James Hay updates
Delivering better value for your clients’ cash
Over the next few months, we’re launching some exciting changes to help make your clients’ cash work harder – this is part of our commitment to investing in our products and service.
Sharing the benefit of active cash management
Our James Hay products offer the facility to hold cash. We’ve historically retained any interest earned on these holdings, in order to keep our charges as low as possible.
However, with interest rates rising we’ve reviewed our position. As a result, we’ll start paying interest on cash balances from this Summer via monthly payments.
The interest rate will be variable and based on the amount of interest we earn on cash balances. We’ll retain the first 1% and share all remaining interest with your clients 50/50. At present, we expect the rate payable to them to be in excess of 1.5%, although this is dependent on market rates at the time.
As interest rates rise, our Treasury team expects to generate more interest and your clients will earn more.
| Earned interest rate | % of earned interest rate paid to your clients |
|---|---|
| 0.00% - 1.00% | No interest paid |
| Over 1.00% | 50% of interest paid above the retained 1% |
Ensuring your clients have options to make their cash work harder
We don’t recommend that customers hold large balances of cash for long periods of time in product bank accounts. But if your clients want their spare cash to work harder in the medium to long term, we offer access to specific products with attractive rates of return via our cash panel.
We’re partnering with Bondsmith to significantly expand our cash panel. Through them, we’ll provide access to a far wider range of competitive fixed term deposit and notice accounts via most of our SIPP products.
These new accounts will have a lower minimum deposit amount, compared with those previously available, to provide greater flexibility and enable more customers to benefit from them. Where previously the minimum deposit was £25k, going forward we’ll have options that allow your clients to deposit £10k for most fixed term accounts (some may be as low as £1k) and £1 for notice accounts. Please note that minimum deposits may vary between banks.
We’re delighted that our enhanced cash panel will offer competitive and improved rates from a wider selection of banks, and on a broader range of terms – from six months to five years. We expect it to be live in the Summer and will confirm specific details nearer the time.
And an end to exit fees
In our recent adviser feedback survey, you shared how you feel about exit fees - so we’ve taken note! As of 6 April 2023, we’re no longer applying them when a customer chooses to leave any of our products. Charges for transferring a property will continue to apply.
We’re able to make these improvements because of our scale. These are the initial steps on an exciting journey which has the needs of you and your clients at the heart of our planning. We hope you agree this is an encouraging start!
Investing in our service to ensure we effectively support you
Our new scale has allowed us to make a significant investment in our service. Within the James Hay business we’re acutely aware that this was an area of frustration for some in recent years. Adviser feedback and MI tells us we’re now providing much more robust support and a consistently strong service.
Throughout 2022 and into Q1 2023, James Hay - and also Nucleus Wrap - demonstrated consistently strong performance against target service levels. Focusing on critical customer outcomes, end of month figures were well in excess of 95%, often achieving 100% performance.
Key highlights for James Hay
- We recognise the difference that having well trained and committed teams make. We’ve introduced quality metrics for our phone calls. Assessment of our Customer Service Centre telephone-based support in 2022 reported 93% of calls to be of ‘good quality’, with 62% achieving ‘gold standard’. This means that not only were the queries answered but the right signposting to next steps or full resolution were also completed with the adviser. Gold standard calls continue to rank at >60% in Q1 2023.
- We’re committed to delivering reliable, repeatable and quality service. So far in 2023, all our service indicators have delivered within agreed service levels. All our service outcomes have achieved 99%.
This focus on service is shared across the group – the Nucleus Wrap Client Solutions team also continue to maintain a 100% performance record across their 21 key customer areas.
Striving for even better service
We’re not resting on our laurels though. We’re continuing to invest in our people, the service we deliver and the all-round experience you receive. We’re doing this by:
- Reviewing our processes to establish how we can reduce end to end timeframes for a number of key actions/instructions.
- Launching an optimised inbound telephony experience, piloting in James Hay before being rolled out across Nucleus (as covered in the article below).
- How customers feel about products and service is hugely important to us. Our Complaints handling team are introducing an ‘Initial customer contact strategy’ to make sure that any complainant receives a call within five days, reassurance that their concern will be fully investigated, their details clarified, and next steps confirmed.
- Using insight from advisers to evolve the way we work so that it continues to develop and strengthen.
We recognise that your ability to service your client efficiently is largely dependent on us playing our part, so we hope you’re seeing the benefit of this progress. We’re always keen to hear how you feel we’re doing, so please feel free to contact your Business Development Manager if a conversation would be of value. We look forward to reporting back with further positive updates soon.
Making your call to us a positive experience
If you or your clients call our Customer Service Centre team from June onwards, you may notice a change to our automated telephone answering system.
As a next step in investing in our service, we’ve completely refreshed our approach to interactive voice response (IVR) so that you get access to the help you need promptly and efficiently.
Our new system features optimised channelling of enquiries, helpful comfort messaging, useful information and new human voices that much better reflect how we’ve modernised our business. Don’t worry though, we know you value speaking to one of our helpful team of people, and you’ll still be able to do that - it’s just the welcome messaging that’s changing.
We’re committed to helping make retirement more rewarding for your clients, so providing a friendly, easy to use call answering service is important. And so that’s what we’ve done!
Our team continue to be available to help you on 03455 212 414, 8.30am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays). We hope you feel the benefit of these improvements.
