Lessons to learn: How providers won five stars in 2017

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Lessons to learn: How providers won five stars in 2017

The past year has been without a doubt one of the busiest periods for the financial services sector.

Firms across the mortgages, investments and life and pensions market have all been hit by waves of regulatory change, while at the same time trying to stay competitive.

While absorbing all that Retail Distribution Review and pension freedoms bring, on the horizon are Mifid II, the General Data Protection Regulation and the senior managers and certification regime to name but a few.

Evidence of the scale of the challenges faced are highlighted by the actions companies commended in this year’s Financial Adviser Service Awards have taken. A large number have run roadshows, to engage and educate intermediaries on current and upcoming issues.

One company that excelled in this area was investment firm Quilter Cheviot. The firm organised two nationwide series of roadshows engaging with more than 1,750 advisers and creating 25 bespoke documents.

Another investment firm, Brooks Macdonald, hosted 11 adviser academies for professional advisers across the country with a number of high-profile industry speakers.

Providers also recognise that it is not just advisers that need to understand what is going on in the market, but it would make the lives of IFAs easier if their clients were able to get to grips with financial terms too.

With that in mind, a number of firms are embedding simpler language into the information they provide.

Just and Canada Life are among those that are promoting the Plain English Campaign across their businesses. 

This year Just was commended by the campaign for its life and pension product documents. It has also rewritten a further 350 documents to match the Plain English Campaign’s standards.

Group communications director Stephen Lowe said: “We believe designing and rewriting these documents so they explain things in a way that can be easily understood by advisers’ customers makes advisers’ lives easier too. We’ve also trained 150 of our colleagues in the writing tools and styles recommended by the Plain English Campaign.”

At Canada Life through continuous customer surveys, plain English training and ongoing independent communications sampling, the company said it has become closer “than ever” to customers.

This simplification has not stopped at language. 

Simplification of fees has been a big thing for Ascentric this year. Advisers had previously told the platform that its pricing structure was too complicated and difficult to explain.

Head of marketing Sarah Lyons said: “We went for a really simple pricing structure that puts no barriers in the way. Advisers can genuinely give the best advice to that client without any fear of additional charges or costs.”

Ascentric’s fee simplification roll-out was part of a wider review of its service standards.

The company is not alone in trying to find ways to attract new clients and make existing ones stick around. The activities that firms have been engaging in range from reducing the turnaround times for mortgage applications, drawdown requests and defined benefit (DB) pension transfer requests.

At Scottish Widows, staff have been trying to remove unnecessary tasks and barriers to trade.

One of the results that has emerged is that the company has reduced the time it takes individual pensions clients to access their retirement income, by more than 69 per cent.

In the Workplace division, Scottish Widows introduced a new digital hub for employers, which took the average time to process a contribution file from 22 days to less than one day. 

Group chief executive Antonio Lorenzo said: “Our proposition, coverage and customer-facing teams have worked extremely hard to ensure the service we provide to our advisers, employers and customers matches and exceeds their expectations.

Service change programmes have also taken place in the mortgages market.

At Accord, the lender underwent a raft of modifications following complaints from advisers who said the lender was too difficult to deal with.

It rolled out a multimillion investment programme, training more than 100 caseworkers up to underwriter level, and reducing the amount of documentation it requested and the turnaround time from when an application was made to being approved.

David Robinson, national intermediary sales manager at Accord, said: “We have invested significant money to make sure brokers can speak directly to underwriters whenever they need to. For us, to have this recognition and change perception has been a long hard journey – not without its challenges.”

As firms continue to make changes they also look for new markets to enter.

Despite being busy with defined benefit transfers and equity release, a number are considering entering or expanding their protection offering.

Arguably, across all firms and sectors, the biggest changes that have been made are technological. They underpin the strategies companies have formulated as they target new advisers and, more importantly, battle to keep the ones they have.

In a market that is under the constant eye of the Financial Conduct Authority, The Pensions Regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the government, advisers are desperate for an easier life.

Providers that have helped to make their lives simpler have struck on a winning formula.