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17 January 2023: Dynamic Planner, the UK’s leading financial planning system and Quilter Financial Planning, a leading financial advice network, have entered into a long-term partnership agreement which will see Dynamic Planner provided to advisers within the Quilter group.

Quilter advisers will be able to fully access everything in Dynamic Planner’s one system including: industry leading psychometric risk and sustainability profiling; investment progress reviews; cash flow modelling; digital client access, recommendations, and research. Quilter will benefit from Dynamic Planner’s product governance target market and panelling functionality, which along with a shared consumer focused culture, will support them in meeting the new Consumer Duty. Dynamic Planner already works closely with Quilter Investors, Quilter Cheviot and the customer proposition team.

Dynamic Planner will fully integrate into technology already used by Quilter Financial Planning to ensure ease of data flow for users and maximise operational efficiency centrally. Roll out of Dynamic Planner to Quilter advisers has begun and is expected to be completed by Spring 2023.

In an early adoption programme, Quilter advisers using Dynamic Planner have already seen significant improvement in productivity, with feedback indicating that advisers can move from servicing 80 clients to over 300, an increase of 275%, whilst at the same time deepening relationships and spending less time on paperwork.

Ben Goss, CEO, Dynamic Planner said: “We are delighted to partner with Quilter Financial Planning to support their thousands of financial advisers in the delivery of outcome focused financial planning in an age of Consumer Duty. We have invested heavily in our one system technology in recent years and look forward to working closely with Quilter as a partner to help power their financial planning process with Dynamic Planner at scale.”

Steve Gazard, CEO, Quilter Financial Planning said: “We have been piloting the Dynamic Planner system with a number of key firms and advisers across our business for the last 18 months and have been delighted with the efficiency gains those firms have seen and the improvement in client experience. I am pleased that we have been able to further strengthen our offering by working closely with Dynamic Planner, and as such have a close relationship that will now allow us to rapidly deliver this to our wider adviser base.”

12 January 2023: Dynamic Planner, the UK’s leading risk-based financial planning system has appointed Michael Whitfield as its new Chair following FPE’s investment last year. Michael’s career in financial services spans four decades working in a variety of roles focusing on people and creating the technology to best serve their needs.

Michael founded Thomson Online Benefits in 2000, which he led for 17 years as CEO. He built the organisation from start-up to 500 people serving clients in over 90 countries, cementing its place as a market leader in global benefits software. Since 2018, Michael has focused on injecting his world-class expertise into guiding companies that inspire him, many of which are technology providers directly used by the end client.

Ben Goss, CEO at Dynamic Planner said: “We warmly welcome Michael as our new Chair. He has world-class experience of scaling a UK FinTech business internationally and understands the importance of culture and client focus in a successful business. I and the team look forward to working with him.

“I would like to thank Neil Brown, our previous Chair for his chairmanship, advice and support over the years.”

Dynamic Planner has launched Product and Platform Research, ‘fit for the future tech’ which gives advisers the ability to research investment and retirement products, whilst meeting the evolving needs of clients and regulation.

Part of Dynamic Planner as standard, Product and Platform Research is available to Dynamic Planner users from today and comes with all the benefits of working seamlessly within one system, avoiding the risks of re-keying and miscalibration.

The technology powering Dynamic Planner’s Product and Platform Research is designed in line with PROD and Consumer Duty regulatory requirements, putting clients at the heart of the process, and has data sourced direct from providers across the UK market. It simplifies what can be a vast task, enabling advisers to quickly identify those features that can lead to good client outcomes.

Rather than ‘scoring’ products or providers by the number of features, Dynamic Planner’s Product and Platform Research empowers the adviser with all the information necessary to determine which matches the need and preferences of the consumer. Selection criteria and research can be saved and matched to a firm’s target market. At a firm level, advisers can manage their centralised propositions, segmenting clients into defined target markets and tying product research to them.

Chris Jones, Proposition Director at Dynamic Planner said: “The world of financial planning and regulation has evolved more than ever this century. Yet in the area of research, firms have been stuck with technology of the past, faced with as many as 300 product features and the challenge of matching and explaining them to a client. We asked advice firms what we could do to help them navigate this maze of features. They told us they wanted clarity over complexity, a simplified process and something different to what they had used before.

