Personalising your suitability reports using advice options and reasons

Simon Large

Key to good suitability report writing is the need to personalise the report to reflect the client’s individual circumstances and objectives. It assists in building a relationship with your client by demonstrating that you are invested in helping them meet their objectives, and, equally as important, it demonstrates to your compliance department and the FCA that you ‘know your client’ and you are… invested in helping them meet their objectives!

Before his retirement, Rory Percival stated that “one of the areas of concern is that there is the potential for increased standardisation process to result in a lack of personalisation.” An example of this concern that Rory points to is “objectives are solution-based rather than client-based” suggesting that these are not considered to be true client objectives by the FCA.

One of a number of ways that Genovo helps its users ensure their reports are personalised is through a piece of functionality called advice options and reasons.

What are advice options and reasons?

For those familiar with Genovo, you will undoubtedly have used the advice options and reasons functionality before, but for those who are a little newer to Genovo, advice options and reasons are the name we’ve given to the selectable options in the steps of the various wizard sections. You should think of an advice option as the “what” you’re recommending, and an advice reason as the “how” and the “why” you’re recommending it.

Genovo comes preloaded with a number of standard advice options and reasons covering a range of advice scenarios to help speed up the report building process for you and your users. However, it is advised – and in some circumstances, necessary – to edit these selectable options to better reflect your client’s circumstances and objectives. Suffice it to say, if, when building a report in Genovo, all you ever do is simply select the standard advice options and reasons as you progress through the steps of a section, it is unlikely that your reports will be looked upon particularly favourably by your compliance department!

How to personalise your advice options and reasons while building your report?

To edit the wording of a standard Genovo advice options and reasons when building a report, simply select it and click the pencil icon in the end column.

You will be taken to a new page where you can edit the standard wording and / or input further information pertinent to the client’s circumstances and objectives. In some instances, you will notice that a segment of placeholder text such as *INSERT* has been included to actively encourage you to insert custom content.

Creating custom advice options & reasons in the Report Builder

However, there will be times when none of the standard options fit the bill and you will need to create your own custom option. In fact, we would actively encourage you to do so because building up your library of selectable options will help you to customise Genovo to more accurately reflect your own personal preferences and advice service, and in turn speed up the report building process for you and your users.

The quickest way to add a custom advice option or reason is ‘on the fly’ whilst building a report from within the step of the section wizard. Simply click add advice option or add advice reason within the step and you’ll be directed to a new page where you will be prompted to include your custom advice option or reason and save it. 

If you only wish to include the custom advice option or reason in that report click save. However, you will also have the option to save it to your Advice Options & Reasons Library so it’s available for selection in future reports.

Add to Advice Option / Reason Library – This will add the option to this report and save it to your Advice Options and Reasons Library.

Add to Advice Option / Reason Library AND share – This option is only available to Account Admins of multi-user company plans. This will add the option to this report and save it to your Advice Options and Reasons Library and automatically mark it up as shared so it’s available for selection by you and all of your other account’s users.

Advice Options & Reasons Library

You will find further functionality to manage and customise these selectable options in the Advice Options and Reasons Library, which you can access via the customisation dashboard.

To view the advice options and / or reasons of a particular step, first select the appropriate section, and then any steps within that section containing selectable advice options or reasons will be displayed in the drop down beneath.

You can then:

• Edit the wording of any custom advice options / reasons previously created by you or other users within your company (assuming you have been allocated the necessary role to do so).
• Delete any custom advice options / reasons belonging to you and your company (assuming you have been allocated the necessary role to do). Obviously if a custom option is no longer required, deleting it will help keep the list of options that show in a step more relevant and manageable for you and your users.
• Hide an advice option or reasons by deselecting the show tick box. This will remove it from the step in the wizard section and tailor the list of options to more accurately reflect your individual advice service. It will also help make the list of options that show in the step more relevant and manageable for you (and your users).

• Share or unshare any custom advice options belonging to you and your company (assuming you have been allocated the necessary role to do).
• Pre-select an advice reason so it’s automatically selected when you and your users visit that step when building a report. This can be particularly useful and save a bit of time if there are certain options in a step that you find yourself always selecting.

It’s worth noting that the ability to delete, hide and pre-select advice options / reasons is only available through the Advice Options & Reasons Library.

Simon’s summary

I hope that this User Tip has highlighted to you not only the necessity, but also the ease with which you can personalise your suitability reports to ensure a client-focused and compliant report.

Genovo is designed to provide you with the structure and efficiency to produce consistent and compliant suitability reports but as with any tool, the quality of the finished work is often down to you, the user.

Further reading

You’ll find loads more really useful information in:

• Genovo’s series of User Tip blogs;
• the extensive Genovo Knowledge Base;
• the collection of really useful Genovo matrices;
• the ever popular Genovo video tutorials; or
• by attending one or more of our regular monthly training webinars.

Of course, if you’re still stuck, or just need a helping hand, you can always submit a support ticket and we’ll get straight back to you.

Finally – make sure you don’t miss any of our hints & tips – subscribe and get email alerts when we update our blog.

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