360 Templates
Hello
Bit of an odd request.
I have been contacted by an adviser who asked for my opinion about 360 templates. He's thinking about using them going forward, however the templates he has been sent are very raw. He asked if I'd ever used them and if I had any examples of the finished article. I think he just wanted to get an idea of how they might look once they had been worked through.
I couldn't help him, but I said I'd reach out to you lovely lot and ask if you found 360 templates straight forward and if you had any example finished articles that he could view (suitably redacted of course).
Look forward to hearing from you
Maddy
Comments
Hi Maddy
I've seen these templates from working at previous employers and remember them being very wordy, very compliancey and not client friendly at all. That being said, I don't know that they are designed to be used as they are and perhaps the reason they are so raw is they may be more for using the wording to put in your own format.
I've not seen them for a number of months so they may have changed but if they are still like that, then they would need a lot of work to get to the finished article.
On a separate note, I'm not sure I would give someone a sample report, redacted or otherwise, that's your IP you'd be giving for free!
I don't know if my response will actually be any help to you at all! 😂
Thanks for that - I'll feed that back to him.
I think he's seen that the templates are wordy and just wanted a general idea of how much they can be whittled down. He'd have the content anyway from the templates themselves, he just wanted an idea of what a worked example could look like before he committed himself.
I think that I'll suggest he goes back to 360 as they might have worked examples for him.
I was surprised at how poor the 360 templates are and didn't find them useful at all really. I used them as a rough guide for the flow of a report but essentially built our templates from scratch. 360 also have checklists which can help from a compliance point of view to ensure you're including the relevant bits but as far as their templates go, they're of little use.
Pleasure treasure!
and that sounds like a good plan!
I'm sure this is semantics, but are we talking about threesixty, the compliance people?
If so, they only provide word templates - there's no 'wizard' or anything to make them into a fully fledged report.
You can use them, of course, but I don't know that I would. We tend to complete a 'financial plan' style report and there's no template that fits that mould.
I do use their technical sheets however, and use them as an appendix for the products recommended in the report.
EDIT: Attached the Pension Transfer example template.
Hi all...
I've deleted the attachment from Aron's previous post as it breaks forum rules on sharing licensed material.
I tend to agree with the general comments of all in this thread. Although I don't like threesixty's product technical sheets either and I've recently abandoned most of the technical appendices I had used in my reports, in favour of much shorter explanations in the main body..
I've also ditched appendices covering off generic product info. If the information is in the key features and other docs that accompany a report, does it need to be repeated in the report? I tend to signpost to the page they can find it and my clients and their compliance people are so far happy with that.
If the product has a feature that is of specific benefit to the client and will help them to achieve their goals, then that needs to be detailed in the reasons why part of the report. If it's already written somewhere else, why repeat it if you can direct them to it.
Say it once, say it right is my view!
Hello
Thanks for all your help with this.
Yes, I suppose it was a bit of an odd ask really. I have no working knowledge of the threesixty (you're right Aron) templates and couldn't help the adviser with his query at all.
Have a lovely weekend people
Maddy x
Probably too late if you've already gone back to the adviser, but IMO the Threesixty templates aren't actually too bad as they follow a lot of the principles we've talked about on the various Powwows and Howwows i.e. keep it simple and personalised, remove unecessary generic wording, signpost to other documents etc. Where the adviser might think they look 'raw' is because they aren't like most other report templates the typical compliance people or report generators spit out with all the unecessary compliance gubbins he's used to seeing.
Whilst I still think they need some tweaking still, I think they're a great starting point, but they might just take a while to get used to!