Headlines this month
Welcome to our latest Progress Report, designed to keep you updated on the service enhancements we’ve been working on.
Covering everything from platform developments to updates to our investment offering, this is your one stop shop to find out what we’ve delivered to make your and your clients’ lives easier.
We’ll also give you a sneak peek of what’s coming up and when. Some of these things might change, be pushed back or get reprioritised depending on how complex they are, feedback from advisers, or if we need to pivot to new laws or regulations. But we’ll keep you posted here when this happens.
Without further ado, here’s May’s update.
Updates to Vantage
Our Vantage reporting dashboard has been updated to include a new tab called New Business under the My Business section. It includes the number and value of items in the pipeline, transfer in values and more.
A new Access tab has been added to My Team showing adviser and paraplanner names, whether or not they have MFA enabled, and their last login.
Not got access to Vantage? Get in touch with your regional sales manager and they’ll get the ball rolling.
A sneak preview of tiered adviser charging
If you missed our recent Never Stop Improving webinar with our CEO, Martin Jennings, here’s a quick preview of an early concept. This is subject to change.
We’re planning to launch this late summer. From then you’ll be able to:
- create different adviser charging structures on the platform, determine the number of tiers and the percentage charge for each tier.
- link new and existing clients to the correct tiered charging structure and move clients easily between charging structures.
What's happened?
Better data
- We’ve made client quarterly reports clearer and more streamlined. You’ll have received emails about this over the last few months, but in a nutshell, they have all the essential information about your clients' investments and portfolio performance, without the extra detail on things like dividends and income statements. Your clients will start seeing the updated reports from 1st June.
- More CGT reporting enhancements are here. Our tax packs will be generated at client level rather than portfolio level, to make CGT planning easier for you and your clients. These are available to download from the platform now. Consolidated unrealised gains reports have been pushed back to allow us to focus on tiered adviser charging.
- Vantage has been updated to include information on your new business pipeline and which of your clients have MFA enabled. More on this in the feature highlight above.
Digital first
- We’ve made platform notifications better – you can now search and filter notifications to make them more manageable. Archive functionality will come around July.
Financial Planning
- We’ve agreed the scope and initial iteration of our tiered adviser charging solution, provisionally targeting a late summer release. You can find out more about this here. You can watch a short concept video in the feature highlight section above.
- Based on recent adviser feedback following the LTA changes, we made some small but useful additions to the SIPP allowances under Investment Details page. They now display how much of the Lump Sum Allowance (LSA) is used by a client’s transitional certificate (if they have one), and if a client’s LSA is from a protection certificate.
What's next?
- Quicker payments through Natwest PayitTM - you’ll send a link to the client; it’ll open their banking app and they can pay straightaway. This will be for the top-up journey initially, but we’ll roll it out for more processes in the future (coming June/July).
- Clients will be able to approve a Direct Debit mandate through the app. The adviser will set up the mandate, the client will get an alert on the app, tap approve and it’ll be ready to go (coming June/July).
- We’re looking at how we can share the data from client’s quarterly report packs in a downloadable .csv format, to help streamline your annual reviews and support your consumer duty obligations (coming June/July).
- We’ve shifted our focus from offering clients the option to change their address in the app and online to simplifying our electronic signature and identity verification (ID&V) processes, to make it even easier for your clients to confirm address changes (coming Autumn).
What's happened?
Investment reporting and content
- Don’t miss our latest weekly market update and fortnightly ESG insights, to keep up to speed on the latest market trends.
Investment Choice
- We’ve added lots of new DFMs to the platform including Elston, Quilter and Portfolio Metrix. To see the full list of third party DFMs available on our platform, click here.
What's next?
- We’ve completed some behind-the-scenes work, like connecting to Equisoft, and we’re looking to make ETFs available on platform for third party DFMs around July.
What's happened?
- We’re reviewing all our ethical investing literature in line with the new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements. These will be available by end of May.
What's next?
- TCFD reports, including our own, will be available in client’s’ quarterly report packs from June.
- Pensions Dashboard is in the spotlight again and we need to be ready by April 2025, for a planned rollout to clients and advisers in 2026 - we've started scoping the work involved to meet the new deadline.