Informed Choice was shortlisted for two awards at the Money Marketing Financial Services Awards 2012 – IFA of the Year and Best Use of Technology by an Adviser.
This afternoon in London, we are being interviewed by an expert judging panel who will decide on the eventual winner in this technology award category.
Here are some of the ways in which we use technology at Informed Choice, which we believe puts us streets ahead of the competition.
Our website at www.icl-ifa.co.uk forms the ‘hub’ of our online activity. Regular website visitors will be aware that we post one or two new blogs every day, as part of our strategy to educate and inform our clients.
We encourage our clients to visit the website, read the relevant blogs and ask us if they have any questions. This engagement is encouraged through the issue of our weekly email newsletter, which signposts our clients and professional connections to the most popular blogs from the previous seven days.
We relaunched our website in the summer, working once again with Gareth at [codepotato] to bring the design, structure and functionality of the site up to date.
In the first fortnight of the new website going live, our analytics report demonstrated the measurable success of the new site design and content. Page views were up 66%, pages per visit were up 44%, the bounce rate was down 22% and the average time spent on the site was up 35%.
Our website now attracts an average of 6,500 visitors each month.
Towards the end of 2011 we engaged with the professionals at Intelligent Mobile to create a mobile version of our website.
Rather than build a native ‘app’ for different smart phone browsers, we felt it was better to optimise the existing website for use on mobile Internet browsers, so as not to exclude any particular brand of phone.
This new mobile website came with some exciting new functionality, including the ability to send a text message (SMS) to the short number 84840 with the word ‘informed’ in order to receive back a message showing your closest Informed Choice Financial Planner.
This locate a Financial Planner tool uses online mapping technology combined with the GPS in smart phones. We are thought to be the first IFA firm in the UK to make use of this sort of technology and we are very proud of the results.
As Social Media becomes increasingly important in our daily lives, we are proactive across a variety of these platforms, including Twitter.
Over 1,500 people now follow our corporate Twitter account @informedchoice, and our individual Financial Planners also have big followings on the platform. For example, our managing director Martin Bamford, who has been using Twitter since May 2008, has nearly 3,800 followers.
To make life easier for our Twitter followers and to reinforce our brand on the platform, we became the first IFA firm to create a custom link shortening service, using the bespoke domain infrmd.ch.
This means that when we publish links to content, those links are automatically shortened using the infrmd.ch domain, saving valuable space in each tweet.
The Internet and Social Media have become so important that, during the course of 2011, one in five of our new clients engaged with us via these channels.
We also make use of technology in ways that our clients and professional connections do not see. This is in order to deliver greater efficiency, value for money and excellence of advice.
Last year we developed a new Intranet site called HQ, using the WordPress content management system, to collate our internal content and share best practice. Since launching HQ in June 2011, we have posted 224 items resulting in 420 comments from members of the team.
As you would expect from a leading firm of Chartered Financial Planners, we use various software systems to conduct whole of market research on financial products and investments. We also use technology to deliver enhanced reporting to our clients and manage flows of information.
Last summer we implemented Avelo Adviser Office as our back office system, initially to improve the efficiency and quality of our client review reporting.
We are now using this system to produce between 30 and 50 client review reports each month, reducing the time it takes to produce each report from an average of 90 minutes to an average of 15 minutes, greatly improving report quality and detail at the same time.
It is important that we make best of use of technology as an adviser, which is why this award at the Money Marketing Financial Services Awards 2012 is something we have entered and hope to win in March – along with IFA of the Year, naturally.
Photo credit: Flickr/Florin Hatmanu
