For the last few years, I have worked as the only adviser in my firm and currently have approximately £24m of assets under management, offering clients a full financial planning service. My career started in 1997 when I joined Chase de Vere in Leeds, having just graduated and then set up my own business after the birth of my daughter in 2005.
What do I love about the industry? I love being able to make a difference. There’s nothing more fulfilling than being referred a client with various financial issues and being able to provide them with a solution and enabling them to live the life they deserve.
I started using Dynamic Planner in 2016. Pre-meeting, I email the risk profile questionnaire link through to the client. Once I have the fact find on Intelligent Office (iO), this is then sent across to Dynamic Planner via the integration.
All client investment and pension assets are risk profiled at the touch of a few buttons, which is a godsend, because it immediately gives you an overall asset allocation as well as the contract asset allocation, which just saves so much time. It also gives me a breakdown of the risk of each fund within the contracts. When you work alone, anything that can save even five minutes can be a big help.
I also use Dynamic Planner to carry out fund research (using their risk and Premium and Select ratings), product due diligence and report services. This is incredibly useful for due diligence and suitability.
The integration between Dynamic Planner and iO is hugely important. My job would be more difficult without it, because it would mean repeating work which can so easily lead to human error as well as time wasted in the day, using the integration, all client information is perfectly consistent.
The valuation integrations Dynamic Planner has with different platforms are very useful because, at the click of a button, they pull through the client’s valuations as well as fund breakdowns. Long gone are the days of searching for ISIN codes to work out unit prices.
Frequently I request the help of the Client Success team at Dynamic Planner. The service and support they provide is excellent and couldn’t be more helpful. The value they add makes Dynamic Planner much more attractive as a proposition to you as an adviser. You know that once you have passed them a question it will be dealt with. This is rare in our industry.
I frequently recommend Dynamic Planner to fellow professionals, because of everything we have talked about: the ease of risk profiling, the level of fund research and the ongoing support.
Dynamic Planner takes on board your feedback as a client and if they can implement your suggestions into the service they really do, which I think is incredibly rare and means that it is constantly improving and evolving. In that sense, Dynamic Planner is adviser-friendly as it can be. I’m very happy with it and I wouldn’t change it.
