All your Risk Researcher questions, answered

Iress product manager Brent Muller recently jumped onto Advisely to answer all your burning questions on Xplan Risk Researcher.

Here are three of the most interesting conversations that came out of his AMA: 

Q: How do you best incorporate Xplan's fully interactive risk insurance comparator system in an advice process, and how would you efficiently create standard insurance SOAs?

Each of the Risk Researcher screens is able to be embedded within a site's advice wizard.

Please refer to our Iress Learning Centre here for a micro-learn on adding wizards.

We include a default SOA as part of Quick Merge within Risk Researcher. This is intended to give an example of the layout and content available for the report output.

The default template can be downloaded, with the ability to customise as needed.

Alternatively, our Technical Services team are more than happy to assist with customising SOAs.

Q: Is there a way to 'refresh' a Risk Researcher scenario? Currently, if the current policy info is input incorrectly (and the adviser has prepared the RR scenario for the SOA), there is no way to update the current position, so the only workaround is to start again from scratch, which means re-inputting the needs analysis/recommendations etc. 

Risk Researcher scenarios are intended to be a snapshot at the point in time.

Updating the existing policy details could invalidate any modelling already completed within the scenario, especially where shortfalls or even entire policies are impacted.

Creating a new scenario ensures the correct financial position is taken into account when beginning the modelling process.

Having said that, we are monitoring adviser feedback around this, so the process of ‘refreshing’ is to be reviewed again, taking into account the above considerations.

Q: With the Like for Like functionality, what is the best way to incorporate the premiums into the Like for Like product? Are there any plans for future development to automate this from the premium quotes to save advisers time having to source the quote and manually input this?

Unfortunately we are unable to source in-force policy premiums from the providers, as they are generated and maintained from their internal systems.

We only have access to their new business calculators and rate tables.

If they were to make the in-force premiums available, we would be more than happy to incorporate these into Risk Researcher.