It has been launched with support from several product providers, technology and adviser e-commerce organisations: Prudential, Scottish Widows, Standard Life, Webline and IBM.
‘The Adviser E-Enquiry’ is a research initiative aimed at understanding more about the attitudinal and emotional reasons why advisers and their staff use technology and e-commerce services to differing degrees.
Rory Curran, executive chairman of 1st, explains: “Rather than creating another ‘pressure group’ the purpose of The Adviser E-enquiry initiative is to bring the industry’s various ‘interest groups’ together - advisers, providers, Adviser Forum, ORIGO, the media and the FSA. Our ultimate goal is to make e-business a part of an adviser’s every day working practice, whilst simultaneously increasing efficiency and profitability for providers, platforms, portals and adviser firms. The focus is on making e-business work ‘on the ground’, covering the wider adviser population - not just larger distributors and multi-tied groups.”
The Group supporting The Adviser E-Enquiry will meet to study the high level results of the independent research in early May with final results and the press conference scheduled for mid June. 400 adviser firms will be invited to take part in the project and all responses will be confidentially analysed by an independent research group.
Shaun Crawford, IBM Partner, Insurance Services division, comments: “One major area that we are seeing very sporadic activity in, across the provider e-environment, is in the development of full contract enquiry capabilities. There is an urgent requirement for life companies to ensure they can retrieve data from legacy systems. This is really essential for ensuring full Wrap capabilities can be delivered and also ensuring full end to end processing can be completed across a wider product range.
“Contract enquiry is a very unsexy area of e-commerce but is an absolute hygiene factor for enabling the type of e-services that professional advisers are now demanding. Surely those providers who do not take this seriously cannot expect to be winners going forward - multi tie deal or no multi tie deal.”
The full results of The Adviser E-Enquiry, analysis and presentations from the supporting organisations will be made at the 1st annual conference, held in Birmingham on 28th June.
