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.

I love how Dynamic Planner gives you a consistent way of assessing attitude to risk and capacity for loss, of every client. That is integral to our process. It’s one of the first things we do with the client after the terms of business. First, we onboard their investments and then they get a Dynamic Planner risk questionnaire. From there, everything emanates. Dynamic Planner’s advances in digital onboarding have been really helpful, also.

Concise communication. Clear analysis

We really like the investment progress review in Dynamic Planner. It’s great to have all a client’s assets on one platform. A great strength of Dynamic Planner is that, when dealing with multiple providers and multi-asset, you can see everything by product and by fund. You can explain to a client graphically that yes, they have more risky funds along the ‘efficient frontier’, but you are ultimately in the right place with your portfolio.

The investment progress review report is better to read for a client. It has everything, including a wealth projection of where you will likely end up with your investments. We’re really happy with it.

Vulnerability, sustainability profiling

I’m looking forward to introducing the financial wellbeing questionnaire for clients. That will be a big tool to say we’ve asked the questions and a client has told us the answers. Then, every year we’ll ask the questions again to make sure everything is okay. It becomes part and parcel of the review. From a compliance point of view, it’s fantastic.

Like Dynamic Planner’s ESG questionnaire, it’s proof that we have completed the exercise and we’ve discussed it. It is nice to say to a client this is how you profiled on ESG. It’s a discussion point. And every year it will become a discussion point again. 

Great face-to-face events

Dynamic Planner’s Training Academies are one of the most useful events you can attend. All the team members there are red hot at what they do. You’re not just talking to salespeople. You’re talking to designers, people who can run everything in the system backwards. The event provided a great insight to what was coming soon in Dynamic Planner and improvements being made.  

Fund research – Powerful due diligence

We recommend to clients funds with a Dynamic Planner risk rating, and preferably with a ‘Premium’ research rating. You can say to a client, we’ve researched these funds via Dynamic Planner, and it makes it easy to do in six months’ time.

I certainly would recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm. It’s a well-researched, well thought out system. Also, the wider governance it places on product providers, that in itself acts as a powerful tool. Dynamic Planner governs asset managers’ adherence to its risk measurements and asks them to demonstrate that governance on a quarterly basis. That is powerful due diligence, in terms of a dealing with the client, but also external diligence of funds we are using.

At Advantage Wealth Management we give clients holistic advice, which includes insurance, mortgages and wills alongside the core of the business – investments, pensions and protection.

We first started using Dynamic Planner in 2015. We left the 2plan network and Compliance First (which is part of SimplyBiz) in March 2017 and moved direct to Dynamic Planner. This version is so much better than the one we were using previously.

When we were with Compliance First, we used Dynamic Planner, as so many advisers do as a risk profiler. We didn’t have access to its Portfolio Suitability Hub and Dynamic Planner’s fund research and recommendations. We felt that was hugely important to us and to our process.

We now build model portfolios in Dynamic Planner and we find we are able to extract more information from the system. Cashflow planning and investment solutions are available and can be stored within Dynamic Planner using it to its full capacity.

It has been the right decision for us to go direct to the Financial Conduct Authority. They are an excellent resource. The freedom to choose the right suppliers is very important to us and that was the main reason behind our decision to become directly authorised.

Our background prior to Advantage Wealth Management was working for insurance companies, banks and legal institutions. Compliance, therefore, has always been part of our backgrounds and we are used to that discipline and method of working.

Dynamic Planner is instrumental to our investment proposition. We use multi-asset solutions for investments up to £100,000. Over £100,000, we use model portfolios, multi-asset and other bespoke solutions.

The more information you input into Dynamic Planner, the better the information you are able to obtain. It’s very good at consolidating, visualising and summarising information for clients in an easy to understand way. That’s where it is really beneficial.

Dynamic Planner can produce an Investment and Retirement Financial Plan Report which summarises everything you are recommending. That’s where Dynamic Planner has helped to make our process more efficient and professional. I would have no hesitation in recommending it and have done so in the past.

I offer clients a very personal service. When they call, they speak to me – nobody else. This year, they have been relatively happy with how their portfolios have performed. People don’t necessarily want big returns – they want stability. Hopefully, I have been able to educate my clients that investments will go up and down, but over time they should ensure you achieve your objectives.

