“With Xplan, I can”

Before Xplan, Mark and his team went around in circles to get the MI they needed to run the business. Mark shares his frustration:

“The one thing I wanted was a snapshot, but it was seemingly difficult to get hold of. I would run a report once a year, and ten months later, Rhodri would say it was all out of date, and we were going around in circles because we’re a monthly business. We do a monthly profit and loss account. We have monthly board meetings. I wanted to get all our clients, their AUM, their investable funds, their fee income, their fee percentage and their addresses so that I could do fancy things every month as a downloadable file. I can do that with Xplan.”

“Xplan keeps us on the straight and narrow”

The team has found Xplan invaluable in helping them meet their consumer duty and regulatory obligations, even some of the more ‘bonkers’ FCA requests.

Mark explains: “Being regulated, we’re always asked, ‘Did you follow your own process?’ We’ve got processes coming out of our ears and were able to write them into Xplan, which keeps us on the straight and narrow. I also own the price and value section of our Consumer Duty, and Xplan helped me gather all the information in one place and make a considered judgement on our stance on price and value.”

He continues, “I can’t over-estimate how useful Xplan is for us in being compliant. We used to get our knickers in a twist about reg data requests from the FCA, some of which were just bonkers. Gathering the data, which was all over the place, used to take us three days, and by the time you’ve done three days trying to gather stuff, you’ve got no enthusiasm for the request it’s intended for. Xplan puts it in one place, and it takes half an hour.”

Rhodri agrees, adding, “Xplan keeps everything shipshape and where we need it. Even something as simple as sending an email in Xplan instead of Microsoft is better because it keeps a record of it, so we don’t have to fuss around saving it separately.” 

“Xplan helps my job go swimmingly.”

For Rhodri and his team, the best feature in Xplan is Tasks, which enables them to create automated workflows for each stage of their advice journey, something he says makes everyone’s job easier:

“If a client review is due in December, Xplan will notify us in October to send out the review invite and send further reminders when we need to prepare for the review and prompt clients to send information. We’ve created different workflows for new business cases, so it’s all in a thread. It helps my job go swimmingly without needing to create tasks all the time. We just open a case, and Xplan will do it automatically.

There’s another feature Rhodri highly rates: “I can’t live without the feeds and valuations. It’s so much easier than going to the providers manually, and it updates daily.”

To make things even easier, they’ve embraced Saturn, a time-saving AI-enabled integration in Xplan that, among other things, generates meeting notes and documentation in minutes:

“We use Saturn to make us quicker with review meetings. It means we can do a post-meeting note in two hours, not twenty-five.”

As Rhodri neatly puts it: “Xplan allows us to be better at our jobs because there’s less to do, so we can do more.”