In this volume of our client feature series, we’re catching up with Prospera Wealth Management who have been using DocPortal to great effect, implementing it to support their client servicing and communication.

Read below to find out how they’re doing it…

Can you start by telling us a bit about Prospera Wealth Management?

We are based primarily in Sheffield but we have advisors up and down the country so can service clients nationally. Two of our advisors are employed in-practice though and we like to encourage them to see clients in our main office in Sheffield as we like to promote face-to-face service as much as we can, where that’s preferable to our clients. Our back office team is based in Sheffield as well, but we are looking to expand our locations across England in the future.

Why did you feel DocPortal was a good fit for your business initially?

We got to a point where we just needed something where we could reach out to clients in a quick way. Obviously just before Covid in March 2020 the markets went a bit crazy, and we found ourselves spending a lot of time phoning clients for fund switches etc. So having the ability to put something together on a document that we can share with all our clients in minutes, seconds even, became really important to us. So in practice, we can now send these letters out through DocPortal, regarding fund switches for example, with a box at the bottom where the client can say if they’re happy or not to go ahead. If that pings back with a yes, we have their consent and we can do that immediately for them rather than it taking several days to get through the hundreds of clients we’ve got. So that was the main thing we wanted to get from it - just that instant communication.

Then the other thing would also be the document sharing, it’s keeping things alive and it’s getting things back and forward from our clients easily. We’ve shared so much on there so far, in fact I’ve done one this morning and it takes seconds. We’ve got an event coming up in June so we've shared the invite through DocPortal. The client gets a notification that there’s some new content on there, and they can go into it and find all the information for the event and click to register if they want to. It’s just a really helpful way to remind the clients that we have these events happening throughout the year in a way that’s more accessible to them.

We also use it for other content as well, like interviews or updates which we’ll pop in the news folder. Or we’ll put regulatory documents in there like up to date SCDD and brochures, and because DocPortal is so easy to use we can update those documents again when we need to. All you need to do is click on it and replace it with the updated version and it reshares it with all your clients.

How is DocPortal supporting your goals for the rest of 2023?

It’s everything we’ve said so far really. We just want to keep using it and keep in contact with our clients. Servicing is such a massive thing at the moment and we just want to make sure we’re as near to the top of our game as we can be from a client service point of view. Because of this we’re actually bringing in a new role within the practice so that after every sign up meeting an advisor has had - and we do want to try and take this across the board will all our advisors that are using DocPortal - there will be a bit of an onboarding call for the client. So once the client has signed up in that initial meeting, there’ll be another meeting with this new ‘onboarder’ role if you like.

It will mean we can get them set up on the app and be able to provide a bit more of a one-on-one onboarding session. Of course, we do also have to understand and appreciate that not all our clients are tech savvy so we always say that we have this app, but we’re also not getting away from still receiving things through the door because that’s still really important as well.

Something that will come later in the year for us also is using DocPortal more to manage the client’s ongoing proposals. After speaking with your clients, you end up with all this paperwork and half the time they don’t want it - and some clients do end up with a lot of paperwork. So over time, we will work through our client bank and if they decide they want all their documents stored in DocPortal instead then that is something we want to start doing for them.

Lastly, do you have any favourite features in particular from the DocPortal app?

The app is obviously an ongoing thing and can still be developed with the things we want it to do more of, but at the minute what we really benefit from is that instant communication. From our perspective as a business it’s just very, very easy. It’s got a great flow and there’s no complications to it, and everything that you need to do is there, but it’s also very user-friendly from the client perspective as well. Then actually there is the digital executor function as well that we love. We’ve currently got an email drafted up to send out, which again DocPortal helped us with, around a digital executor campaign so that’s exciting, and of course it’s a brilliant referral tool for us as a business.

One other thing to mention is that the support we get is unreal as well. We actually only found out about a month ago that our main contact for DocPortal is actually based in Texas and he just works UK hours! We speak to him all the time, but whenever we ring him or email him he’s straightaway getting back to you. So the support you get as a business is brilliant, even when we’ve had handovers in support whoever we have dealt with has been excellent.

Prospera Wealth Management LLP is a St James’s Place Partner with over 140 years of combined experience that provides bespoke financial planning solutions. Many thanks to the Prospera team for taking the time to chat to us about their experience with DocPortal so far.

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