Tech review: Money Vista given top marks, but will consumers pay £8?

Mark Loosmore, of IRESS, says Royal London’s B2C Money Vista website could complement, not compete with, advisory firms...

At the end of November this year, Royal London launched Money Vista, its direct to consumer offering. Given it is one of the first product provider B2C propositions out there, we decided to take a look at it and spoke to the team at Royal London to understand its value and how this sits alongside an IFA proposition.

Corporate overview

Royal London’s corporate strength is often hidden behind a series of strong, individually branded, propositions including Bright Grey, Scottish Life and Ascentric. It has been around for 150 years and has a proud heritage in financial services

Vision

At the heart of Royal London’s existence, and running through each brand, is the fact that it remains a mutual. It has a vision of being a ‘Champion of Financial Sense’, helping consumers make financial sense of their world, and Money Vista is a direct play to this strategy. Money Vista is in essence a simple financial planning site with broad coverage including, savings, investments, protection, property and retirement.

It is clearly a B2C site but sits reasonably comfortably alongside its IFA solutions. There is some overlap with an advised offering but, for a few reasons, we felt that the overlap is minimised. A key reason for this is because Royal London has deliberately stopped short of making the site transactional.

In essence it is aimed at helping to provide customers with a structure to organise their financial information and understand their needs – at which point they will usually still need advice to help fulfil them. Some consumers undoubtedly will go to other consumer sites to transact business directly, but we suspect these consumers would have done so anyway. The site is targeted at those who are not currently receiving advice – again avoiding a direct competition with IFAs.

Functionality

The functionality within the site is broad in the needs it covers and the support tools it offers. It shows a basic cash flow forecast and provides tools to analyse financial needs. It has a series of financial articles and news items and a financial discussion forum. The site gives consumers the ability to compare simple financial planning scenarios and does not try to provide detailed or complex scenario planning. This comment is not a criticism, as more in-depth tools could be dangerous without professional advice to support them.