Case study: Fund Research

Octagon Financial Services

As a firm, I like that we’re on a journey with Dynamic Planner and when new developments are released, you can feel if it’s the right thing for you to adopt.
Adrian Hill, Octagon Financial Services
Octagon Financial Services
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Each of our advisers has around 60 active clients, whose portfolio typically sits between £50,000 to £150,000. We are directly authorised and first began Dynamic Planner about five years ago.

Where it works really well for us is once we’ve collated all of a client’s information and are then looking to make a recommendation, Dynamic Planner helps speeds up that process. It makes it much more efficient, because all the research is there for you, about a client’s existing products and their level of risk.

Dynamic Planner’s fund research is a great resource. It filters funds down to ones specific to the client’s needs. Otherwise, you could be looking at thousands of different solutions for a client. Fundamentally, it helps make something which could be quite complex more simple. From a client’s point of view, they receive a good level of documentation about the process, supporting a recommendation you’re making.

Explain risk more clearly to clients

Dynamic Planner gives you a great starting point with a client, because a lot of clients wouldn’t understand the level of risk they’re currently taking with their pensions and investments. I like the fact that everything covered in a review is included in one document, which tells a story for the client of the last 12 months. Our clients like it.

It’s all well and good talking about trust and the relationship you enjoy with clients, but it’s really important that they understand what you’re doing and why, which is why the literature you can produce for them in Dynamic Planner is so important: it brings their financial plan and its implications to life.

Should, for example, a client be looking at taking more risk? What will that mean to them in retirement? Dynamic Planner allows you to demonstrate that, without producing multiple reports. That really helps. And it makes you come across well to a client. You look professional.

Client reviews

We’ve started using Dynamic Planner’s Client Review. Until Covid, we had been completing reviews for clients in our own way, but that is very time consuming. The hardest review to complete is the first one, because you obviously haven’t got historic valuations for a client’s portfolio in the system, but I still completed a review the other day in 45 minutes.

Previously, for a simple review, it would have taken a couple of hours. For something more complex, it could have taken up to five hours just collating everything. On top of that, it was then the amount of paperwork we were passing on to the client, which was why we wanted to look at what we could do to try and avoid that.

If you’re reviewing a client’s portfolio, they can be invested in up to 20 to 25 different funds. But Dynamic Planner brings all of that information efficiently together for you and, as a business now, I am an advocate that we become better at using it and that it becomes our main system we use to both manage our business and more importantly, support our clients

We’re on a journey with Dynamic Planner

As an advice firm, I can buy system on top of system, but the thing I need to adopt is a system which encompasses most of our business. In an ideal world, that system would do absolutely everything, but the important difference is, Dynamic Planner is working towards that. We will then hopefully have one system encompassing everything we need to do.

As a firm, I like that we’re on a journey with Dynamic Planner and when new developments are released, you can feel if it’s the right thing for you to adopt. You can build your business around Dynamic Planner. Then, because you’re only working in one system, in time everyone at your firm becomes an expert using it and you’re getting the most from it.

Dynamic Planner, ultimately, supports us as financial advisers. We’re growing and the world is evolving, but Dynamic Planner is growing and evolving too. It just makes logical sense to use it more and support our clients in the best way possible.