Continuing our new series of articles highlighting quick wins when using adviser firm technology, software experts share quick tips and tricks to help make your working day more efficient. Here Iress Community Manager, Sara Row, look at how to get the most out of Xplan, specifically when clients add structured products to their plans.
The FCA says structured products are generally a type of fixed-term investment where the amount you earn depends on the performance of a specific market (such as the FTSE 100) or specific assets (such as shares in individual companies). There are two types:
Structured deposits: Structured deposits are savings accounts or National Savings & Investments, where the rate of interest you get depends on how the stock market index is doing for example.
Structured investments: Structured investments have two underlying investments, one to protect your capital and another to provide the bonus. Again depending on how the stock market performs.
We hear a lot from our clients and users around how best to record them.
Adding structured products
As structured products can be added to many different wrappers (e.g. ISA’s, Bonds, Deposit Plans etc), the product wrapper itself is recorded as you normally would in Xplan and an attribute (field) against the record is selected to identify it is a structured product.This is important when considering the tax implications etc, of the investment wrapper, and recording it this way will ensure Xtools+ (cashflow) will adopt the correct tax rules.
Reporting on Structured Products
Client Lists – Advanced Search
Should you wish to know all clients that hold a specific structured product, you can find these clients using Advanced Search. The fields to look for in the search are (Balance Sheet – Asset) Structured Product.
Policy List – Xport
Should you need the details of the particular policies themselves, you can obtain these separately as part of an Assets Xport.
As always if you have any specific questions about Xplan please drop me a line via our community.
