Since Covid-19 there has been a massive shift in technology, which has enabled advisers to get closer to their clients. And still, an even bigger change is coming with the Financial Conduct Authority’s consumer duty as advisers do more to track their client outcomes, according to Dynamic Planner chief executive Ben Goss.
“The ability to really track, understand and track outcomes is going to be a game-changer because consumer duty is forcing it. The first part of the financial planning cycle is: what does the client want to achieve? But it hasn’t really been tracked,” he says.
“And that’s because tracking outcomes are technically quite difficult. There are lots of variables, but with good financial planning technology [provides] the ability to monitor the portfolio daily, and the ability to monitor positions and to articulate to the client where they are at any given time against their plan.”
Goss says this is where a company such as Dynamic Planner would come in, because it has developed technology to support advisers conducting reviews, which can track and understand clients’ outcomes against their objectives.
As a result of the Dynamic Planner technology that advisers incorporate into their annual reviews, he says that in some cases this has cut the review time down to 18 minutes from as much as five hours.
“We have clients who have gone from 80 to 100 end clients per adviser to 200 to 300 clients per adviser [...] because they are using end-to-end technology to crush down that time, cost and risk of delivering advice,” he says.
“The system does not give advice, the adviser does that, but it crunches the numbers, does the math and ensures you don’t have to rekey or do all of that checking you did on manual systems.
“In that review, you can check whether the risk of the portfolio is still suitable, and you can track whether the client is still on track for their objectives, which is very powerful.”
Speaking to Goss as the company marks its 20th anniversary, he says getting the time down to 18 minutes has been helped with the use of digital apps for the customer to use so that they can, for example, tell the adviser ahead of a review what has changed in their circumstances, or they can check their fact find on their phone.
Goss says advisers have also expressed satisfaction with the tool, which is not just helping them cut down on time, but it also means they can pass this on in fewer fees to their clients.
“[The adviser says], ‘if it’s taking me 18 minutes, I can charge a lot less or I could charge a fraction of what I was charging, and therefore the minimum fee client or the minimum investment that a client might be offered can come right down’.
“And we absolutely have firms today who are using Dynamic Planner for that purpose.”
