Risk Profiling

“Dynamic Planner’s Risk Profiling process works well,” said Dean Mullaly, of Mark Dean Wealth Management in London. “Yes, it’s longer than others, but I think it needs to be, in this day and age. It is good because it assesses also a client’s investor experience and their capacity for loss, so it gives you something to hang your hat on, so to speak, for the regulator. Would I recommend Dynamic Planner to another firm? Absolutely. In this day and age, I don’t think you can run your business without it.”

Lee Waters, of Barwells Wealth in East Sussex firm, said: “In the past in financial services, when it came to client risk profiling, there was always a danger that the adviser very much led that conversation. Having a modelling process like Dynamic Planner really allows the client to drive decision-making much more. It allows you to frame your advice to clients in ways that they can understand.”

“For new clients, Dynamic Planner is excellent,” said Neil Beattie, of Cadence Financial Solutions in Birmingham. “We will send them a secure link to complete the risk profiling. They can then complete that and send it back, so that when you finally meet you can have a discussion around the results and start talking about what they want to achieve.”

Dynamic Planner Portfolio Review

Portfolio Review

“All client investment and pension assets are risk profiled at the touch of a few buttons, which is a godsend,” said South Yorkshire adviser Serena van der Meulen. “It immediately gives you an overall asset allocation as well as the contract asset allocation, which just saves so much time. When you work alone, anything that can save even five minutes can be a big help.”

“We use Dynamic Planner to put a review pack together, which is sent out to clients and then we complete any paraplanning work off the back of that,” said David Owen, Wealth Sales Director at Lifetime Connect. “We are finding that process to be hugely efficient.

“When we previously did a client review it was taking us between five and six hours per client. Now, using Dynamic Planner, it takes us 45 minutes. When you then start to consider your costs and assume a decent wealth adviser will have around 100 clients, we think Dynamic Planner, coupled with using a professional paraplanning firm, enables advisers to double the number of clients they have.”

Dynamic Planner has been building Asset Risk models since 2005 as the next essential component after the risk questionnaire

Asset Allocation

“I have always been passionate about ethical and sustainable investing, which, back in the 1980s, was much less mainstream,” said Worcestershire adviser Jan Oliff. “It has taken a long time for companies to create a stream of good, sustainable investment portfolios. Often these cannot reflect the very special preferences clients demand, so I have to create some portfolios myself and find ways I can risk-rate these to ensure they fit into compliant advice.

“One of the benefits of Dynamic Planner is that I can easily get these portfolios objectively risk rated – something that I was beginning to get concerned about as the new business grew. I needed to find ways to keep moving forward compliantly. Dynamic Planner fills that need.”

South Oxfordshire adviser Milton Gordon: “Dynamic Planner has added value to the firm, in terms of ensuring suitability, by helping me design investment portfolios. In terms of efficiency, it saves me many hours of work and adds accuracy to my portfolio design. In terms of demonstrating value to clients, I can easily demonstrate to them my portfolio design process.”

Close up of water

Cash flow Planning

Cliff Patterson, of Kent firm AV Trinity: “Dynamic Planner enables us to ensure suitability in a number of ways. What we particularly like about it is the ability to clearly demonstrate to a client the impact in stochastic modelling terms of either down-risking or up-risking their investment portfolio. That process can be very powerful, because clients clearly see the impact of decisions they are considering.”

Dynamic Planner Analyst

Research & Recommendations

Tom Orchard, of Wiltshire firm Annetts & Orchard: “We realised that we needed to conduct a review of our investment process, because at that time we were using a provider’s risk profiler, which was not whole of market, so we obviously had a massive gap in our process. We decided that we wanted to use one company, which is going to map for us risk profiles of all the different types of investments we use – Dynamic Planner.”

Martin Allsop, of Wiltshire firm Marshwood Financial Services: “If you are sat with a client and looking at fund analysis, you can see the ‘efficient frontier’ and where their portfolio sits on that scale, which, as an adviser, I am finding really useful – and clients themselves are finding that analysis really interesting.”

“We don’t use funds from a particular platform. The only thing we ensure is that they have a Dynamic Planner rating,” said Devon adviser Louise Jones. “Dynamic Planner makes life more simple, in short. It means we don’t have to complete lots and lots of fund research, because Dynamic Planner has already done it for us. We are simply too small a business to physically and adequately research the market for clients.”

Laura Hutchings, of Northamptonshire firm The Pension House: “We go into Dynamic Planner’s Portfolio Suitability Hub to research and recommend funds for clients. It is fantastic – I love it. You can quickly filter down your research to Premium and Select rated funds, which we like, because that’s what you want to recommend to clients: funds which have outperformed their peers.”

