The FSA paper on ‘assessing suitability’ published earlier this year included guidance for advisers on ensuring that the descriptions used to check that investment solutions are suitable ‘are fair, clear and not misleading’.
We are delighted to announce that as part of our enhancements to risk profiling, our 10 risk profile descriptors have received the Crystal Mark clarity seal of approval from the Plain English Campaign. In fact, you could say, our risk profile descriptors are ‘crystal clear’.
Introducing plain English risk profile descriptors is just one of the exciting enhancements to Dynamic Planner as part of our Spring release. The rest of this bulletin summarises the all the changes which take effect from 13 May.
Turning to client activity; we are pleased welcome Natasha Phillips, who joins us as Client Services Manager and the 500 advisers who signed up for our Dynamic Planner risk profiler lite tool, following the four Prudential road shows held in March.
Finally, there has been much interest in fund risk profiling this quarter. The Money Management feature published in March gave a good account of the benefits of risk profiled funds and how we support the advice process throughout. We have also seen a greater interest in fund risk profiling and as a result, our Quantative Analysis team are working hard on behalf of our clients.
We are very excited by all these developments and hope you are too. If you would like to discuss anything in this bulletin further, please do get in touch with me or the team.
Kind regards
Ben Goss, CEO Distribution Technology
We are pleased to welcome Natasha Phillips, who joined us from Close Asset Management on 26 April. Natasha has been a client of Distribution Technology at two businesses and comes to us with a background in financial services and technology. This means she is ideally placed to help clients receive optimum benefit from the solutions that we provide. If you have not already received an invitation to complete her client survey, you can do so here.
Richard Thaw, Marketing Manager at Canada Life UK Division says "we have been working with Distribution Technology to provide financial planning tools that support the sale of our popular savings and investment products since 2007. Extending our licence for Investment Planner is just one example of our commitment to the advice process and the IFA sector.”
We have a number of enhancements to Dynamic Planner risk profiling:
You can find examples of the how these new screen look under the Support/Resources/ Gallery section of the website.
On 13 May, we also withdrew support for our 5, 18 and 24 question questionnaires, as the newer 10 and 20 question versions offer a much greater degree of accuracy. We have contacted clients using the old style questionnaires to explain that these will be removed in June and that existing risk profiles are unaffected.
Finally, we have launched a ‘Best Practice Guide to risk profiling with Dynamic Planner’ to help advisers make the most of the support available. A copy will be sent to each of our clients.
We recognise the importance of combining the complexity of the calculations with Dynamic planner with the simplicity of a good user interface. As a result, we have reconfigured the workflows within Dynamic Planner Enterprise and given the screens a fresh new look.
This will allow advisers to complete fact find data using a variety of routes. It also means we can deliver Dynamic Planner tools and services, more quickly and at a lower implementation cost than before.
Our charts now identify any short-term and long-term income shortfalls not met through increasing the annuity, more clearly.
If you are interested in upgrading to the Enterprise version of Dynamic Planner, please contact us.
