At Tingley & Cooper, we are a small firm with two advisers in the pre- and post-retirement space. We have just under 200 clients in all.
We began using Dynamic Planner to implement a coordinated approach to reviews for clients. Be more efficient. Currently, we have business on four platforms with different products and are collating data around risk from multiple places; similarly, for fund manager charges. Collating all that represents quite a lot of work. We did trial another system, but we never went live with it because the portfolio valuation function never reconciled itself with our existing tools. That was a costly and disappointing conclusion.
We wanted a proven way to collate correct valuations on data feeds, and we found, from our due diligence, that Dynamic Planner had experience here. We wanted a comprehensive suitability process for the review of clients’ investment portfolios, a system to take us through that journey.
Do your investments match your attitude to risk? If it doesn’t, why not? As long as the client is happy and it is documented, you’ve proved suitability. That hasn’t been done effectively before. Dynamic Planner is a very good, documented process which can be audited easily. I like that. Ultimately, we have a far more joined-up process, which saves us time and money, and it improves our presentation to clients.
We are currently spending £2,000 to £3,000 a year on other tools, which will potentially become redundant using Dynamic Planner. I could use valuation feeds from my back office, but it comes back to presentation to a client.
‘A better, Dynamic Planner process’
We have all the valuation integration feeds set up in Dynamic Planner. They work very well. They’re very efficient. It’s excellent when you’re collating everything. Instead of logging onto four platforms, you log onto Dynamic Planner once. The process is better.
Yes, it’s been an investment getting information onto Dynamic Planner. We have had a paraplanner working to upload information and assets from our existing systems onto Dynamic Planner. But now we’re nearly there, we are finding we can produce a report in minutes. Before, it would have taken us one to two hours.
New clients joining us will then be immediately familiar with a high level of reporting. I’m excited about that. That will add a lot of value to our business.
We were looking at recruiting another member of staff, but now I don’t think we will. The financial savings and efficiencies with Dynamic Planner are very good. We’re happy.
