November 2007

The True-th is out there

What is True Potential?

True Potential is an electronic business platform which joins the wide variety of product manufacturers such as life and pension companies, asset managers and fund supermarkets with the individual distributors.

The average client can have holdings with a large number of different product providers and with the right permission all these holdings can be seen and valued at once on the platform. Our platform also allows the distributor to transact their business right through from their initial fact find to actually transacting the business. Advisers can do their quotations on the platform as well as choosing the asset allocation of a client's portfolio and submitting the business through to the product manufacturers.

We've had a team of 28 people working on the system for the past six months. Our first client is Positive Solutions and we plan to have another 48 clients installed before the end of this year.

What does it offer that other platforms can't?

The business platform is more than a piece of software, it requires us to approach manufacturers and asset managers to gain permission to effectively plumb our platform into their computer systems. It took several years of working with these manufacturers to ensure they understood what we wanted from them and for them to trust us enough to give us permission to do these things. The extent of the coverage is unique and the amount of tasks people are able to do is huge. Trying to issue a life assurance product for instance can take weeks under other systems. With the True Potential platform the individual financial adviser can type directly into the product provider's admin office and correspond with them via a two way messaging system. These are small things but the knock on effect of having this messaging system means that everything can be done electronically.

As well as cost advantages business is transacted quicker and it is more efficient as you have a defined electronic trial that the adviser can use as evidence of how they have advised a particular client.

What have been the main challenges?

The main challenge has been getting the timing right in building the system. If you had tried to build it even three years ago it wouldn't have worked because the major thing is to have a secure centre for your data. In our case we have one centre in London's docklands with the data also being immediately backed up at another centre in Madrid. Internet connectivity speeds have only recently become good enough to support this process. The challenge has been waiting for these innovations to happen.

Advisers need a platform where you can deposit information and have it instantly retrieved by anyone who works for you wherever they are in the world. Another thing we've done which is interesting is that we have 12 business consultant partners who visit the advisers in their offices and interview them about their business - see profitability, staff turnover etc so we can go back and show them the savings they could make with our platform. The results constitute the most extensive survey ever done in the sector. People have been spending two to three hours with each of 1060 firms and that tells us where the market really is. We'll publish our findings in the next month or so.

Has there been any initial wariness from advisers about adopting this system?

You will get early adopters who are keen on anything new - there's a fair few of them. At the other end you'll get people who say I've never used a computer and never will. That's fair enough. We've had no problems gaining access to the advisers. Our people are very experienced and have done the job for many years. Advisers as a whole are quite open about what they do and this has created a potential client list for us. The purpose of these visits is two fold - one is to ensure we know the market really well. The second is to leave the door open for a further visit to go back and sign people up.

You recently trained 1600 Positive Solutions partners in how to use the platform. How did it go?

The Positive Solutions project has been a real challenge for us. It's officially the largest single IFA firm in the UK. It has a huge amount of live data on its systems. The training went really well and we've received a lot of positive feedback. There's stuff on the True Potential platform that you can't get with the Positive Solutions one. The Positive Solutions platform has had extra functionality added to it over time whereas True Potential is one system.

The real challenge here is to win hearts and minds and we hosted workshops with a maximum attendance of twenty people. All in all I think we did around 80 different workshops. The system was initially due to go live at the end of August but we found a glitch in the data that could have caused problems so we've decided to hold back for the moment to make sure we have sorted out the data. As we speak, the development team has been working on cleaning this data up and transferring it on to the new servers where they will test it and then delete it. By doing this we know that when the system does go live it will all be fine. No-one lost any data, sales or money as a result of this. We won't go to anyone else until we get it right with this client.

We have the view that the True Potential system is simple and effective. The hardest bit of the project has been designing something that is simple to use so the amount of training people should need is miniscule.

With many tools advisers only use a tiny percentage of the functionality available to them because they would need so much training to use it properly. As a result, advisers end up using them as a database. Our systems are not like that - we want our users to use all of the functionality available to them.

David Harrison
Managing Director
True Potential