Pensions eCommerce - Meeting the RDR Challenge

Pensions e-Commerce - Meeting the RDR Challenge identifies a technology roadmap for the delivery of services over the coming years with the objective of delivering a "best in class" proposition within this period.

Email Encryption & Secure Communications

The Email Encryption & Secure Communications report has been compiled following a series of one-to-one meetings with Head Office personnel at eleven intermediary firms and investigates:

• What, if any, email encryption solutions their firms are using/plan to use
• What their firms will need to know about product provider email encryption solutions to help them assess what impact this could have on their businesses
• What concerns/issues they have about supporting the email encryption solutions put forward by product providers

Distribution Evolution

In an ongoing series of bi-annual reports, Distribution Evolution explores the challenges facing the distributor market in the 21^st Century, and how these might impact on the selection of provider business partners.  Initially published in Autumn 2009, the reports produced to date focus on:

• Exploring adviser business practices (Autumn 2009)
• The true cost of financial advice (Spring 2010)
• The learning curve ahead of RDR (Autumn 2010)

Proposition Assesment Service

Technology is increasingly the key conduit for business and obtaining customer buy-in is important from the outset.  As a result, external evaluation of new and updated technology systems and propositions is in growing demand from providers, platforms and client management systems (CMS) ahead of any formal launch and subsequent updates.

F&TRC is now offering a consultancy service to provide a structured assessment plus feedback on these systems and propositions

Product Selection Research/ Due Diligence

With the increased focus by the FSA over a wide range of industry areas to ensure selection of  Wrap Platforms, selection of Product Providers and other regulatory services have been undertaken using full Due Diligence procedures.  This is subsequently increasing pressure on companies to carry out this research on a regular basis rather than just occasionally.  In October 2008, F&TRC launched a bespoke online survey system to streamline survey initiation and completion, which offers the potential to achieve considerable savings for both advisers and providers and includes:

• Electronic survey creation
• Online survey completion (with reuse of existing responses)
• The ability to build dedicated scoring models to objectively benchmark responses