Parmenion is delighted that Marianne Streames, Head of Proposition, has been long-listed for the Women in Financial Advice [WIFA 2019] Awards, from a total field of over 1,100 nominations. These awards are all about celebrating and recognising the achievements of women in a sector where they continue to be under-represented. Marianne’s nomination is in “Retirement”, a category open to women whose achievements and work in retirement-related areas of UK financial services have helped enhance the sector or raise its profile as a career for women. The winners will be announced at an event in London on 3rd July. Two particular areas of Marianne’s recent work which have led to this nomination, her participation in the UK Treasury’s Tech Sprint to come up with a solution to assist self-employed people to save for retirement and the development of Parmenion’s Income Manager Tool (IMT).
Marianne’s career track record in technology success goes back several years and a particular highlight must be the 2014 launch of Interact, Parmenion’s online simplified advice tool for use by advisory businesses. Not an out and out robo, this technology gives financial advisers the capability to add a channel to their business to capture and retain clients without the wealth to justify full advice and those with the very simplest of investing needs.
A major area of focus for Marianne over the last couple of years has been the development of Parmenion’s retirement analysis software, the Income Modelling Tool or IMT, sophisticated, charge free technology integrated into our platform.
‘In designing the IMT, it was important to understand the concerns and challenges that the end investor faces when it comes to thinking about retirement. Working alongside our Advisers, our aim was to deliver a tool that could help to clearly demonstrate the impact that longevity and risk can play when needing to make a decision about when to retire and how much income is required’ states Marianne.
What IMT is designed to deliver to advisers is a capability to create in minutes a robust assessment of the likelihood of a retirement plan to meet its objectives whether that is to create income to a point in time, an income for life, the purchase of an annuity or the ability to leave a legacy. Or indeed some combination of any of these goals, underpinned not only by state of the art, post code/age/health/gender specific longevity data but also forward looking capital market assumptions. In retirement, it is less helpful to dwell on historic performance. It’s an independent, professional assessment of what happens next that counts, as you would expect to see if you were a trustee of a large pension scheme. IMT brings all this simply into focus with input from consulting actuaries Hymans Robertson. Needless to say this project was a lot easier to imagine than to deliver! It took the co-ordination of expert actuaries, Parmenion’s investment team, external consultants and developers, our own in-house scrum teams and is now being rolled out to advisers through our business development team.
“It is well understood that diverse teams create better business outcomes and I am delighted that Marianne has been nominated for this award. It is testament to her breadth of knowledge, tenacity and focus and she thoroughly deserves the recognition,” said Sarah Lyons, Chief Marketing Officer at Parmenion.