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.