“Working from a blank canvas, we have been able to create technology that is fit for now and the future, and guided by PROD and Consumer Duty. Dynamic Planner’s Product and Platform Research puts clients at its heart, simplifying the process and efficiently highlighting product features which can be demonstrated to lead to good client outcomes. It provides an unblinkered view of the market with all information, sourced directly from providers.

“We’ve gone even further to meet the needs of the financial planning process and built the ability to segment clients into defined target markets, tying product research to them to consistently deliver good outcomes. Along with potential cost savings, it has the key benefit of being part of Dynamic Planner’s one system, enabling firms to save time, money and work seamlessly in one place.”

Not a Dynamic Planner user? Schedule a free no-obligation demo with a business consultant and experience the full functionality of Dynamic Planner.

14 July 2022: Dynamic Planner, the UK’s leading risk based financial planning system, has welcomed a significant investment from FPE Capital.

The investment from FPE, a leading UK software focused private equity growth firm, will back the current management team and help accelerate the growth of Dynamic Planner and the delivery of its ambitious plans in the UK and Europe.

Dynamic Planner has been growing rapidly in recent years and now serves almost 40% of wealth advice firms and over 150 asset managers, profiling over £250 billion of assets via its SaaS platform. Headquartered in Reading, the company employs over 100 diverse and talented people and is on track to pass £10m in annual recurring licence revenues this year. In the last 12 months it has launched a raft of upgrades to ensure Dynamic Planner and its open API is the one end-to-end financial planning system firms need in a hybrid world. Earlier this year it appointed Christophe Ponette as European managing director based in Luxembourg to lead the company’s continental expansion.

FPE Capital has a successful track record in backing SaaS businesses with a focus on market leading, quality products and strong, client focused, cultures.

Ben Goss, CEO at Dynamic Planner said:

“As a fast growing, privately owned company we were looking for an institutional investor partner to help us take the business to the next level in the UK and internationally. Our selection of FPE was based not just on their track record of backing software companies that successfully scale, but also on their team who we feel share our values.

“From the outset FPE understood the value that Dynamic Planner brings to our clients and industry as an independent provider of technology and asset risk modelling serving a growing community in the wealth management sector who trust and rely on us. They also share our vision for solving our industry’s major challenges through technology such as process digitisation, customer experience, investing sustainably for future generations, and omni channel financial planning in a post pandemic world.

“This investment allows us to progress our industry for the better and as a management team we look forward to sharing the benefits of this collaboration with our clients and team in the months and years ahead.”

David Barbour, Managing Partner at FPE commented:

“We are delighted to be working with the team at Dynamic Planner on their exciting growth ambitions and to build on their existing leading position in the wealth management sector with new products for this core market.”

Dynamic Planner, today announces the appointment of Christophe Ponette as Managing Director for Europe to lead the company’s EU expansion. Christophe was previously the MD of Avaloq, the European Banking and Wealth Technology Provider for Benelux, speaks multiple languages and has over 25 years’ experience working in sales and management positions in European markets including The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Belgium.

His appointment follows an extensive, two-year exploratory process which has looked intensively at the needs of European financial services firms, asset managers and clients as a result of MiFIDII, IDD and the growth in risk-based investing.

Christophe will work in collaboration with Simon Colboc who has joined Dynamic Planner in a non-executive capacity. Simon has 25 years’ experience in Financial Services, including executive positions at Fortis, BNP Paribas and Prudential Plc. He heads up FECIF’s work on pan-European pensions and runs the Financial Services Practice of Paris-based firm CMI Strategies.

Dynamic Planner has signed an agreement with The European Federation of Financial Advisers and Financial Intermediaries (FECIF) an independent and non-profit-making organisation exclusively at the service of its financial adviser and intermediary members, who are from the 27 EU countries plus the UK and Switzerland; it is the only European body representing European financial advisers and intermediaries. FECIF is based in Brussels, at the heart of Europe and will be working with Dynamic Planner to identify and introduce potential partners.

Dynamic Planner has already completed the localisation of its risk and sustainability profiling instruments for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium working with in-country experts and financial advisers to ensure they adapt to local requirements. Dynamic Planner will localise its full functionality including: reviews, goal based cash flow planning and suitability reporting to provide its one financial planning system to European clients.

