4 exciting ways we’ve improved our service to benefit you and your clients

The last 12 months have seen the working practices of many businesses change and adapt to the ‘new normal.’ IPM is no different.

A year ago, our team of more than 30 people came into our Hertfordshire office each day. Now, the vast majority work from home. Despite this sea change, and the disruption to our processes, you tell us that we’ve done a superb job of maintaining our usual levels of service.

Our advisers and clients have also had to change the way the work. We know that many of you no longer have face-to-face meetings with clients and that many of you are also working from home. Logistically, this can pose a range of problems when dealing with providers, both in terms of paperwork and procedures.

Many of you will know that IPM have always been a more ‘personal’ business rather than one that is heavily reliant on being online. While we have always offered online functionality to complement our usual levels of service, we acknowledge that with the way the world is changing, we need to do more.

Here are some of the areas where we have changed over the last year, and how this can benefit you.

Enhanced online access for you and your clients

IPM offers two types of online access, one for advisers and one for clients.

We can provide adviser access at either an individual adviser or firm level, depending on the nature of the adviser’s business. This access provides advisers with the information IPM holds on their clients’ SIPPs including:

Trustee bank account balances and transactions
Transfer history
Previous contributions
Drawdown information
Historic annual valuations for the SIPP.

After feedback from our advisers, we have now expanded the client online access to replicate the information we provide to the adviser for that individual. Previously, we had only offered access to the trustee bank account information.

If you or any of your clients have not registered for online access with IPM head to our dedicated page to do so.

Our online access is a particular area of focus for us at the moment. We hope that we will be able to enhance the features of our online proposition over the coming months – keep reading our updates for news!

It’s important to say that any enhancement of our online offering will not reduce the personal one-to-one service and support that we offer all our advisers and clients. This is a fundamental part of our service proposition and will not change.

New, amendable PDFs

If you’ve requested any IPM paperwork over recent months, or downloaded any of our forms from our website, you will note that these are now all amendable PDFs. You’ve given us lots of positive feedback about this change and the benefits this has brought.

Note that we are not quite there yet with electronic signatures! So, all our forms still need the signature of the client and, where appropriate, the adviser.

However, given current working conditions, we are accepting scanned copies of IPM paperwork so we can ensure that requests are carried out as efficiently as possible. We always require original forms for our file, and these should follow at the earliest possible opportunity. If we don’t receive these, this could prevent us being to carry out some requests.

Zoom meetings and presentations

We miss going out visiting our advisers and clients, as well as welcoming people to our Cambridge House office. However, like most businesses, we now regularly hold adviser and client meetings on Zoom, and we have found that these work well.

As well as meetings, James and Jonathan often travelled around the country presenting to our advisers and their professional connections. We are still happy to provide that support to you and, since last March, we have successfully carried out many of our presentations over Zoom.

And finally… another year of 5-star service

Recently we were delighted to learn that Moneyfacts has, once again, awarded the IPM SIPP a 5-star rating for 2021.

We will cover this in more detail in next month’s newsletter.

Get in touch

If you have any SIPP-related queries, or if you have any clients for whom SIPP or SSAS advice would be beneficial, please get in touch. Email info@ipm-pensions.co.uk or call 01438 747 151.