cloud-based is going to help businesses. Dynamic Planner and Intelligent Office are the backbone of my business: I couldn’t exist without them.
I absolutely value the support I receive from Dynamic Planner’s Client Success team. It’s a big part of what Dynamic Planner provides and does. Everyone on the Client Success team are so good at what they do and the fact that you can simply phone them up makes it so easy. Customer service is so important.
If I was encouraging you to use Dynamic Planner I would say, ‘It should be an integral part of your business to help you stay compliant and produce documents for clients – which can be audited – in a very efficient way, because it is integrated with everything else you do’. I wouldn’t be without it. Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Yes, absolutely – and I have done.
3R Financial Services is a directly authorised firm, with four advisers and two mortgage brokers supported by a team of office staff. Our assets under management are approximately £60m and we offer clients a full financial planning service.
RDR has been the biggest and best change in my time in the industry. Before RDR, you could argue that we were all salespeople in financial services, but after it, it has become a profession. That’s a huge difference. As a result, clients today expect to receive a proper service and that’s what they get.
We first started using Dynamic Planner in 2015, initially to help us manage risk. That was the driver. The client risk profiling process was the reason why and it’s worked for us ever since. We wanted to demonstrate for all of our clients that we were measuring accurately their attitude to risk. We wanted to put procedures and processes in place.
‘Our whole client review service is built around Dynamic Planner’
We also massively use Dynamic Planner’s Client Review process and report. Our whole review service for clients is built around the report, so that as a firm we can demonstrate suitability for clients – and it’s been great. Our centralised investment proposition all feeds into Dynamic Planner through its integrations with the platforms we use. That was a big part of our due diligence when we first decided to adopt Dynamic Planner – its platform integrations.
Dynamic Planner saves us time as a firm. Previously, everyone in the industry had to kill to eat, so to speak, but now things have evolved and we are in a position where we can farm. We looked at what we had to do and realised we had to do it efficiently. The number of reviews we were doing was starting to increase. Being a new company, we did not have any major legacy business.
‘We had no centralised way of reporting to clients before’
Before we started using Dynamic Planner, we had no centralised way of reporting to clients at their annual review, due to the smaller number of clients we had for review. It was chaos and just a mess. Each one was done on an individual basis.
When we first saw Dynamic Planner’s Client Review, when it launched, we thought, ‘That’s absolutely perfect for us and exactly what we need’. We can archive and store reviews and reports for clients as we complete them – and it’s peace of mind for us that we are clearly demonstrating that we are providing ongoing advice for clients. If the regulator came to us and asked, ‘How is that advice suitable?’ We can demonstrate that and say, ‘Yes, it is’.
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.
‘Through Dynamic Planner, I can do something that is really good for the client’
Ultimately, Dynamic Planner has enabled us an advisory firm to provide a centralised investment proposition for clients. I would only describe myself as a ‘bum on seats’ adviser, but through Dynamic Planner I can do something that is profitable for the firm; something that’s really, really good for the client; and I can do it quickly and in a way which is seamlessly integrated with everything else we do – it’s absolutely brilliant. We have no problems at all.
Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Yes – but no, because then it would give them as much competitive edge as we have.