Ben Goss, CEO, Dynamic Planner said: “Backed by almost two decades of experience of Dynamic Planner in the UK, we are now taking our leading financial planning system to the Continent. Europe is in the foothills of an enormous shift in the way that advisers help households manage their finances and prepare for retirement in terms of the investment risk they need to take and the regulation that they face. The market feedback we have had is that we can help financial services firms successfully meet these challenges as we do in the UK.

“This is a natural progression for Dynamic Planner and an incredibly exciting time for us as both a team and a business. We have already learnt a great deal from our engagements with European partners, advisers and experts about how financial advice is given in different countries, for example in the area of sustainability, and much of this will be beneficial for our overall product for our UK clients too.

“Our mission is to help firms match people to suitable portfolios through engaging financial planning and we believe there is a huge opportunity to contribute the expertise and one financial planning system technology we offer in the EU.”

As part of the exploratory process, Dynamic Planner’s Head of Psychology and Behavioural Insights Dr Louis Williams, conducted a large-scale country specific and analysis study of a cross section of the populations in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Spain to understand attitude to risk (ATR) and views on sustainability to assist in the creation of bespoke psychometric questionnaires for each territory. Local financial advisers reviewed translations and provided their views on the question set and framework.

Key differences between the five European countries and UK population include:

ATR Profiling:

Sustainability:

Christophe Ponette, Managing Director, Europe, Dynamic Planner said: “We have undertaken extensive country specific research to enable us to understand what is needed and begin to adapt what we offer to each market. This has already informed the design of a range of country specific, multi-language risk profiling and sustainability questionnaires. This insight has also highlighted a need for more education around financial risk and this is central to what we do at Dynamic Planner.

“Large organisations in Europe face many challenges – ageing populations; low savings rates and clients with assets held across different institutions. Above all there is a need to create a culture of investment, improving the overall customer experience and establishing a better and more efficient integration of the financial planning process. We believe Dynamic Planner can provide the answer to these challenges.”

To find out more about how Dynamic Planner can help organisations in Europe, please see our Corporate Brochure and our Guide to Client Profiling in Europe, both available here

Advisers looking for risk rated investing solutions for their clients, can benefit from the revamped RSMR Responsible Managed Portfolio Service (MPS) now available through Dynamic Planner.

The newly launched RSMR Responsible Growth Portfolio means that advisers can now take advantage of four risk profiled portfolios in the RSMR Responsible MPS that is risk rated on Dynamic Planner: Responsible Cautious, Responsible Balanced, Responsible Growth and Responsible Dynamic. This new range of portfolios joins the RSMR Rfolios range of eight funds which has now been added to Dynamic Planner, having been launched in 2015.

RSMR Head of Managed Portfolio Services, Stewart Smith, said: “We have taken the opportunity to broaden our offering in the responsible investing area through the launch of the Responsible Growth Portfolio. Alongside our well-established RSMR Rfolios range, we offer advisers four RSMR Responsible portfolios, risk profiled by Dynamic Planner within risk levels 4, 5, 6 and 7.”

Yasmina Siadatan, Sales & Marketing Director, Dynamic Planner said: “We are passionate about broadening out the range of risk rated funds with a focus on responsible investing to give advisers even greater choice within this area for their clients. We welcome the MPS Range from RSMR to Dynamic Planner. Continuing to expand the risk rated responsible fund universe in Dynamic Planner enables advisers to give clients increased opportunity to use their investments to deliver financial returns for the risk they are willing and able to take, alongside ensuring sustainability preferences are matched.”

What is RSMR’s approach to ESG?

Dynamic Planner has launched Client Access, a customer focused and interactive technology designed to help advisers drive deeper client engagement and relationships in the new flexible hybrid world of financial advice.

Now available to Dynamic Planner users, Dynamic Planner Client Access empowers clients to complete the psychometric risk and sustainability profiling questionnaires remotely, enriching the process of data capture. Fully interactive, clients benefit from simple language and short videos to clearly communicate key messages and guide them at every step. It is mobile friendly with screens optimised for all devices, with the look and feel fully configurable to a firm’s branding.

