Investing in report building capabilities

To help improve the adviser experience, we’ve been looking at the areas where we know firms spend a lot of time. This is where relieving those seemingly small annoyances can make all the difference.

This is all part of our continuous discovery work, an ongoing collaboration with advice firms which is inspiring a regular stream of small but impactful efficiency improvements across 2024 and beyond.

We work closely with advisers, paraplanners and administrators who spend so much of their time on the Morningstar Wealth Platform to understand the pain points they encounter, however trivial these might seem. Because we own and operate our own technology we’re able to engineer micro-enhancements promptly, which we can then test with our advice partners.

Report building is a crucial function for advice firms

Administrators and paraplanners tell us that they spend around 60% to 70% of their time building portfolio performance reports for advisers to use in client investment reviews. These annual or biannual client meetings form critical moments for advisers. They present key opportunities to demonstrate the services they are providing in exchange for their adviser fee.

Reporting capability is one of the areas we’re working to significantly upgrade. We’ve started with two points which we know our platform users were keen to see improved – their brand presence in the reports, and the automatic emails that confirm when reports are generated.

Increasing your brand presence

Brand matters to any business. Brand is a core part of your relationship with your clients.

However, when you downloaded a report from the platform, a frequent niggle was that the firm logo was too small and not visible enough. It lacked the prominence you wanted it to have.

In response we’ve increased the logo size on the front cover of the report to make it much more eye-catching. We’ve also added the firm’s colour scheme so the entire report is now on-brand, sitting comfortably alongside other reports you might share with your clients. We’ve worked to ensure the logos we hold for our customers are high resolution and quality but if you find that’s not the case, please speak to your account manager and we’ll update your logo.

This prominence now matches the firm’s branding throughout the platform and Investor Portal, with every screen and interface clearly displaying the advice firm’s identity. At all points we’re helping to reinforce and support the all-important adviser-client connection.

Turning off disruptive emails

With some users spending such a high proportion of their time on the platform building reports, they will be downloading reports throughout the day. One client might have two or three products, or accounts. Then there are couples having joint review meetings, or family groups. It adds up to a lot of reports.

Whenever a user would generate a report an automated email would follow, confirming that the report was ready. Alerts were ‘pinging’, inboxes were filling up and tempers were fraying.

Happily for all concerned we could turn this feature off, disabling the code that generates the emails. We can always turn it back on in the future if there’s a need; owning our technology gives us that flexibility. As always, we’ll be guided by what works best for our customers.

More improvements on the way

These are small but worthwhile updates. This upgrade has allowed us to understand areas where we can improve our capability. Coming very soon will be a significant change to creating consolidated reports for your customers.

By making it easier to combine the status, valuation and performance of client accounts across SIPP, ISA and GIA for a single view of the total value for the period in question, we can save advice firms considerable time and resource which can then be better used.

Our first step in this will be a consolidated summary view showing overall portfolio performance. Some of you have been engaging with us on the designs for these new reports, and we’re excited to bring these changes to all of you very soon.

We’ll share more updates over the coming months. These enhancements small and large will keep on coming for the benefit of all our Morningstar Wealth advice clients.