Axa Wealth, in addition to its Elevate platform and multi-manager provider Architas, all appeared within Financial Adviser’s five-star ranked providers this year in the life and pensions and investment categories, a feat which Mr Kellard put down to a commitment to improve service and to make ongoing technological advances to its client proposition.
Architas has created an RDR-ready suite of investment solutions with three ranges of multi-manager funds allowing the adviser to choose between active, passive or blended multi-asset portfolios in a range of risk profiles.
Axa Wealth’s focus has been on ensuring it fulfilled its RDR commitments and to make it easier to do business with the company. Mr Kellard said “We are moving much more towards becoming a digitally positioned business, and to facilitate this we have been recruiting staff across the whole company with digital and marketing backgrounds to push this change forward.
“The changes in our industry are not just down to restructuring how we sell our products, it’s also about infrastructure and marketing and bringing in a different viewpoint into the business, often from outside the financial services industry.
“We want our online propositions to be as effective as the likes of Amazon, and to have simple and easy to access functionality. By 2013 Axa will be very much a different type of company. We sold our legacy book a couple of years ago. We’re now less of an old-world life company and more of a digitally focused wealth management firm.”
On the RDR, Mr Kellard added: “We had a certain advantage due to the fact that as a business we were not reliant on commission. Winterthur’s proposition was fee-based more than 12 years ago, and Axa Wealth’s economic model was built on this fee-based structure. But we have obviously had to make changes on the technical side of our service proposition to comply with the RDR proposals.
“The pressure came more from making sure the service proposition was compliant, and how we engaged with our customer base in assisting them in their preparations.”
Axa Wealth have been very active in offering RDR training and workshops to help advisers make the transition to the new regulatory environment. Consultants from the Axa Wealth Professional Edge team will have run more than 2500 hours of seminars and workshops by the end of the year, with Mr Kellard stating: “We have listened a lot more to the advisers about what they need, rather than tell them what to do as part of their RDR preparations.
“All of our consultants are accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute and qualified to chartered level themselves, so they know what the advisers have to go through. Our seminars and workshops also give the opportunity for advisers to claim 15 CPD credits, forming part of the structured CPD required under the new RDR regulations.”
Additionally, completion of an Axa Wealth seminar can be used where appropriate for gap-fill purposes.
Andy Zanelli, head of retirement planning for Axa Wealth said the qualifications of its consultants meant they could keep pace with the speed of legislative, regulatory and taxation change, ensuring they can help advisers understand what the changes mean for their business and clients, and that they would continue to develop to match the qualifications of advisers.
With the approach delivering positive feedback from advisers, he added: “This is just the start, as the adviser community moves towards chartered status Axa Wealth believes that in order to continue offering advisers market leading, ‘value-add’ services, any teams delivering support need to demonstrate at least the same level of commitment and understanding.”
A business transition programme run by Professional Edge has assisted advisers in looking past the qualification hurdles they faced and onto how they make their businesses thrive, with staff from more than 50 advisory firms learning how to re-evaluate their personal and business objectives and creating a profitable pricing strategy that will stand up to the rigours of the post-RDR charging model.
Gary Thompson, head of specialist support for Axa Wealth, said: “advisers need to survive throughout 2013 and beyond. The changes they make to their businesses today will help them achieve their client employee and business goals, which is what we are here to support.”
Mike Kellard added: “We have also been focusing on the segmented market, looking at the different types of adviser in the post-RDR world.
“I think we will see quite a lot of independent advisers become restricted. From our point of view we are pretty agnostic over the matter. As long as our products match the consumer’s needs we will be happy, and I don’t necessarily thing that becoming restricted is particularly a bad thing either.
“If you have two or three good offerings and a wrap platform with a good choice of funds, it can be a good example. I think there is less of a stigma about becoming restricted now than in the past.”
Adding that Axa aimed to make the Elevate platform as user friendly as an iPad, he stated more than £10m a year was invested in its development.
Elevate is also the basis of the Axa Self Investor platform, which can be ‘white-labelled’ by IFA firms as a proposition for clients who may not need the full range of financial advice offered through Architas.
He said: “We want to see Elevate continue to improve in terms of usability and we will keep adding to the platform and ensure it is easier to integrate into an adviser’s back office systems.”
Kevin White is a features writer at Financial Adviser