Dynamic Planner reports clearly demonstrate the value you add to the investment process.

Client Reports

“The reports you can produce in Dynamic Planner look very professional and the system helps make our advice process both robust and efficient,” said Neil Beattie, of Birmingham firm Cadence Financial Solutions. “I would certainly recommend it to a fellow adviser – and I do.”

Cliff Patterson, of Kent firm AV Trinity, said: “At AV Trinity, we are chartered financial planners and we are very proud of that fact, so client reports are not only important in terms of ensuring suitability and compliance with the FCA, but also in terms of presentation to clients.”

Jeremy Calderbank, of Rigby Financial on Merseyside: “In Dynamic Planner’s new Client Review report, the client can easily see where they were 12 months ago – what money has gone in; what money has gone out; and the growth in the portfolio. It just makes everything so much simpler, as a snapshot for the client.

“On top of that, it is a document we as a firm can use very easily. We can print it off; it looks nice; and we can personalise it. For example, where our offices are, near St Helens, they back onto green, rolling fields – so we just took a photograph of them and used that as our front cover image. It just works for us.”

A compass symbolising the transformation of Independent Financial Advisers

Implementation

“The integration between Dynamic Planner and Intelligent Office is hugely important to me,” said South Yorkshire adviser Serena van der Meulen. “My job would be more difficult without it, because it would mean repeating work which can so easily lead to human error as well as time wasted in the day. Using the integration, all client information is perfectly consistent.”

She added: “The valuation integrations Dynamic Planner has with different platforms are very useful because, at the click of a button, they pull through a client’s valuations as well as fund breakdowns. Long gone are the days of searching for ISIN codes to work out unit prices.”

Neil Beattie, of Birmingham firm Cadence Financial Solutions: “Intelligent Office is the back office system we use, so we can send all the client fact find over from there to Dynamic Planner. The two systems work well together.”

Dynamic Planner Apps

Digital Advice

Lee Waters, of East Sussex firm Barwells Wealth: “In terms of efficiency, Dynamic Planner’s iPad app really helps. It’s a ‘one and done’ job: you get the questionnaire answers; you can produce a report; you can print the report; and the client can walk away with it from a meeting. That’s sped up our process considerably. Ensuring the client walks away with something tangible like a report helps you as an adviser demonstrate value, because clients can see what you are doing.”

“Dynamic Planner is fantastic and the biggest time saving service for me,” said Neil Beattie of Birmingham firm Cadence Financial Solutions. “It saves me a lot of time when you consider how you can get the client to complete the risk profiling prior to a face to face meeting. Also, using the app on an iPad saves on paper – I think there is too much paper used in this industry – and always having to print everything out.”

Devon adviser Louise Jones: “If we were not able to use Dynamic Planner on an iPad, I would be sat with a client using a piece of paper, going back to the office and then inputting all that information into the system – then going back to the client and telling them what their attitude to risk is. Using Dynamic Planner, I can sit with the client and talk it through in real time. They can instantly feed back and tell me that they aren’t comfortable having investments that risky. In all, that saves me a heck of a lot of time.”

A Dynamic Planner talking to an Independent Financial Adviser

Training & Support

“The people on Dynamic Planner’s Client Success team are brilliant and masters at using Dynamic Planner,” said David Owen, Wealth Sales Director at Lifetime Connect. “The customer support you receive as a result is fantastic. We really like it and have nothing but high praise for it.

“Everyone on the team is very knowledgeable and what we particularly like about the support is, you call up, they’ll ask you where you are in the system and what you are currently doing. Then they’ll say, ‘Okay. Hit that and you’re good to go’. It’s brilliant and stops you sitting there staring at a screen for two hours trying to work it out.”

Dean Mullaly, of Mark Dean Wealth Management in London: “We love the support you get from the Client Success team at Dynamic Planner – they are great. You can call up; they don’t try and get you off the phone; they login and share the screen; and they stay on the line with you, right until the end to ensure you have resolved your issue. It’s really, really good. For me, this is Dynamic Planner’s biggest selling point.”

South Yorkshire adviser Serena van der Meulen: “I frequently request the help of the Client Success team at Dynamic Planner. The service and support they provide is excellent and couldn’t be more helpful. The value they add makes Dynamic Planner much more attractive as a proposition to you as an adviser. You know that once you have passed them a question it will be dealt with. This is rare in our industry.”