Ben Goss: ‘The ability to really track client outcomes is going to be a game-changer’

“The ability to really track, understand and track outcomes is going to be a game-changer because consumer duty is forcing it. The first part of the financial planning cycle is: what does the client want to achieve? But it hasn’t really been tracked,” he says. 

“And that’s because tracking outcomes are technically quite difficult. There are lots of variables, but with good financial planning technology [provides] the ability to monitor the portfolio daily, and the ability to monitor positions and to articulate to the client where they are at any given time against their plan.”

Goss says this is where a company such as Dynamic Planner would come in, because it has developed technology to support advisers conducting reviews, which can track and understand clients’ outcomes against their objectives.

As a result of the Dynamic Planner technology that advisers incorporate into their annual reviews, he says that in some cases this has cut the review time down to 18 minutes from as much as five hours.

“We have clients who have gone from 80 to 100 end clients per adviser to 200 to 300 clients per adviser [...] because they are using end-to-end technology to crush down that time, cost and risk of delivering advice,” he says.

“The system does not give advice, the adviser does that, but it crunches the numbers, does the math and ensures you don’t have to rekey or do all of that checking you did on manual systems.

We have clients who have gone from 80 to 100 end clients per adviser to 200 to 300 clients per adviser, because they are using end-to-end technology to crush down that time

“In that review, you can check whether the risk of the portfolio is still suitable, and you can track whether the client is still on track for their objectives, which is very powerful.”

Speaking to Goss as the company marks its 20th anniversary, he says getting the time down to 18 minutes has been helped with the use of digital apps for the customer to use so that they can, for example, tell the adviser ahead of a review what has changed in their circumstances, or they can check their fact find on their phone.

Goss says advisers have also expressed satisfaction with the tool, which is not just helping them cut down on time, but it also means they can pass this on in fewer fees to their clients.

“[The adviser says], ‘if it’s taking me 18 minutes, I can charge a lot less or I could charge a fraction of what I was charging, and therefore the minimum fee client or the minimum investment that a client might be offered can come right down’.

“And we absolutely have firms today who are using Dynamic Planner for that purpose.”

Dynamic Planner, which claims to be used by 40 per cent of investment advisers and was set up 20 years ago, has been at the forefront of technological change in financial planning and asset management.

When the business first started, its core objective was to use technology to make financial advice and planning engaging, to enable people to live and fund the life that they want.

Goss still remembers signing the formation papers in his south-East London flat all those years ago.

He says: "One of the most enjoyable parts of building the business has been the people and some of our early team are still with Dynamic Planner today. And I am incredibly proud of what our team has achieved and the culture we have built within the business."

A lot has happened in the industry since then, not least pension freedoms and the Retail Distribution Review.

Twenty years ago a lot of people still had defined benefit pension schemes, which were built with little to no need for engagement from the policyholder. The biggest change that the pension reforms introduced was choice — making advice a critical component of that.

“Today, we enable reviews, we have products and a platform, research and recommendations, and full suitability. So the ability to go end-to-end with a front office financial planning system, connected to your back office connected to your platforms of choice is our footprint,” Goss says.

Now, the next big wave of regulation that arguably will bring about as much change as the RDR and pension freedoms is consumer duty.

“We believe that there is a rapidly growing market now for firms to do things differently than they might have done before consumer duty. The need to adopt more efficient financial planning and financial advice processes that demonstrate value to your clients, at the same time, has really powered our growth over the past few years,” he says.

“And we can see that it will continue to do so over the next few years, as the industry gets to grips with consumer duty.

“You can't deliver your obligations on consumer duty unless you are focused on outcome and value to the client, but by delivering that at an economic cost that works for you as a business delivers value to your client. Front office financial planning technology has a really important role to play in all of that.”

An environmental science and geography graduate, Goss started his journey in the industry by working for a fund manager during the summer of 1987, where he would be given a script to use when speaking to investors about why they should invest in a particular asset.

A few months later, the Black Monday crash happened. 

Unlevel playing field

Goss, who qualified as a financial adviser, went on and co-founded Sort in 1998, touted as the UK's first online investment adviser. Two years later it was sold to a US-based online adviser. 

As his career in financial services developed and he looked back on that early period, he felt that the playing field was skewed against investors.

“Those consumers didn’t really understand what they were getting into. There was no suitability process, there was no good quality advice,” he says. 

"As I spent more time in financial services, I felt that the combination of technology, internet-based technology, great best practice investment and financial planning can play a really important role in helping people fund the life they want, at a risk that is right for them, that takes account of their objectives, and does so in a really transparent and engaging way, so that we can help make planning your retirement 15 years from now as interesting as planning your next holiday.”

To enable the next stage in its expansion, Dynamic Planner received financial backing from private equity growth investor FPE Capital, as it looks to double its size in the UK and expand into Europe.

Goss says: “What they do bring is clearly more firepower in terms of financials, but they also bring expertise. We deliberately selected FPE as [a company that] shares our values about how business should be run.”

With all the technological change that Goss has seen in the industry and that has happened in financial planning, one thing that technology has been unable to change is the need for human interaction — something that even artificial intelligence cannot replace.

We believe that there is a rapidly growing market now for firms to do things differently than they might have done before consumer duty

“The engagement with the client [with the use of technology and financial planning technology] post-Covid, has really radically increased,” he says.

“So advisers will send out something like 12,000 invitations a month from Dynamic Planner, to ask clients to complete some of the financial planning process to gather data and do some risk-profiling to review their circumstances. 

“In doing that, hopefully the client engages a bit in their finances and gets to think about the information they’re providing. Technology can’t replace that human-to-human feeling.

“With some of the things that we’ve done with mobile technology and mobile friendly technology — the ability to enable clients to engage with their own financial planning — I think we’re scratching the surface as to what’s possible there.”

Another well-known passion of Goss's is the drive for diversity and inclusion, which he says is crucial to his business as it leads to diversity of thought from which better understanding and solutions for clients emerge.

Looking ahead, Goss says he is as excited now about the prospect of Dynamic Planner and the industry as he was 20 years ago.

He says: "We are entering a new era for the industry with the advent of consumer duty, and an increasingly digital world where technology powering advice is now essential to deliver suitable and sustainable portfolios through engaging financial planning.

"It’s a huge opportunity for us to bring what we do to millions more investors and even more advice firms."

Ima Jackson-Obot is deputy features editor of FTAdviser