When Chris Walklate, Product and Proposition Manager for Wesleyan, revamped the company’s online fund centre, he was looking for something high impact that would showcase Wesleyan’s funds and ‘bring the data to life’ for Wesleyan’s customers. He selected FE fundinfo's Digital as the means to achieve this – and while the new fund centre has only been live for a matter of weeks, it has already been very well received.
Background
Wesleyan is a financial mutual that provides specialist advice and services to doctors, dentists, teachers and lawyers. Now with more than £6 billion of assets under management (AUM), the company was founded in 1841 and celebrates its 175th anniversary this year. Over this time, Wesleyan has grown to employ 1,000 people at its Birmingham Head Office and approximately 350 more across its field sales teams around the country.
Business challenge
The recent fund centre project aimed to improve and update Wesleyan’s website and provide customers with more comprehensive information in a timely manner. This involved automating the previous process of updating daily unit prices on the website - and creating a more professional, more engaging area where customers could find all of the relevant documents and information they needed. The new fund centre is a key element in Wesleyan’s online investment centre, a new area of the website designed to both improve access to information on Wesleyan’s funds and investment products and also provide more general information about investing to Wesleyan’s customers.
The previous fund prices and performance page was one of most visited pages on the website – so it was important to ensure that the revamped fund centre ‘got it right’.
Why FE fundinfo Digital?
Chris had previously used FE fundinfo Digital at a different company to meet a similar objective and so trusted FE fundinfo to deliver on the project. Plus, Wesleyan has been an FE fundinfo customer for a number of years, steadily increasing their investment in the Precision+ product line.
“We have a very good relationship with FE fundinfo and a good level of confidence too,” says Chris. “We receive a number of services already, so we know that the data provided by FE fundinfo is good. If you know the raw data is going to be correct, it’s one less thing to worry about when you are looking at how to present it to customers.”
As for this latest implementation, Chris describes the experience of working with FE fundinfo as “professional and well-received”; commenting that: “they worked with us at every step of the process and gave us named contacts who knew their solutions very well and were able to provide quick - and more importantly, correct responses and feedback throughout the development and delivery phases”.
Benefits
Making data easily accessible
Having this kind of user-friendly fund centre is almost an industry standard now, according to Chris: “Customers expect data at their fingertips, accessible in an easy to use way.”
The essential information that customers need are daily prices, key investor information documents (KIIDs) and fund fact sheets. The ability to further engage customers by giving access to charting tools and allowing them to go in and play around with parameters is a “nice to have,” according to Chris, who is pleased that Digital provides for all of these scenarios.
A single ’golden’ source of data
The fact that FE fundinfo hosts the main funds database and offers a single ’golden’ source of data is important for Wesleyan; in fact it is probably the most important reason for working with them. This data is then spread out across a number of services. “Fund centre data, fact sheet data – it’s all the same data, presented at the same time. This makes it easier and less confusing for customers says Chris.”
Point-of-sale support for Wesleyan’s financial consultants
The new fund centre also acts as an additional tool for Wesleyan’s financial consultants, providing information about the firm’s products in an easy to use one stop shop that enables them to show customers how to get prices, fact sheets and also plot fund performance – so giving customers a real view of what has happened to their funds previously.
Time savings through automation
Digital automated and improved an internal manual process, which has resulted in major time savings for Wesleyan’s digital team. The solution complemented a previously purchased FE fundinfo service – Report Production - which automated the production of Wesleyan’s fund fact sheets. Prior to this, there was a longer production process because each fact sheet was done separately.