In this blog, we discuss why EV is the right choice for your digital and hybrid advice provider at a time when technology plays an important part of our daily lives.
Introduction
The world is becoming more digital-first in its approach to everyday life, and the way it conducts business with consumers, and 89% of businesses surveyed have already adopted a digital-first business strategy or plan to do so. The financial advice and planning industry is no exception.
In fact, over 70% of advice firms increased their spending on digital transformation during 2022 to increase business efficiency, and 35% had specifically introduced digital fintech to meet client demand.
Consumers are looking for financial advice that is accessible, personalised, delivers value-for-money and is seamless no matter how they access it - either online or through talking to someone. This means that firms providing advice need to ensure their processes are consistent across all channels.
Digital and hybrid advice providers must offer a solution that can meet these needs while providing clients the convenience and flexibility they demand.
Below we will discuss why EV is a powerful choice of technology partner when looking to build or incorporate a digital and hybrid advice process into your business. Our EVDigital offering is based on our specific benefits of consistent tech, realism, educational tools, future-proof modelling, expertise, and flexible solutions.
The benefits of choosing EV as your Digital and Hybrid Advice Solution Provider
Below we delve into the various benefits of choosing EV to help your organisation create your digital and hybrid financial advice solution:
Consistency
Consistency is one of the most important benefits of any digital and hybrid advice provider. Clients expect to receive the same seamless experience throughout the risk profiler, data gathering and additional questions process. It also requires delivering consistent outputs, underpinned by one calculations engine.
At EV, we are the only provider of guidance and advice tools based on the same calculation engine. In addition, EVDigital ensures digital advice delivery is consistent across all advice channels, including face-to-face advice. This allows clients to move seamlessly between the channels without fear of different or confusing results.
Realism - born from our knowledge of the market and regulations
A digital and hybrid advice provider must focus on consumer outcomes to meet the requirements of FCA’s Consumer Duty. This means having a risk profiling method that focuses on the client’s growth or income objective and risk appetite. This requires an objective-based and forward-looking methodology for risk profiles. It also means having a sensible approach to looking at objective goal setting and achieving the goals. Goal setting and outcome-based needs require realistic forecasting based on the risk and reward of the client's situation, including all the elements of income and fund values. We provide a unique forward-looking risk profiling methodology based on the same calculation engine used to generate the probabilities of clients meeting their financial goals; this alignment is very important and can prevent client risk profiles and unsuitable investment funds from being mismatched together. By engaging effectively with clients, our solutions can gather information about their financial situation, risk tolerance, and goals and use it to provide personalised advice to help them achieve their financial objectives.
Educational and engaging tech - understanding risk and reward
To explain risk and reward, a digital and hybrid advice provider must personalise the goal and choices. Realistic, forward-looking stochastic forecasting is the only way to deliver this in a way that reflects the types of risk that can be seen, such as pound cost averaging and ravaging and sequencing risk. Ignoring these considerations when explaining these risks and rewards could lead to non-compliance with the FCA’s Consumer Duty, as the risks are known in advance and could be foreseen.
EVDigital is the only solution that can provide real-time calculations fast enough to calculate cash flow based on risk and reward in front of clients.
This is particularly important for at and in retirement, where the risks are much greater. In addition, our solution educates the client about the risk and rewards of the goal they are looking for.
Future proofed for a range of financial advice areas
A digital and hybrid advice provider must cover all advice need areas to avoid an expensive change later when more holistic financial planning is required. At EV, we are well-placed to cover all investment and retirement planning advice areas. Investment is where most people start, but many are extending their proposition to include retirement, which means having a solution that can cover all areas.
There are many areas where EVDigital can be deployed, including.
- Investment
- Pre-retirement
- At-retirement
- Protection planning.
The calculations get exponentially more complicated as more elements are included in the solution and goals. We have already delivered solutions in all these areas based on our experience of over 30 years.
Specialist expertise and experience
Expertise is critical when choosing a digital and hybrid advice provider. Your business will need a technology partner that is an expert in the field of automated financial advice, with the knowledge and experience necessary to understand your unique needs and provide tailored solutions that meet those needs.
At EV, our expertise in this area began 30 years ago with a mission to provide people with the knowledge and confidence to make informed financial decisions. Using sound asset modelling techniques, we achieved this by pioneering stochastic modelling to graphically explain investment risk and reward. This helped us produce consumer guidance tools to help individuals make self-assisted personal financial decisions.
Since 2003, we have also developed financial planning tools for financial advisers and planners. Our goal was to support professionals in providing better advice to clients. Then, as early adopters of 'robo-advice', we developed digital investment advice to meet FCA's advice requirements. Unlike other companies, we treated digital advice as complementary to guidance and delivered regulated advice. This resulted in a low-cost advice option for consumers and productivity gains for our clients.
In 2018, we delivered compliant pre-retirement digital advice in the workplace and continued to expand our offerings to encompass more complex at-retirement advice. This included digital advice algorithms to test retirees' cash flow plans, income preferences, and capacity for loss.
As we look to the future, we focus on personalising the digitally aided advice process for clients. Our goal is to provide the right tools to help financial institutions deal with their clients more efficiently in less time or service more clients with the time freed up through digital engagement processes.
Valuable flexibility
We understand that all businesses have unique requirements and preferences at EV, so we offer flexible solutions to cater to those specific needs. With our API solution, you can have full control over the front end without the hassle of creating complex solutions. You can integrate multiple APIs to create a more detailed and in-depth goal-based planning solution that covers all objectives and needs. Alternatively, you can use our standard front end for digital and hybrid solutions, with the configuration of key areas that will give you a starting point for your solution, making it faster to implement and easier to manage. You can also use our standard front end as a base to build your custom solution, adding or taking out elements to suit your exact needs.
Conclusion
Summing up, choosing the right digital and hybrid advice provider is crucial for your business to meet your clients' evolving needs. We stand out as the ideal choice due to our unique benefits, including consistency across all channels, a focus on consumer outcomes, educational risk and reward explanations, and future-proofing with a wide range of needed areas, expertise, and flexible solutions.
With the off-the-shelf EVDigital modules or API-delivered algorithms, you can provide personalised and automated solutions for your clients' financial needs, covering all aspects of financial planning. By partnering with us, your business can be confident in delivering consistent and exceptional service to their clients, no matter which channel they use.
Ultimately, choosing us as your digital and hybrid advice provider means choosing a partner who shares your commitment to providing the best financial advice and planning solutions.
What do we offer at EV?
Our EVDigital modules include:
- Client Fact Find - Begin the advice journey with a clear overview of your clients' current situation, including their current finances, wellbeing, lifestyle needs, vulnerability, knowledge & experience, and risk appetite.
- Investment - Help clients to create a plan to achieve their desired lifestyle goals and aspirations, giving them the crucial information they need to achieve them.
- Retirement - Seamlessly take clients from before, into and through retirement with the consistency they expect from one stage of their lives to another. Helping clients maximise their retirement savings, setting them up for a more comfortable and enjoyable retirement.
- Protection - Provide clients with expert protection advice to ensure they have the necessary cover, giving them secure comfort in unfortunate circumstances.
Our user journey solutions support various routes such as investment, at- and in-retirement, and protection covering all aspects of financial planning. Whether for a fully digital or hybrid advice solution, we provide consistency across all channels to ensure your clients receive the same level of service regardless of the channel they use.
With EV, you can make the right choice for your digital and hybrid advice provider, with flexible solutions that cater to your specific needs and a user journey that covers all aspects of financial planning.
Click here if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you to create and implement a digital advice financial solution effectively or contact our expert team today.
