“We have been using the portal for 3.5 years now. People trust it.”
Nathan Faraday
Paraplanner
at
Metis Wealth
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“We have been using the portal for 3.5 years now. People trust it.”
Issue hundreds of quarterly valuations en masse, removing the unsustainable reliance on paper and the costly burden of a manual process.
Metis Wealth is a team of Chartered Financial Planning experts based in London and West Sussex. The business was founded seven years ago to provide fully independent financial advice to client and professional connections. Nathan Faraday is a Paraplanner at Metis Wealth, whose role includes supporting the advisors with research, recommendations, and reports, as well as taking on an IT role to liaise between their external IT company and the business.
In June 2018, the company launched their discretionary arm of the firm, Metis Asset Management, to manage clients’ portfolios on a discretionary basis, providing greater flexibility over how they manage client portfolios. Part of this new service was to issue quarterly valuations generated for all their clients, which created a time-consuming, manual, and unsustainable issue for Nathan: “We’re conscious that this is a lot of paperwork to be generated. This is a lot of paperwork for our clients as well, nowadays they don’t want this much paperwork.” Nathan was tasked with the job to find way to automate the process of sending out the reports to all their clients, in time for the first statements to be issued.
As a business, they were already storing all client information in Virtual Cabinet and, with a solid existing integration to their back-office system – Curo, created by Time4Advice – it seemed obvious to Nathan to investigate the option of using the Virtual Cabinet Client Portal to issue the information.
“We have been using the portal for 3.5 years now. People trust it.”
- Nathan Faraday, Paraplanner, Metis Wealth
Nathan was put in touch with Head of Implementations at Virtual Cabinet, Mike Glasbey, to see what the possibilities were. Mike was confident they could put in an automated process to publish all the necessary valuations to each client through the portal, via a process called ‘auto-publishing’. Through collaboration between VC, Metis Wealth and Time4Advice, a solution was created.
At the end of every quarter, Metis Asset Management’s platform provider produces and uploads all the quarterly valuations to an SFTP area (secure online zone).Nathan does a quick spot check to ensure the data looks correct, before simply pressing a button which starts the entire automated process. VC then takes over, downloading all the valuations from the SFTP area over an encrypted connection, extracting information on each individual valuation as it goes (in this case, a unique client account number). It then uses this to ‘look up’ the remainder of the VC indexing information to auto-file the statements, as well as finding the email details, client name etc., to automatically publish the statements to the necessary recipients on the portal. This is done using something called ‘Delegate Publishing’, so that it even looks like it’s been published personally by a member of the Metis team!
For a small number of clients that do not wish to receive their statements in this way, they are set with a ‘post only’ flag in Curo. VC reads this while processing and knows not to issue their statement via the portal, so it places these particular statements in a VC intray, which the team can then process in the clients preferred way.
Metis Wealth have just reached the end of their first year using auto publishing to complete their quarterly valuation goal. The whole process has been a positive experience for Nathan. From working with Mike: “Mike has been so patient, it has been a challenge as, whilst I’m comfortable with IT, what he’s done is well beyond me. He’s such a nice guy and so easy to work with”. To not having to employ an additional system to handle the process: “I’m glad we didn’t have to involve another system to achieve our goals, which could have muddied the waters.”
Automating this system has meant that Metis Wealth have avoided more cumbersome and time-consuming methods, such as individually printing and binding hundreds of hard copies – which would have been a huge admin burden. Using the portal means that delivery is instantaneous and secure, alleviating the possibility of postage problems or the whole minefield of sending confidential data via unencrypted emails. It also means that the entire process is included in the VC audit log, allowing Metis to see if a user has received (or even read!) their statement, right down to the minute and second.
Auto-publishing is just another cog in the wheel of Metis Wealth’s existing tech structure to support them working remotely.
“VC has massively helped us with remote working. I write my report, the advisor runs through it, I make it a pdf, drop it into VC, index it and publish it via the portal. Then sometimes within the same day you have had the client come back with the signed copy of it. That process could take a matter of days or even weeks previously.”
- Nathan Faraday, Paraplanner, Metis Wealth
Being veteran VC Portal users, Metis Wealth use it to send out 90% of work that requires a signature, and they use the automatic reminders in VC to chase outstanding tasks automatically. “We set it so everyone gets a weekly reminder to check and sign any documents that we’ve sent them.”
To find out how you, too, can utilise the auto-publishing feature for faster sign-offs, book your free demo and speak to our experts.
