Digital tools freeing you up to connect with your clients

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As digital advancements move us more online, it can sometimes feel like we’re moving further away from meaningful interactions with real people. The rise of AI and auto-generated responses can leave us wondering who’s on the other side of the daily tasks of doing business. At Standard Life, we firmly believe in balancing the human side of money with the financial side. This allows for a more client-friendly planning journey of exploration and collaboration that counterbalances the complexities of our market. Striking this balance takes time, something that’s increasingly scarce for financial advisers grappling with an increasing administrative burden while trying to grow their business.

At Standard Life, we aim to partner with advisers to grow, elevate, and futureproof their advisory business through our service and support. Blending the best of our people and technology together, we continue to develop tools, content, and online features that will help you do less of the admin so you can do more to grow.

Quick and tangible – the key to useful digital tools

Good digital tools feel personal and have huge benefits for advisers and clients. From offering shortcuts and enhancing professional outputs for advisers, to giving clients tangible takeaways that bring clarity and confidence to inform decision making. This is why we’ve increased investment in recent years in our suite of adviser-informed digital tools, developed to suit how you do business. Not only do we set out to build them to your needs, but we also continually refresh the experience and functionality in response to adviser feedback as they don’t work for us if they don’t first work for you.

Bespoke proposals for client investment plans

An increasingly popular tool on our platform, our quick yet thorough investment proposal tool has one purpose – to give your clients tailored information to support their investment decision making. The tool generates a bespoke report that you can brand and add commentary to. In client-friendly language, it presents the past performance of selected funds, displays the asset class and geographic breakdowns along with client-specific charges and commission details.

We’ve added new features, so the tool now caters for both single and regular premiums on our PRSA, personal pension, and regular invest products. You can also include withdrawal options on the investment bond (either as a percentage or monetary amount), and vested PRSAs have been added with withdrawal options also included. We’ve also added a quick how-to video to help you make the most of the tool.

Secure a competitive annuity quote in just two minutes

Approaching retirement is a significant milestone, where a long-established pattern of behaviour – regular savings through pension contributions, swiftly leads clients to a series of active choices. This is a pivotal point on the journey to retirement when financial adviser expertise and support is of most value. To give you the time and space to make these conversations as meaningful and customer centric as possible, we’re developing tools to support at-retirement decision making. The first of these, our annuity quotation tool is designed to support an important piece of the decision-making, quickly and easily.

All our annuity quotes provide a unique extended guarantee, meaning if all details remain the same, the annuity rate used in our quotation is guaranteed for 14 days from the date of the quote. Even better, if we receive the application within this 14-day period, we’ll hold the rate for a further 30 days from the date we receive the application, to allow time to receive the purchase amount. Importantly, if the purchase amount is received and all requirements are met during these 30 days, we’ll use the higher of the rate given in the quotation or our current annuity rate at the time of processing. If anything changes in relation to the options selected, customer information or the purchase amount, you’ll need a new quotation.

More content for better client conversations

From quick performance updates to in-depth analysis on our funds for your clients, there’s a range of supports available on our Fund Centre, including daily and monthly factsheets on all funds, quarterly factsheet of key funds, as well as market outlooks and reports.

Through our risk profiler, we help clients understand not only their attitude to risk, but at the same time it satisfies the Insurance Distribution Directive requirement with three optional questions on sustainability preferences. This tool also allows you to generate your custom branded report to provide tangible outputs for your clients.

Help your clients get closer to our funds with a suite of short, engaging videos from our Investment Solutions team explaining some of our most popular funds like our Global Index Funds, Vanguard index funds, and MyFolio. These videos are easy to share and cover all the need-to-knows, supporting better confidence and understanding of some of the fundamentals of choosing funds.

Less admin time with online applications

When you apply online, you’re guaranteed faster turnarounds and fewer follow-ups which means a more seamless experience for you and your clients. We’ve streamlined the submission process to keep things simple with clear prompts guiding you and your team at each step. Understanding that supporting a client is a collaborative process on all sides, we’ve included a save and resume feature so you can pause an application and return to it later at any time within a 30-day window. Our online application journeys have now expanded to include Synergy PRSA AVC and transfer from Synergy Executive pension to Synergy PRSA.

Digital tools that enable a more human connection

Getting the balance right of using online and automated tools while creating meaningful client relationships is equally a challenge and a great opportunity for the future of financial advice. Speed and convenience are paramount, but nothing beats understanding the human experience and the value of advice in return. As Standard Life continues to invest in digital solutions to help advisers run their businesses, connect more with clients, and still meet increasing obligations, we’re always open to hearing from you directly on what works best. Our goal is to give advisers the right tools to work smarter and build stronger client relationships.

If you have any questions or you’d like our advice, email retirementsolutions@standardlife.ie
 

A version of this article is available to read in the March 2025 edition of Irish Broker Magazine.