Looking back over the past year brought me to jot down some of the more memorable events and issues we faced this year:

Major upheaval in the Money Markets

Exciting new launches of several new Sales tools for the adviser market

Regular fines coming from the FSA

Repositions on the increase

Young Mr Thelwell of AT8 passing his IOD exams

Credit Crunch

House prices starting to fall

Retail Distribution Review

IFA Consolidation

Soggy summer of floods

TCF coming into force

MiFID

A Crazy Chancellor with disregard for entrepreneurs

Solutions being refreshed and upgraded by IT companies, at a rate rarely seen, throughout the distributor market place

If you have some time, try our Christmas Game

Have a great Christmas – the blogs will start again in the New Year.

Many of the IT decisions made by distributors continue to surprise me, yet some of the same decisions happen time and time again.  One such case is the purchase of multiple systems, to do broadly the same job, from multiple suppliers.  Of course this is not new as my colleague Mark Thelwell (a lot older and therefore able to talk in far more depth about historical decisions) once told me that when they merged AXA and Sun Life, AXA had one POS system but Sun Life discovered that they had seven!

Things aren’t quite that bad now, but many distributors still end up with separate systems for mortgages and full financial planning solutions, or even a separate ‘Wealth Management’ system.  The duplication brings with it different user interfaces for the advisers to learn, additional licence costs, additional support costs, no single point of contact for support and often a bad headache!  The decisions are usually justified initially on the basis that no one system does what the business needs.

Why should this still be so?

Well suppliers don’t make it easy and have often segmented themselves into different niches.  Mortgage Stream, Mortgage Keeper, Trigold, Mortgage Brain are all strong Mortgage systems but offer little to help support a financial planner.  Moreover these systems are at a price point that that makes it unattractive to the financial planning software providers to enter this segment in a whole-hearted way. In the other direction you have systems like Distribution Technology, that have fantastic financial planning functionality but are lacking in their support for a mortgage sales process.  The Mortgage systems don’t tend to enter into Financial Planning as serving this market niche properly can be extremely complex and therefore costly to cater for.

However, things are changing via some of the larger software houses that have the financial muscle to carry the investment needed to bring these solutions together.  1^st Software has recently launched their mortgage solution, Crystal has a financial planning solution on the blocks and Focus is looking to support both markets with their 360° package.  Will the end users still purchase separate systems – you bet – buying processes will still often be self contained in silos with separate business cases needed for each system and maybe even a degree of politics coming to play too. But others will look at the needs more holistically and may even adapt their own business model rather than trying to tailor the software.  Those that do, could gain from a more cost effective approach, and ultimately may provide a more user friendly infrastructure for their advisers.

Many companies provide employee benefits – that’s the good news. However, they, or more particularly their intermediaries that service the business, seem to be missing an opportunity. Having managed an SME and therefore been a client in two ways, I was amazed at the lack of proactive use of technology along with a strange reluctance to actively service the business and people within it. Having spoken to others, it would seem that this is not unusual…! Without wishing to be generalist and judgemental, it may be that after the ‘initial commission’ from setting up the schemes, there is felt to be little opportunity to earn money and so justify the time.

Rather than debate whether or not this is indeed the motive, I would simply say that I believe that many companies are missing out in two fundamental ways. The first is that the client companies are a great affinity group and if they were proactively serviced along with regular marketing, I believe that there would be a mutually profitable relationship for all – employees, employers and the intermediary alike. The second opportunity is to employ better use of technology. With the access to more and more comprehensive POS and Back Office solutions that can operate on and offline along with the new Wrap platforms, it is now possible to integrate these into a Worksite Marketing proposition. It is possible to create processes whereby you can use the systems to gather client factfind data, do some remote analysis [Para planning] and prepare for a more focused and effective client meeting that could be supported by telephone, internet or even video calling. You can enable clients to access their benefit information remotely and even use technology to market more effectively.

The important thing is to be effective and efficient (doing the right things in the right way). Advisers should see and seize the opportunity to apply the use of technology for the benefit of clients [employee and employer] and adviser. Using technology can create new ways of interacting with the Worksite personnel and as a tool that supports the right approach it also makes it more efficient.