Elementary Financial Planning

Elementary Financial Planning is a chartered firm of financial planners that has used FE Analytics since the middle of 2017. Senior ParaPlanner, Simon Moore explains how FE fundinfo’s solutions for Advisers play an important role in powering the business.

The Challenge

Given the Financial Conduct Authority’s emphasis on risk profiling and risk management, Elementary Financial Planning knew they wanted a service that would assist them in making sure that risk was being managed appropriately. Says Simon:

“We chose FE Analytics to be the service to do this because it came so highly recommended. A former colleague of ours was a big cheerleader for FE Analytics. We were also attracted to the EValue attitude to risk questionnaire that came as part of the process, as it gives a clear indication of a clients’ openness to risk.”

Ease of use was also a factor.

“Some of us here have had experiences with other providers and found them too complicated whereas with FE fundinfo, everything was very intuitive and easy to use.”

A part of day to day business

FE Analytics helps Elementary Financial Planning with several tasks on a day to day basis, such as risk profiling and fund research. They also benefit from MPS Directory; a tool within FE Analytics which allows for detailed research and analysis of model portfolios provided by discretionary fund managers.

“We use FE Analytics to help us carry out risk profiling of clients, we also use it for fund research if we are looking at single sector funds.

“MPS Directory is particularly useful to us because it gives us access to external MPS providers, which we can compare and contrast with portfolios that we have put together ourselves to particular risk profiles, and we can also compare them to FE fundinfo’s own MPS service – the FE Investments models.”

For Elementary Financial Planning the overall benefits of this approach are establishing suitability and risk mitigation as it shows that they are reviewing all portfolios on an ongoing basis based on the same metric – FE fundinfo’s risk score.

“We have to have proof at our end that we have tested a client’s risk profile accurately. The FCA oversight is that you shouldn’t take a third party’s word for it so MPS Directory helps us to demonstrate that we have done appropriate due diligence on providers.”

Conduct portfolio comparisons

In order to conduct portfolio comparisons, Elementary Financial Planning identify the performance line charting tool as key. The end result of this is that it allows them to see where funds can be both added and removed. States Simon:

“If a client has an existing portfolio of multi asset and single sector funds, we’ll build that within FE Analytics and then use the performance line charting tool to compare that with various MPS, including the FE Investment models.

Summary

FE Analytics has enabled Elementary Financial Planning to carry out a range of crucial tasks as part of their day to day business, supporting their overall investment proposition. Given its importance, Simon says that he would have ‘absolutely no issues at all’ in recommending FE Analytics to a colleague. He likes the fact that the layout is straightforward with a single front page and everything operates off that page.

“It is actually difficult to get lost using FE Analytics, which has not been the case with other systems I and others here have used in the past.

“FE Analytics simplifies the relationship between risk profiling and fund portfolio selection.”