Morningstar Wealth has had a busy year with Analyser updates. We invited their Product Team to share some insights around their latest developments and what the next stage of growth might look like.
Everything we’ve launched over the last year or so has been informed by our Continuous Discovery strategy – where we work closely with advice professionals to really dig into what they want and need from the platform.
Users of our platform invest around 500 hours a year of their time with us and it’s very satisfying for us when we can roll out the benefits to them.
Owning our own technology really helps. It means we can set our own priorities and find solutions that work the way our clients need them to. We’re continually learning, so flexibility is crucial; we’re in control and can quickly adapt and improve.
Our advice professional clients continue to give us their time, sharing their experience of the platform, and letting us sit in their offices to see all that for ourselves.
We’re hugely grateful they continue to invest their valuable time, and we think that speaks to the strength of those relationships. The last 12 months has seen a huge increase in the velocity of our developments, big and incremental, across our proposition. Everyone is benefitting from working with us in this unique way.
Continuous Discovery for ongoing improvements
This is where our Continuous Discovery method comes into its own.
The product team is in regular dialogue with advice professionals throughout the development cycle. This is a deliberately different approach with the aim of delivering more frequent changes that really add value.
For example, we expect to deliver over 30 non-maintenance releases by the end of this year. This is on top of all the work deep within our technology stack that is mainly invisible to end users.
Software is commonly developed by talking to customers, finding out how to improve, then going and doing that for six to 12 months.
The risk is that needs have changed, or new regulation has come in, and it’s easy to just deliver stuff that misses the mark.
Our 500 hours of conversations with advice professionals each year relate not just to thematics like retirement, but specific user journeys and capabilities.
We want to fully understand the workflows and tools used throughout the entire advice lifecycle, not just direct interactions with the platform. Experience has shown us that what seems like a small issue can make a significant difference to the user experience.
User feedback put into action
The lang cat’s State of the Platform Nation report is another good source of feedback.
While users rated us positively for support and price, there was room for improvement around functionality, particularly in retirement, as we knew. This chimed with what we’ve heard in our own conversations with advice professionals.
We continue to invest heavily in our retirement proposition, with 11 retirement-focused releases so far this year. We have an entire team of product, design and engineering colleagues focused on improving our retirement functionality, capability and digital experience.
Investing in retirement
We know how important it is to provide what advisers need to meet their clients’ ever-changing needs. We want to have the full flexibility around income that meets increasingly bespoke retirement needs.
As part of this, we’ve created a digital experience for flexi-access drawdown, UFPLS and drip feed drawdown.
Some of the changes we’ve brought in include:
· Removing the need for users to rekey information that we already hold from previous requests
· Increasing the frequency of UFPLS to monthly
· Introducing a dedicated journey to get money from already crystallised funds
· Upgrades to the illustrations engine to allow for firm-level access
· Improvements to working with the support centre, where advice professionals can attach relevant information to their case rather than emailing evidence separately
· Adding digital declarations, with no need for client signatures
· Introducing save and retrieve functionality for greater flexibility
The result is a change in the retirement process satisfaction score from five to nine out of ten. We have also reduced the average time it takes for a user to submit a request from 30 minutes to less than ten, and our ease-of-use rating has moved from 2.3 to 4.3 out of five.
We also have plans to create what we’re calling ‘invisible illustrations’, where users won’t have to see the illustrations engine at all.
We see developments like moving away from paper-based processes as enhancements rather than a replacement journey, and firms can continue to use their own paper processes if they want to. It’s all about removing the points of friction that existed previously.
Bringing together the best of both worlds
We try to best combine the benefits of being part of a global business while keeping an innovative mindset. We consider ourselves a fintech inside of a corporate, giving us the best of both worlds.
That philosophy extends to the products and services we create, with the platform one element of a broader ecosystem across the advice process, from managed portfolios and data to our practice management software, Wealthcraft.
Owning our own technology sets us apart from other platforms; it’s a source of stability for advice professionals and gives us control over our own destiny.
While our focus this year is very much on retirement, we’re also working on rolling out developments across areas such as reporting, onboarding and mobile processes.
The firms that work with us are big supporters of the platform and what it does, a commitment we don’t take for granted and we’re continually working to reward.
From the Morningstar Wealth product team:
Steve Coleman, head of product – international wealth platform
Steve Owen, head of proposition
Robert Murdoch, product owner – future of retirement
