The new product will be showcased at the company’s conference on Thursday, July 1st and released via a controlled roll-out thereafter.
New Provider Partners
Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow includes integrated services with a number of new partner companies: Scottish Mutual (bond valuations); the SIPP Centre (SIPP valuations); Morgan Stanley Quilter (portfolio valuations and transactions) and Cofunds (extended to provide downloadable valuations, full transaction history and historic data).
Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow is aimed at professional advisers dealing in financial planning, portfolio management, retirement planning, protection, mortgages and corporate benefits. The new product is designed to help advisers reduce the hours spent on compliance and administration, releasing greater time for advisers to focus on delivering high standards of advice to both private and corporate clients.
Other new features of Adviser Office:Intelligent Workflow include:
1. Intelligent Workflow – extensive range of new tools to help standardise business processes and improve procedures for both front and back office efficiency
2. Objective based financial planning – incorporating new financial planning tools and Tillinghast-Towers Perrin stochastic modelling techniques (as used on Standard Life’s IFA extranet)
3. ASP & Consultant Client Transfer – enabling advisers to work wherever and whenever they need by giving access via internet, ASP, desktop, laptop, tablet and PDA
4. Mortgage Manager (formerly Mortgage Tracker) completely redesigned to form a single process, including a new fact-find and KPI reports
5. Employee Benefits Manager (previously Employer Services) completely redesigned to form a simplified, intuitive processes, including ‘new employer’ wizard
6. Increased lead generation and lead tracking functionality – intelligently sources best consultant for each lead, based on specialisms, locations and activity levels
7. Intelligent compliance checking functionality – with system defined events tools able to ensure all data needed for compliance is completed
Nick Bowler, channel manager (financial planning) at 1st, said:
“Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow provides tools that empower the adviser to maximise the chances of meeting a client’s financial objectives. All of the financial planning tools have been built with input from a number of expert financial planners, to help advisers in the move from ‘product based’ to ‘advice based’ sales, which is why we are confident that this extra functionality will be a success."
New Financial Planning Suite
Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow includes a suite of new financial planning tools which provide advisers with sophisticated modelling techniques to help analyse a client’s entire portfolio against a number of financial objectives. At the heart of the system is a powerful calculation engine developed by actuarial and management consultants, Tillinghast – Towers Perrin. The engine allows an adviser to:
- determine and illustrate the statistical probability of achieving clients’ goals
- set multiple investment objectives as part of a cash flow based holistic financial planning process
- associate new and existing assets and investments when analysing the probability of achieving goals
- identify as a starting point an optimum asset allocation to reflect the client’s ideal portfolio, based on a psychometric risk profile and a user-defined or an “efficient frontier” portfolio produced by a stochastic asset model
Bruce Moss, principal of Tillinghast, commented:
“The stochastic modelling analysis is a new feature of the popular cash flow financial planning tools originally launched by 1st Software in 2003, which incorporates attitude to risk software produced by The Silent Partner and the output from Tillinghast’s stochastic financial planning tool - eValue. Together, the tools provide a sophisticated, yet easy to understand analysis of the client’s objectives, investments and attitude to risk. The tools are integrated with the Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow’s fact find and with sophisticated and fully customisable report writing capabilities using Microsoft Word.”
Employee Benefits Functionality
The introduction of additional workflow functionality to the Employer Services module of Adviser Office: Intelligent Workflow will allow users to manage group business in one place without having to access other areas of Adviser Office.
Two new wizards have been developed to further improve business processes and allow intermediaries more time to focus on advice. The New Employer Wizard prompts users through the process of adding an employer and corporate fact find, whereas the New Scheme Wizard makes adding new business onto the system quicker and easier. Both wizards include workflow elements that allow users to create standard workflow processes which can then be saved within the system.
In addition, the Employer Services module has been updated to include activity management for employers and scheme members, corporate fact find and scheme commission. SIPP functionality has been moved into its own module making integration with the Client Management module more seamless.
