Financial Planning Tools Review - Dynamic Planner

The move to fee-based business models and the focus on understanding and communicating risk has driven many advisers to look for tools to help support them in generating accurate, professional financial plans.

In some cases, advisers are procuring stand-alone tools, whilst others are utilising tools that are integrated with the wider Point of Sale (POS), or back-office systems used within their company. Some also rely on tools sitting on insurers extranets and there are some interesting developments in this area. Regardless of which route they take, Distribution Technology's Dynamic Planner product may well be the tool at the heart of one of these system.

Dynamic Planner is a web-based financial planning tool, allowing the creation of professional plans quickly and easily. It is placed uniquely, in that it is the only tool that an adviser can buy as a standalone tool (£85 per user per month) or obtain it as part of a wider POS solution called DPOS. Dynamic Planner also sits as a third party tool in systems such as Intelligent Office from IntelliFlo, or via Insurers extranets such as those from Scottish Widows and AEGON Scottish Equitable or can be found sitting on Platforms such as Cofunds and BNP. Through this combination of deployments, Dynamic Planner claims to have 20,000 users, although there is likely to be some double counting within this number.

The tool covers the key need areas of retirement, investment, mortgage (although at a very high level), protection and estate planning. It bases its analysis on a strong underlying financial model that has been proven in the market over the past 6 years. Interestingly, Distribution Technology recently ran a series of backdated financial scenarios through the tool to see how effectively the modelling outcome tolerance limits would predicted the current financial turmoil. They have gained an apparently positive set of results that are currently being audited before being released to the market. They believe this will be a further endorsement of the financial model that has seen it being used by the FSA.

The tool produces a good level of output, and although the reports are not as modern looking as some of their competitors, they are comprehensive and professional. The report includes a series of traffic light graphics highlighting progress towards meeting individual needs, and the report incorporates graphs and diagrams to help illustrate the financial plan that has been created.

Distribution Technology also provides an Attitude To Risk (ATR) tool which can base the risk using five, 18 or 24 questions. In addition, they have also released a new series of functionality called 'Tasks' aimed at the adviser who just wants to investigate a single need area without the requirement for a full financial planning process. The new function is a welcome addition, but currently is only available to corporate clients and not to the wider user base.

Dynamic Planner supports the ability to run an iterative process of building multiple financial plans that can then be compared and analyzed. These iterations do not include the interactive nature of changing a single item on the plan and seeing the immediate impact reflected on the screen. Instead, it results in the rework of each plan and re-running of the report. However, as the tool is designed to be used back in the office, rather than in front of the client, this may be less of an issue than it may appear.

Dynamic planner is one of the more expensive products on the market (although by no means the most expensive) but it does haves a strong pedigree and scores highly on usability. Definitely a product worth considering if budget is not an issue.