We are now delighted to be able to announce that we can offer all our member firms comprehensive access to the Synaptics Research Suite that will include the following:

 This is exciting for all our members that carry out investment or pension business as it now gives you end to end research capability, centrally managed and supervised by IFAC and should allow all of you the confidence in your recommendations that they are supported by an industry leading research house and that the on-going diligence and oversight will be conducted by IFAC on your behalf.

So for the following advice this new service will be highly advantageous and valuable:

• Investment product research and comparison (new business and switches)
• Pension switches and new pension plan sourcing
• Client Risk Profiling
• Retirement Cash Flow Modelling
• Drawdown sourcing and comparison
• Platform and fund management comparison

There is also the new Synaptic Portfolio Builder that allows you to build, maintain, analyse and report on a client’s portfolio.

Being an IFAC member you would also gain access to “Contract Enquiry”, this allows for real time links to investment providers, offering you up to date valuations of client investments and pensions, all directly linked through the BAT system, no more need to wait weeks for valuation statements for those clients not managed through a platform!

Being able to use one, centrally accessible research suite gives all our members the ability to have a common approach to research and for IFAC as your compliance consultant and file reviewer, confidence in the research that you conduct.

Synaptics will work automatically within BAT to pull through information from BAT each time you use it, this means you only have to enter client data in BAT once and Synaptics will take through what it needs for you!

Now IFAC being IFAC won’t mandate that you must use these tools, that is not how we work with you, rather for those of you that need to use research you can access a top line suite through us and importantly at a significantly reduced cost.

If you go direct to Synaptics for the same suite, you will pay £120 per month for a licence.

If you access it through BAT then the cost will be £50 per month, this cost will increase each year by CPI (inflation).

This will allow you to focus all your investment research through one system and through BAT.

We have not included a TVAS or TVAC analysis system though in this suite of tools, as the demand for such we feel is so small as to significantly outweigh the potential cost.

What do you need to do?

Simply reply to me, georgina@ifac.eu   in order to secure the heavily reduced rate of £50 per month,-  substantially less than the cost direct and without the ability to link your client data to it through BAT.