Making progress on our strategy - UK savings and wealth

Ahead of our Full year results for 2022 on February 28 we’ve been looking back at the progress we’ve been making against our strategic priorities. With UK savings and wealth a critical part of our client-led plans, here we highlight some of the key developments delivered within our Adviser vector over the last 12 months.

A focus on our Adviser vector

During the many challenges brought by 2022, we have aimed to give our advisers all the support and guidance they need as they steer their clients through the cost-of-living crisis, soaring inflation and changing regulations towards the post-pandemic ‘new normal’.

In such uncertain times, the need for good tax and retirement planning has never been more important. Helping families to create new savings strategies in this tough new environment has also been crucial.

Take a look at just some of the highlights from the year:

Consumer Duty is a major step-change for adviser firms and the most significant piece of regulation to hit the financial services industry for some time. At its core, Consumer Duty is about promoting good governance and it touches on all parts of an adviser firm’s operations.

To help adviser firms comply with the new Consumer Duty rules as easily as possible, we created our Consumer Duty ‘toolkit’, a site where they can find more details about obligations under the Consumer Duty rules with a range of practical step-by-step guides, gain access to an assessment and action planning tool from Threesixty, and make use of a series of templates to help advisers get started with their implementation plan.

Over the course of 2022, we have continued with our major Wrap upgrade, designed to offer time savings for advisers and their firms, and we continue to enhance our platforms to give our advisers the best possible service. We’re proud to say that we’ve managed to improve responsiveness from an average answer speed of three minutes down to 16 seconds, and even single figures during December. Complaints have come down by 20% and those complaints that are received have moved from an end-to-end resolution time of 30 days down to five days. We are targeting world-class customer satisfaction scores, building on our end of 2022 Net Promoter Score of 57 (specifically relating to service) and Customer Satisfaction Score of 95%. 80% of our customers also told us that we were easy to deal with.

We were delighted that Wrap was awarded Best Platform (AUM over £40 billion) at last year’s Schroders UK Platform Awards. We were very proud to receive this award, for the ninth year in a row, as it is voted for by advisers. As we continue to deliver for advisers with our Adviser Experience Programme, this award can only strengthen the confidence advisers will have in partnering with us. We continue to invest in the technology that will keep our platform market leading.

The Wrap platform retained the 5-star rating from Defaqto for its eighth year. Meanwhile, the Elevate platform retained a Gold Service rating for the ninth consecutive year. The Gold Service is especially valuable to us, as it's based on feedback from platform users.

NextWealth declare us ‘digital process champions’ as we now require a paper form for fewer than 10% of our processes. We knew that advisers were calling for further digitisation of platforms and wanted to adopt e-signatures into their processes. So, we have delivered the capability to support documents signed using approved e-signature solutions on our Wrap and Elevate platforms and continue to add e-signature providers.

You can be sure that in the year ahead, we will be striving in every way we can to make sure our advisers can access the best possible service and support from us.