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Traditionally, getting a clear view of someone's financial situation is a paper affair — lots of paper and manual searching. “There has to be a smarter way,” thought financial service provides Söderberg & Partners, prompting them to start using the Upp-app. Söderberg & Partners developed the front end and user environment, and behind the screen the FASCO-solution of Sopra Steria ensures that financial data is readily available and easy to bundle. Rudi Smit, product owner at Söderberg & Partners: “The switch to digital accelerates our advice cases. It makes financial advice affordable for everyone.”
What do getting a car on lease and foreclosing a mortgage have in common? They both ask for a detailed mapping of the applicant's financial situation and a sizeable number of paper documents. Getting this info takes a lot of time for the applicant and the advisor when there are possibilities to accelerate this process considerably with digital tools. Sopra Steria developed the FASCO solution for handling financial questions, and Söderberg & Partners is the first organization to start implementing it in its day-to-day operation.
“Advice required for individual pension assets”
“It is our goal to give everybody affordable and accessible financial advice. There’s a growing market for individual advice. With the coming transformation of pensions in 2023, this demand will only rise in the Netherlands. The new pension system leaves collective guarantee claims for a situation that centralizes individual pension assets. This new situation asks for advice.” For this advice, more specifically for retrieving financial documentation, Söderberg & Partners started using the FASCO solution.
“Users log in with DigiD to share data”
Retrieving financial data is a wholly automatic process within FASCO. Söderberg &Partners handle these affairs for clients with the Upp-app, which operates with Sopra Steria technology behind the screens. Smit: ”Advisors connected to us give you, the applicant, a QR code. Next, you can log in with your DigiD and provide clearance to send the data to the advisor and his system. The data is shared in five minutes, and the advisor can rest assured it is correct information. The attractiveness of this app lies in the ability for the advising party to be both the manager and the designer of the branded environment.”
An app with extensive possibilities
The biggest plus of FASCO for Söderberg & Partners is that retrieving financial data is much less time-consuming. “But the possibility to link the app to our own applications is also a great advantage. If we have any additional questions, we can always talk about them with Sopra Steria. There are plenty of possibilities to adjust the app to our wishes.” Not implementing the changes in the back end themselves is a conscious choice for Söderberg & Partners. “We don’t have enough knowledge of government systems in-house, and it’s just untenable to keep track of all the changes. Ordina monitors everything, saving us a lot of time.”
“We expect a lot more advisors will want to use our app”
By staying ahead of future changes in the financial sector, Söderberg & Partners expect to gain market shares. “The need for sound financial advice is on the rise. At the moment, people working for a fixed employer often assume that their pensions are well arranged. But that thought is ebbing away, even though the right mindset of taking control of your pension situation is not dominant yet. As soon as the new pension system takes hold, there is no longer any guarantee that you will have an adequate pension. So we expect the need for knowing and controlling this situation to become much stronger soon. Advisors will have more means by then to advise customers correctly. You can also use our available tools if you’re part of our network.”
Get financial insight faster.
Smit notices that thinking about changes to come is still far off. “Nonetheless, we think an advisor benefits from already having access to the infrastructure to guide customers more independently later. This self-service concept enables this while the FASCO intelligence is active in the background. You can only keep something small and understandable for someone else if you know how it works yourself. An advisory flow needs to be understandable for users. Stronger still, even non-specialists should be able to fill in requests for advice. At the same time, we think there has to be a form of closure, the final talk with the advisor.” The advisor doesn’t have to waste time making dossiers, Smit thinks, but can put its full attention into preparing the request for advice. The advice applicant also gets the insight to determine precisely what they want.
“A boom of interest by 2023”
Söderberg & Partners is satisfied with the possibilities of the Upp-app and is looking forward to 2023. “This will be the year this project will take off. The one real condition for using this application is being able to work with a smartphone, which is not a problem for most people. Sopra Steria has developed something that the market is waiting for.”