One of the benefits of Dynamic Planner is the ability to create and send monthly or quarterly review reports, updating them quickly on the risk level of their portfolio; the value of their investments; and their performance over the last 12 months. Each report takes me less than 10 minutes. Yes, I could send clients an updated valuation in another way, but without Dynamic Planner clients wouldn’t have any comparison, graphically, for performance over the previous month or quarter.

This year (2020), I only had one phone call, at the start of the crisis, from a client who had just started a new business. I told him, ‘I’m here if you need me’. All the rest of my clients waited until I sent them their latest report.

Also, what Dynamic Planner has allowed me to do this year is identify and highlight more easily funds which have performed best in a client’s portfolio. Obviously, with funds which have done well, I can lean towards them more going forwards. I can show that to the client, so they can see why I am making a recommendation to make a change.

I’ve been in the industry for 40 years and back in the day, I designed a very simple spreadsheet to pull everything together in one place, because there wasn’t anything which could do it. When I moved across to Dynamic Planner, some of my clients contacted me to say, ‘I did like the spreadsheet’. I said, ‘Yes, it’s fine, but it’s prone to errors. This is simpler and gives you everything you want’.

In Dynamic Planner’s review reports, clients like the chart showing how their portfolio has performed over the last 12 months. They can see what’s happening – how it’s gone up, gone down and how this year it’s hopefully come back. I can then have a conversation with the client explaining more.

I first started using Dynamic Planner in the autumn of 2019. I use it to risk profile clients through the risk questionnaires and to risk profile and plot their existing investments, which is brilliant. It’s so easy and just a few clicks – then you can show that to the client and say, ‘You’ve come out as a Risk Profile 6 and all your investments are showing as a Risk Profile 6’. Or they’re a 7 and we need to make adjustments to get it to a 6.

Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another advice firm? Yes I would. It’s so easy to use – and it works on your desktop, your iPad and on your phone.

I have been advising since 1981 and became independent in 1992. I sold that firm after relocating to Worcestershire and, after working with others, soon realised that I needed to be on my own, this time as a one-person firm with support from my husband Chris. I am happy providing high quality, bespoke advice to people who care about their environment and doing good with their money. Funds under influence are no longer my measure of success but more the value I place on quality outcomes.

I have always been passionate about ethical and sustainable investing, which, back in the 1980s, was much less mainstream. It has taken a long time for companies to create a stream of good, sustainable investment portfolios. Often these cannot reflect the very special preferences clients demand, so I have to create some portfolios myself and find ways I can risk-rate these to ensure they fit into compliant advice.

One of the benefits of Dynamic Planner, as I see it, is that I can easily get these portfolios objectively risk rated, something that I was beginning to get concerned about as the new business grew. I needed to find ways to keep moving forward compliantly. Dynamic Planner fills that need.

I wanted software and a service that enabled me, in a sense, to hand over much of the routine to have time to be closer to my clients. I was already a threesixty services member and it was a delight to discover how Dynamic Planner and threesixty fit together to further improve the value of the software.

I have clients who have been loyal for many years which is so important. Of course, you have to ensure everything is strictly compliant and long-standing clients can be managed by earlier standards. I need to have their records and advice also brought up to date. When you work in this sector there are some unusual client preferences that need to be properly documented.

I see Dynamic Planner as a very good vehicle to pull everything together logically. As well as ensuring compliance, it gives me more analysis and planning tools that enhance my process and advice.

I am impressed with the Client Success team at Dynamic Planner as I get to grips with the service. If we have a question or need guidance, I receive fast service in a very pleasant way, even with a touch of humour at times – they are lovely people. Any service of this type must be backed with good support and good communication, which is what I get from Dynamic Planner.

It was a leap of faith to begin using it, but I thought, ‘Let’s test it and try it’. I went for it and am glad I did. If you are looking for a service with great support, it’s a very good idea to test Dynamic Planner.

There are three of us who work at The Pension House – one adviser, a paraplanner and an administrator. We are based in the beautiful countryside of Northamptonshire and offer our clients advice on corporate pensions, private pensions, investments and life insurance. We also hold specialist pension qualifications and can advise on defined benefit, final salary and occupational pension schemes.

We first began using Dynamic Planner in April 2019 and we use it risk profile our clients. We also use the client reporting functionality, which we like. The reports themselves are easy to read and can be tailored to each client.

We go into Dynamic Planner’s Portfolio Suitability Hub to research and recommend funds for our clients. The Portfolio Suitability Hub is fantastic – I love it.

