The RDR deadline is just under 26 months away and so it’s not surprising that we are now seeing many advisory businesses asking how Dynamic Planner can help them.
We continue to make significant strides developing our product set, winning awards and working with new and existing clients to help them successfully meet this challenge.
We are delighted to welcome Close Asset Management as the latest advisory business to adopt Dynamic Planner. We look forward to supporting Close pre and post RDR.
In support of our clients’ pre-RDR journeys, we have delivered a number of significant developments to Dynamic Planner in the last few months:
Providers and platforms - Friends Provident have gone live with enhanced functionality and additional services for their corporate pension scheme members and in October, Cofunds took the lead with our new pension consolidation module. We will share more on both of these developments in the next bulletin.
Asset managers - Our fund risk profiling service has continued to capture the industry’s interest. With over 30,000 registered adviser users via platforms, intermediaries, networks and service providers - we are pleased to be helping asset managers in their drive to assist these advisers in selecting appropriate fund solutions for their customers. Since June, we have risk rated funds for Skandia Investment Management, Seven Investment Management, Octopus and the Prudential.
Finally, as we near the end of 2010 we are reviewing our product roadmap ahead of RDR and the product release schedule for our major quarterly releases planned for 2011. We have a number of important and industry leading developments planned for the year including:
Development is well advanced for our Q1 Winter Release and we look forward to discussing the road map with clients at the User Group on 26 January.
If you would like to discuss anything in this bulletin, please do get in touch with me or the team.
Kind regards
Ben Goss, CEO
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This year F&TRC has extended its popular annual “e-Excellence” ratings for financial planning tools to include those available from software vendors. Twenty-four individual tools and calculators were rated as PPP, PP+ or PP in four categories: at retirement tools, growing pension tools, investment tools and protection tools. Distribution Technology was the highest scoring technology provider with sixteen PPP ratings awarded in total. Ian McKenna, Director at F&TRC says “With financial planning tools increasingly becoming a core part of advisers’ internal and customer facing services, we think the time is right to provide the industry with objective benchmarks of these tools. Distribution Technology have performed admirably in the first set of ratings. This lays down a standard others would do well to aspire to”. |
Mark Hayes-Newington has joined us as Product and Propositions Director and is responsible for developing our offering to support clients.
Mark joins us from Taxbriefs (a leading supplier of learning and marketing solutions for IFAs and Accountants), where he was CEO. Prior to this, he was a founder member of Defaqto (the UK’s leading financial product research company.
As part of our rebrand, we have created a new website. It has a fresh new look and a home page that makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. Under our “products and services”, each Dynamic Planner module now has an overview and content summary, as well as a new section for fund risk profiling. You’ll also find a gallery of screen shots under our “resources” section and a clock counting down to the RDR deadline on the home page.
If you have any feedback, Shelley Robertson, our Marketing Manager would be delighted to hear from you.
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On 5th September, Ben took part in Tri for Life as part of the Dallaligo Foundation Team, with Lawrence and 300 of his closest friends. Ben raised over £2,300 for Cancer Research in a ‘sprint’ triathlon (400m swim, 20km cycle, 5km run). For an ex-winger like Ben, who struggles with distances longer than 200m it was a gruelling event but worthwhile. Ben says “thank you to all those who sponsored me. Cancer Research is a charity close to my heart, since my wife Jayne was diagnosed in 2005 with breast cancer. She has benefited not only from first class medical treatment but also the latest drugs. In Jayne’s case, Herceptin had only just been introduced - it brought home how important it is to get effective drugs from the lab into hospitals as quickly as possible. Jayne was given a clean bill of health a few months ago, four years after the completion of treatment. We are looking forward to the next year and the five year milestone.” |
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We are pleased to announce that we have recently joined Connect Reading, a registered charity with members from the commercial, public and voluntary sector. It aims to find innovative solutions to some of the challenging socio-economic issues facing the Greater Reading area. |
As a Reading-based business, we are keen to support to support charities in our community and will be working with Connect Reading to identify how we can best use our skills and expertise to do so. Our first project is to be involved with providing underprivileged children with Christmas presents.
Our fund risk profiling service has proved a big success since its launch last quarter. We are pleased to welcome Skandia Investment Group, Seven Investment Management, Prudential and Octopus Investments, as new clients and who have taken our fund risk profiling service. Between them, they have added 25 new risk rated new funds.
Feedback from a poll we conducted earlier this Summer, indicates that advisers are increasingly preferring to use a risk rating methodology to identify and categorise attitude to risk. As a result, they welcome the ability to choose funds that align to the customer’s risk rating and target portfolio.
Please talk to your Client Director, if you would like to find out more.
As part of our rebranding, since we operate a single code base, it makes sense to use a single product name – Dynamic Planner. We are therefore changing our product nomenclature accordingly:
Our clients will continue to receive the appropriate release updates in the normal way. This means for example, a client with the Dynamic Planner Enterprise will receive full (DPOS) updates and a client with say, Investment Planner, will receive the Dynamic Planner Classic updates.
If you are considering upgrades to enhance your functionality or extend the range of planning tools, please let us know. We will be delighted to discuss the opportunities with you.
Following the November release, our Autumn round of improvements to Dynamic Planner are now complete. Amongst the improvements for Dynamic Planner Enterprise are:
Full details of the highlights can be found on our website.
We have recently introduced a pensions consolidation and switching module, available in Dynamic Planner Enterprise.
This module creates a pension switching report, outlining the suitability of the client’s arrangements for switching to a new contract and supporting advisers in this complex area of advice.
It allows advisers to enter a prospective pension that acts as the target contract for comparison purposes, including product level charges, funds and fund charges. It also takes into account the customer’s attitude to risk, current asset allocation and whether this matches their target risk level.
The dashboard then presents the results:
Please let us know if you would like to find out more.
Six months ago we began our health checks, giving our clients the opportunity to rate how we were doing and to identify areas where we could improve.
Feedback has been very encouraging. For example, in the last quarter (June to September), we saw our ratings increase:
Both scores now exceed 7/10 and are from the two thirds of clients who respond. Please do keep up the feedback it helps us improve.
The most common answer to the question “how can we improve” was that we don’t publish a list of enhancements that are being put into the product. This is being addressed firstly by the Product Enhancement Plan (PEP), which will be sent out before each functionality release and secondly, by the release summary, which is now published on the website.
08/11/10