Yasmina Siadatan, Sales & Marketing Director at Dynamic Planner said: “While remote advice is here to stay, it can be a challenge for advisers to make the process engaging and easy to understand for clients, as well as build deep relationships which ultimately result in better outcomes. Dynamic Planner Client Access gives advisers that fundamental piece of the hybrid advice puzzle, whilst enhancing their whole experience in an interactive and efficient way.

“We believe it will be fundamental in supporting hybrid advice as demand grows even more, with the ability for advice firms to engage successfully on a remote basis with clients a major step along this path. Advisers will be able to improve outcomes through better informed conversations with clients, whilst at a business level, the increased efficiency of the process will enable firms to increase capacity in their business.”

Advisers can choose which questionnaires clients receive, and once captured, the information flows seamlessly back into Dynamic Planner to support the profiling, cash flow and review processes. With automatic notification that the process is complete, and any inconsistencies in answers flagged, Dynamic Planner Client Access increases the efficiency of advice firms and enables them to focus on more important things such as having good conversations with clients.

Client Access is available now in Dynamic Planner; see for yourself

“We are on the cusp of a Golden Age for the financial planning industry, with a mixture of demand, regulation and technology providing the backdrop against which financial advice and planning is made more accessible than ever before,” says Ben Goss, CEO Dynamic Planner.

Speaking at Dynamic Planner’s 10th Annual Conference, Ben Goss continued: “More than four million people took financial advice in 2020, growing rapidly year-on-year as people considered their priorities as well as their portfolios during the pandemic.

“The Regulator and the Treasury both want to see more people accessing the financial advice they need to make long term investment decisions, and combined with the huge adoption of Internet and video communication over the last two years, advice firms with the right systems now have an unprecedented opportunity.

“They can now open up capacity to the benefit of their clients, the benefit of their business and, in removing much of the manual work associated with financial planning, make their working lives more fulfilling.

“However, challenges remain: regulation continues to evolve, this year with Consumer Duty, fragmented systems all too often cause wasted energy and increased risk of error and advisers need to find new ways to demonstrate their value when they are not in the room with the client. How can firms do this?

“Three years ago, Dynamic Planner embarked on a multi-million-pound upgrade to deliver the one financial planning system firms need in a hybrid world. We have since launched a range of new developments from sustainability profiling to risk-based cash flow planning.

“We are grateful for the contributions from hundreds of firms across our client base, at every stage of the design and development process, ensuring that Dynamic Planner is a system built with financial planners for financial planners.

“Today and over the coming weeks and months, we are launching a range of new innovations to deliver on our one system vision and ensure that firms thrive in the hybrid world.”

New innovations from Dynamic Planner include:

Want to see what Dynamic Planner can do for you? Schedule a free, no-obligation demo and experience the full functionality of Dynamic Planner.

Advisers using Dynamic Planner’s Risk Managed Decumulation Service (RMD) can now access the Garraway Decumulation Model Portfolio Service.

The portfolio is the first decumulation portfolio built specifically to meet Dynamic Planner’s RMD Standard. It has been created using Dynamic Planner’s leading risk-rated portfolio guidelines and assigned a risk rating of 5.

Chris Jones, Proposition Director, Dynamic Planner said: “We welcome Garraway to our Risk Managed Decumulation service, with their specialist capabilities in hedge and managed futures. Advisers and their clients will benefit hugely from being able to access the expertise and scale of an institutional manager via Dynamic Planner.

“Back in April 2020, we effectively launched our RMD service into the pandemic – a timely coincidence with the events of the past 18 months continuing to bring this area of advice to the fore. The system has prepared clients for shocks and falls in capital value such as this, and to date the model and Risk Profiled funds have performed within the parameters an investor was led to expect.”

Mark Harris, Garraway DFM’s CIO said: “Dynamic Planner is the market leading risk-based system in the planning and advice process. With our aim to create a decumulation portfolio that is truly fit for purpose for the whole advisory market, it made perfect sense to work with the Dynamic Planner team to build the portfolio from scratch rather than trying to use an existing solution designed to meet the needs of a different target market

“The result is a portfolio that uses uncorrelated funds, rather than complex derivatives, to better match retirement duration whilst achieving the joint requirements of capital preservation and minimising drawdown. Putting it another way, our back testing shows that an investor could have made fixed withdrawals totalling over £49,000 per annum from a £1 million in this portfolio over 5 years and still have £1 million left. Of course, past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.”

