Dynamic Planner, the UK’s leading risk based financial planning system, has analysed the data* of the 40% of the UK advice market it serves ahead of the anniversary of Consumer Duty.
In the past 12 months, Dynamic Planner has seen exponential growth in usage as its technology is increasingly adopted and utilised to solve the new demands and challenges faced by the industry. Advisers are now generating reports and undertaking reviews more frequently than ever before, with the number of reports created increasing by 100% year-on-year to over 100,000 a month in June. The demand for Annual Reviews and Cash Flow Reports has grown fastest.
Technology has enabled advisers to become more efficient, drastically reducing the time spent reviewing and creating reports: specifically for Dynamic Planner – 16 mins to generate a Review Report; 10 mins for Client Profile Reports; 19 mins for Recommendation Reports; and 28 mins for Cash Flow Reports.
Consumer Duty has put the spotlight on target markets and in the past 12 months, advisers have increasingly used the target market feature in Dynamic Planner, originally put in place to support PROD and MiFID but also aligned to Consumer Duty. Around 1 in 4 firms have now created target markets, with an average of 130 new target markets created every month. Since July 2023 over 1,500 target markets have been created with numbers peaking at the expected times of year in July 2023 ahead of the advent of Consumer Duty, followed by March ahead of the end of tax year; and November pre-Christmas. Year on year there has been a 44% increase in the number of firms using target markets for their recommendations.
In line with the 2021 FCA ‘Guidance for firms on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers’ further amplified under the lens of Consumer Duty, advice firms have completed over 5,000 of Dynamic Planner’s psychometric Financial Wellbeing Questionnaires (FWQ) with their clients over the past year. Dynamic Planner’s FWQ is designed in line with Consumer Duty and the algorithm of the FCA Financial Lives survey. It accurately assesses a client’s characteristics of vulnerability evaluating a client for ‘low’, ‘moderate’ or ‘high vulnerability’ in four areas: health, life events, resilience and capability.
Chris Jones, Chief Product Officer, Dynamic Planner said: “Consumer Duty brought sweeping change across the advice industry and over the past 12 months firms have been working hard to deliver on the guidance set out. We understand that any change or innovation takes time and we are determined to support our clients throughout to meet their objectives and help them to avoid harm.
“As with all new regulation, Consumer Duty has presented challenges and obstacles but the industry has and is overcoming them, with technology central to this success. Our analysis of how advice firms use Dynamic Planner to meet the new regulatory demands they face is a reassuring testimony to our ease of use and the quality of our users. They can rest assured that we will continue to innovate and align with the prevailing regulatory principles and changing requirements faced by the industry such as the Retirement Income Review, in both theirs and their clients’ best interests.”
