At Lifetime Wealth, we have 50 financial planners and our assets under management are approximately £750m. Lifetime Wealth is a full service, financial planning company – offering services to support our clients at every stage of life.
I first entered the profession in 1987 when, at that time, I was a police officer. I saw a man, who had multiple parking tickets he hadn’t paid, driving a Porsche 911. I politely put it to him, ‘How is someone like you driving a car like that?’ He said he was a financial consultant and we got chatting. I thought, ‘Here I am driving around in a car with a faulty fuel gauge and here he is driving a Porsche 911’. So I left the police and became a financial planner.
For me, I love making sure that clients are properly looked after – and I genuinely mean that. There are so many product provider-led solutions in this sector that I still think there is a huge need for pure financial planners to really craft a solution for the client. One which really takes into account a better life that they can potentially lead. Advisers can still be very transaction focused, because that’s the way most of us were trained to work. We’re getting to the point that our advisers are instead focusing on the plan first and implementation of products later.
We started rolling Dynamic Planner out here for our advisers from February 2019. We use 360 Dotnet as a fantastic CRM system, which is big on the side of mortgage protection. On the wealth side we needed to have something that fascinates us: being a family office to our clients and addressing all of their financial needs. Dynamic Planner is the perfect partner to that.
We also work with Lifetime Connect’s paraplanning team, who use Dynamic Planner and we are systematically rolling Dynamic Planner out for advisers, so that they can use it for upcoming annual advice and planning meetings with clients. We use Dynamic Planner to put a review pack together, which is sent out to clients and then we complete any paraplanning work off the back of that.
We are finding that process to be hugely efficient. When we previously did a client review it was taking us between five and six hours per client. Now, using Dynamic Planner, it takes us 45 minutes. When you then start to consider your costs and assume a decent wealth adviser will have around 100 clients, we think Dynamic Planner, coupled with using a professional paraplanning firm, enables advisers to double the number of clients they have.
In short, technology is helping us double advisers’ productivity – because all work now for clients must follow a compliant process and audit trail.
The people on Dynamic Planner’s Client Success team are brilliant and masters at using Dynamic Planner. The customer support you receive as a result is fantastic. We really like it and have nothing but high praise for it. Everyone on the team is very knowledgeable and what we particularly like about the support is, you call up, they’ll ask you where you are in the system and what you are currently doing. Then they’ll say, ‘Okay. Hit that and you’re good to go’. It’s brilliant and stops you sitting there staring at a screen for two hours trying to work it out.
I absolutely would recommend Dynamic Planner to an adviser. I do regularly – all the time. I think it’s great.