The Key Features of Dynamic Planner’s RMD Service:

  1. Focuses on monthly over annual risk.
  2. Allows fair comparison of fund performance and charges for decumulation solutions, by filtering on only suitable solutions first it avoids the temptation to use other solutions because of long-term unit price performance or lower chares.
  3. Reduces the impact of clients encashing units within their portfolio for less than they are worth.
  4. Works in tandem with Dynamic Planner cash flow empowering fund and solution selection to be based on what a client needs and when not just what the funds will pay.
  5. Same simple process as researching and recommending a Dynamic Planner risk profiled fund or risk target managed fund – costing advisers nothing extra in time, but adding all the value and reassurance they need that the client in decumulation has the best possible outcome.
  6. No uncomfortable shocks at a next annual review. The risk and return assumptions of the agreed solution will have performed as expected even when the client introduces sequence of returns risk.
  7. Peace of mind – for the adviser and the client in decumulation. They can have confidence – particularly during times of significant market volatility – that they are invested in the right solution at an agreed level of risk. A typical client in decumulation, most likely retirement, may not have any further opportunities to buy more units if their earning power, from their working life, is largely over.

“Investors can find unprecedented investment opportunities through investing sustainably and it is mission critical for tackling the profound environmental and social challenges facing humanity.” Dr Ben Caldecott, Founding Director, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, University of Oxford

Ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), Dynamic Planner has created a white paper style Sustainability Discussion Guide for financial advisers to use with their clients. The foreword has been written by Dr Ben Caldecott, founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford.

The guide is launching in the week ahead of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) when consumer interest in sustainability is expected to peak. It aims to help the financial adviser community and their clients properly explore the topic of sustainable investing. With recent reports that the FCA and HM Treasury are exploring how to best introduce sustainability related requirements for advisers, Dynamic Planner’s Sustainability Guide will support advisers in more fully understanding investor preferences when it comes to sustainability and ultimately, suitability. The guide focuses on:

Dr Ben Caldecott, founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford said: “The 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) is a key moment where governments, companies, and financial institutions will make bold commitments to tackle climate change. Financial firms representing tens of trillions in pounds of assets will be committing to align with the Paris Agreement and shift their portfolios accordingly. These and related developments will further accelerate existing trends in sustainability.

“The transition underway is also unleashing new technologies and business models, helping to drive innovation and productivity improvements in companies around the world, whether public or private. Finding these companies and helping them grow is essential, and also creates unprecedented investment opportunities for investors, especially those who increasingly want to align their investments with environmental and social sustainability. It is also mission critical for tackling the profound environmental and social challenges facing humanity.”

Ben Goss, CEO of Dynamic Planner said: “Consumer preference around how we can live our lives more sustainably is rapidly accelerating. With estimates of over £5trillion of wealth in the UK being passed down generations by the middle of the century, now more than ever we have the opportunity and responsibility to make investment sustainable. Not only does this make sense in continuing to build wealth, but also to deliver positive changes for the benefit of future generations.

“Financial advisers have a critical role to play in helping investors understand these trends and navigate the complexity and ensure that the asset managers they recommend are properly measuring and managing both climate and nature-related risks and impacts. This is hugely important as it will help ensure capital is channelled efficiently and productively to support the vital transition to global environmental sustainability.

“In a recent survey, 54% of advisers told us that they needed to increase their own knowledge around ESG and sustainable investing. Our guide is intended to inform the discussion and conversation between investor and adviser, written and presented in a way that investors can use to explore all of the issues around sustainability further.”

Earlier this year, Dynamic Planner launched its Sustainable Investing insight, powered by MSCIs global market leading ESG research. In May it launched the industry’s first psychometric sustainable investing questionnaire, combining thinking from schools of psychology and statistics to create a true process where a client’s ESG and sustainability preferences are accurately captured.

Dynamic Planner’s Sustainability Discussion Guide is available to download here