Dynamic Planner, which claims to be used by 40 per cent of investment advisers and was set up 20 years ago, has been at the forefront of technological change in financial planning and asset management.
When the business first started, its core objective was to use technology to make financial advice and planning engaging, to enable people to live and fund the life that they want.
Goss still remembers signing the formation papers in his south-East London flat all those years ago.
He says: "One of the most enjoyable parts of building the business has been the people and some of our early team are still with Dynamic Planner today. And I am incredibly proud of what our team has achieved and the culture we have built within the business."
A lot has happened in the industry since then, not least pension freedoms and the Retail Distribution Review.
Twenty years ago a lot of people still had defined benefit pension schemes, which were built with little to no need for engagement from the policyholder. The biggest change that the pension reforms introduced was choice — making advice a critical component of that.
“Today, we enable reviews, we have products and a platform, research and recommendations, and full suitability. So the ability to go end-to-end with a front office financial planning system, connected to your back office connected to your platforms of choice is our footprint,” Goss says.
Now, the next big wave of regulation that arguably will bring about as much change as the RDR and pension freedoms is consumer duty.
“We believe that there is a rapidly growing market now for firms to do things differently than they might have done before consumer duty. The need to adopt more efficient financial planning and financial advice processes that demonstrate value to your clients, at the same time, has really powered our growth over the past few years,” he says.
“And we can see that it will continue to do so over the next few years, as the industry gets to grips with consumer duty.
“You can't deliver your obligations on consumer duty unless you are focused on outcome and value to the client, but by delivering that at an economic cost that works for you as a business delivers value to your client. Front office financial planning technology has a really important role to play in all of that.”
An environmental science and geography graduate, Goss started his journey in the industry by working for a fund manager during the summer of 1987, where he would be given a script to use when speaking to investors about why they should invest in a particular asset.
A few months later, the Black Monday crash happened.