You can quickly filter down your research to Premium and Select rated funds, which we like, because that’s what you want to recommend to clients: funds which have outperformed their peers. You can filter which funds have had top quartile performance over different timescales, which again is really helpful when filtering investment funds. We nearly always recommend funds for clients, which are Premium and Select rated.

Using Dynamic Planner saves me time carrying out fund research, particularly if a client has a product I’m not familiar with, which we’ve inherited. You can break it down within Dynamic Planner by product, which saves having to search through a provider’s website looking for the information.

Researching funds on Dynamic Planner’s 1-10 risk scale is very helpful and compliance like it, because it ticks those boxes

Each of our advisers has around 60 active clients, whose portfolio typically sits between £50,000 to £150,000. We are directly authorised and first began Dynamic Planner about five years ago.

Where it works really well for us is once we’ve collated all of a client’s information and are then looking to make a recommendation, Dynamic Planner helps speeds up that process. It makes it much more efficient, because all the research is there for you, about a client’s existing products and their level of risk.

Dynamic Planner’s fund research is a great resource. It filters funds down to ones specific to the client’s needs. Otherwise, you could be looking at thousands of different solutions for a client. Fundamentally, it helps make something which could be quite complex more simple. From a client’s point of view, they receive a good level of documentation about the process, supporting a recommendation you’re making.

Dynamic Planner gives you a great starting point with a client, because a lot of clients wouldn’t understand the level of risk they’re currently taking with their pensions and investments. I like the fact that everything covered in a review is included in one document, which tells a story for the client of the last 12 months. Our clients like it.

It’s all well and good talking about trust and the relationship you enjoy with clients, but it’s really important that they understand what you’re doing and why, which is why the literature you can produce for them in Dynamic Planner is so important: it brings their financial plan and its implications to life.

Should, for example, a client be looking at taking more risk? What will that mean to them in retirement? Dynamic Planner allows you to demonstrate that, without producing multiple reports. That really helps. And it makes you come across well to a client. You look professional.

We’ve started using Dynamic Planner’s Client Review. Until Covid, we had been completing reviews for clients in our own way, but that is very time consuming. The hardest review to complete is the first one, because you obviously haven’t got historic valuations for a client’s portfolio in the system, but I still completed a review the other day in 45 minutes.

Previously, for a simple review, it would have taken a couple of hours. For something more complex, it could have taken up to five hours just collating everything. On top of that, it was then the amount of paperwork we were passing on to the client, which was why we wanted to look at what we could do to try and avoid that.

If you’re reviewing a client’s portfolio, they can be invested in up to 20 to 25 different funds. But Dynamic Planner brings all of that information efficiently together for you and, as a business now, I am an advocate that we become better at using it and that it becomes our main system we use to both manage our business and more importantly, support our clients

As an advice firm, I can buy system on top of system, but the thing I need to adopt is a system which encompasses most of our business. In an ideal world, that system would do absolutely everything, but the important difference is, Dynamic Planner is working towards that. We will then hopefully have one system encompassing everything we need to do.

As a firm, I like that we’re on a journey with Dynamic Planner and when new developments are released, you can feel if it’s the right thing for you to adopt. You can build your business around Dynamic Planner. Then, because you’re only working in one system, in time everyone at your firm becomes an expert using it and you’re getting the most from it.

Dynamic Planner, ultimately, supports us as financial advisers. We’re growing and the world is evolving, but Dynamic Planner is growing and evolving too. It just makes logical sense to use it more and support our clients in the best way possible.

Milton Gordon & Co are independent financial advisers. It is a family business in the heart of Henley-on-Thames with assets under management of approximately £16m. I work with private clients and small business owners, and provide independent, holistic, financial planning advice.

I first started using Dynamic Planner in 2013 and use it, within Milton Gordon’s investment proposition, for its risk profiling process and also for designing investment portfolios. I initially heard about it through word of mouth recommendations from other users.

At Milton Gordon & Co, I use mainly Transact, onto which I embed my portfolios and also for larger clients with bespoke portfolios.

Dynamic Planner has added value to the firm, in terms of ensuring suitability, by helping me design investment portfolios. In terms of efficiency, it saves me many hours of work and adds accuracy to my portfolio design. Finally, in terms of demonstrating value to clients, I can easily demonstrate to them my portfolio design process.

It was a quick and simple process to start using Dynamic Planner. I felt that they listened to me and understood my challenges as a financial adviser.