Wish List / Set-Up Advice
Hi everyone, my boss, who is an IFA, currently works for a company but is thinking of setting up on his own. We're just at the start of the process and so I was wondering if you/your boss was setting up now what would your advice be/what would you wish for?
Back office systems? Client Databases? Paraplanning systems? etc
I think this is a golden opportunity to get a really slick, well thought out operation up and running but as I have only been working in this industry for a year any help that your experience could offer would be very much appreciated.
Thank you.
Back office systems? Client Databases? Paraplanning systems? etc
I think this is a golden opportunity to get a really slick, well thought out operation up and running but as I have only been working in this industry for a year any help that your experience could offer would be very much appreciated.
Thank you.
Comments
What i have found in my own experience as working for a directly authorised independent company is that the best individual pieces of software, when put together, do not always produce the slickest of operations, in fact quite often the opposite is true. Therefore, it is helpful when designing your ideal IFA firm to also gather together a list of the 'essential' and 'desirable' software and place more weighting to the essential bits first, and then look at the desirable list and try and go with what works best with that. This of course is easier said than done!
He's wanting to end up as an independent, directly authorised adviser. Mainly people approaching retirement, so looking at pensions, investments and some IHT stuff.
Ok, so I suppose the follow on from me is:
What would be your top essential software products?
My first piece of essential software would always be MS Office, more specifically Excel and Word. Then it already starts to get rather difficult. Probably O&M or Selectapension are needed for retirement planning purposes, then you have a choice between FE Analytics or Morningstar for fund research and investment committee (I'd personally choose FE on this, and not just for the fund research but for all the other potential uses that follows). You have a choice of whether you want to free hand suitability reports, build templates in house, or source suitability software tools externally (there is a separate thread on this i think).You can also run valuations straight from your back office - see below - or outsource this to a software provider (or use a combination). All of these could be classed as either essential or desirable depending on your own point of view, and possibly budget as these things aren't cheap!
Then, you get to the one that ties it all together and which is probably the key bit of kit - the back office software provider. I can't comment too much on this to be honest, but what i do know is that Adviser Office 'does a job' but is incredibly dated and some tasks are cumbersome to the Nth degree. If you aim to work paperless then you'll need a good (hardware) scanner but also the correct provider to back the documents up to as well, and some of these are better than others in terms of integration with back office. We use virtual cabinet and this is very good, if you know how to use it to its full potential, and admittedly you cannot unless you move to the newer, cloud based back office providers. Volume is meant to be good too.
I've heard better things about other back office software providers but simply haven't had any experience of them to comment. If you want to be really fluid then this has to be the most important consideration because some providers can now build you a specification where your other software can then link into, so you don;t have to rekey client details when you create applications or when obtaining quotes for annuities for example. More and more clients also want to access 'real time' valuations and similar via online or portal access, and some providers now have these sorts of features too rather than requiring the client to login to platforms. If you are starting from scratch and do not need to port data from another provider, you will already have a major advantage and i would wholeheartedly recommend spending lots of time building a bespoke back office that works exactly how it needs to.
This is just a brief list/ set of ideas so i hope its helpful! I'm not attending the PowWow at Transact's office later this month but you might get some more really helpful information there as i believe software is a topic.