We are a single office firm – we’re not part of a chain – with two advisers and two admin staff. We are totally independent and we predominantly sell investments for life pensions.
We first started using Dynamic Planner two years ago, because as a firm we could clearly see from seminars and events we attend throughout the year that everybody else in the sector trusts and uses it. People always refer to Dynamic Planner and particularly the big investment houses – they subscribe to it and describe how their funds sit within Dynamic Planner’s risk profile scale.
When people within the industry ask us, ‘What risk profiler do you use?’ They instantly understand when we say, ‘Dynamic Planner’. You are all then singing from the same hymn sheet in that sense and people like Bankhall, who we are part of, know you are using a reputable company in Dynamic Planner.
Because it is recognised so widely within the industry, we know at Chase Buckingham that by using Dynamic Planner’s attitude to risk questionnaire we are asking all the right questions; we know we are not missing anything, and we know that a client’s capacity for loss is covered within it as well. We definitely would recommend it to a fellow IFA, because, like I said, it is so widely recognised.
Our investment process begins with Dynamic Planner’s attitude to risk questionnaire. Once we have established a client’s risk category, we create an asset split and then start selecting funds for the recommendation we make. We are quite traditional in the sense that we select funds from our own research.
Dynamic Planner is a really good system and constantly evolving and is something that could make our jobs a lot easier in the future. When we were introducing Dynamic Planner to our investment process, we always knew there would be someone available to talk through the issues and provide the support we wanted.