FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

If you cannot find the answer to your questions below please contact us at info@financial-clarity.com

1. What is Financial-Clarity?

Market Analysis

Financial-Clarity is a Product Sales Data (PSD) Aggregator for Fund Management Groups, Life & Pension companies and Platforms in the UK. Our ever-growing database now contains transaction data for over 90% of retail sales across the Fund Management sector, allowing each participating firm to benchmark their own performance against the rest of the market.

Financial-Clarity also contains the wealth of intelligence harvested from our Matrix Financial Intermediary Database (MFID) which provides contact information and Market data about which intermediaries are selling which products. This invaluable information resource brings the whole of the distribution landscape to life, allowing Financial Services companies to chart their overall distribution operations and to monitor analyse the effectiveness of all of their channels.

Financial-Clarity offers two different user interfaces to all clients. Those with advanced Market Insight teams use our statistical analytics application FastStats, which permits comprehensive interrogation of the monthly transaction data. Those clients requiring easily-accessible information to bring their distribution operations to life can opt for our Qlikview Dashboards, which provide automatically updated charts and graphs to allow companies to run queries about all aspects of their performance.

In short, Financial-Clarity harnesses the power of a wealth of essential statistical data about your companies’ overall performance and places it at your fingertips. It empowers you to make the right decisions about how best to build your business, based on real-time data about the state of the market, your competitors’ position and your own sales history.

2. Why do I need it?

Corporate Performance

Before Financial-Clarity, the act of identifying and analysing your product sales from UK Financial Intermediaries was a laborious process clouded by poor intelligence, a patchwork of systems and complex modelling. Additionally, the blurring of the sales landscape caused by disintermediation, the emergence of wrap platforms and fund supermarkets and the impact of the upcoming RDR is preventing you from obtaining accurate information about how, where, why and when your specific product sales have occurred. Ultimately, this lack of detailed intelligence is hampering your future growth potential.

With Financial-Clarity, you are able to gain a comprehensive monthly breakdown of your product sales at individual outlet joined to contact level, allowing you to identify sales trends which can even be benchmarked against the overall market. This information can be analysed in a wealth of different ways, including trend, historical and regional performance analysis. It arms you with the intelligence you’ll need to adapt your own specific sales, marketing and distribution strategies to drive your bottom line growth.

3. How does it work?

Sales Team Performance

We’ve created a database of aggregated total market sales for all intermediary sold financial products and services across the UK. It’s taken us almost two years to build the platform, to liaise with organisations like yours and to set up the data feeds. We are now reporting over 90% of retail sales for the fund management industry and an ever-increasing coverage of the Life and Pension sector. This is done under strict confidentiality agreements and the data is anonymised to create the overall UK Financial products sales distribution landscape.

At this point we assimilate the extensive intelligence held in our proprietary Intermediary Database to bring the sales picture to life. We are able to deliver this Single Intermediary View in a number of user-friendly ways:

  • As a custom data feed for inclusion in your internal Business Intelligence systems;
  • Matched and integrated into whichever CRM system your company uses;
  • Use one of our own web-based Business Analysis platforms to interrogate and evolve your sales strategies or provide information dashboards across your business;
  • By using our Insight Bureau Service to analyse your data for you.

4. Isn't that what I'm currently doing?

Key Customers

Unlikely. You’re currently investing time and money to integrate internal systems and data with Workload’s Touchstone products for the market sales data which:

  • Is technically inferior;
  • Gives less outlet and sales granularity;
  • Requires multiple purchases to get a full market view;
  • Is difficult to integrate with other data sources and systems;
  • Gives you a “rear view mirror” view of sales many weeks after the end of each quarter; and
  • Is less user-friendly and more expensive than Financial-Clarity.

5. How is Financial-Clarity better?

Account Analysis

With Financial-Clarity from Matrix, you’ll receive secure access to our web-based platform which aims to allow you to access your monthly sales data within a week of month end. Once you’ve accessed your own sales data, you’ll be able to interrogate this across all outlets and drill down to contact level for the first time, and to build sales trend models against the whole market. Once we’ve assimilated the additional intelligence from our proprietary Intermediary database or various other attitudinal and demographic datasets, you’ll be uniquely positioned to profile, segment and market to your most closely allied prospects.

Additionally many of you struggle to match Workload data into your existing CRM systems obtaining typically a 40-60% match rate. With Financial-Clarity we take this laborious task off your hands and achieve near 100% match rates at source.

Starting from as little as £20k, not only is our licence guaranteed to be cheaper than your current contractual arrangement but we’re also able to offer a bureau service which, if required, can help you easily plan and implement these new sales activities, marketing campaigns and distribution strategies.

6. My MI Team have got no complaints about the data we’re currently receiving.

Profiling

This is probably due to the fact that there hasn’t been an alternative until now, and it’s not been properly explained that the data may be fundamentally inaccurate. The goalposts have now moved, and the latest business analysis software allows a much greater insight into this sales arena than it did even six months ago.

At Matrix we’re uniquely placed to close this skills gap because our core operations stem from providing Financial Intermediary intelligence and our skills in merging disparate data sets are perfectly poised to help to unlock value. For more information about our activities please visit our main website here: www.matrixsolutions.co.uk.

7. Won’t you end up splintering the market?

Market Analysis

We don’t believe so, because we’ve managed to grow to a 90% share without compromising our competitors’ abilities to deliver their products. Our basic view is that competition is good - companies should have a choice of provider and purchase on service, price, and data quality.

We have no complaints with you providing sales data to a number of service providers and then buying the service that best suits your needs. Why are we the only company proposing this?

8. Can you integrate Financial-Clarity into my CRM system?

Corporate Performance

As a preferred consulting partner with Salesforce.com, we have qualified personnel on our team at Matrix who can diagnose your current CRM system problems and develop a solution that will improve your overall business practices. We can deploy the aggregated market sales data alongside the intelligence we hold in our intermediary database into a brand new CRM system that takes all of your existing data and presents it in the way which will most benefit you as an organization.

We’ve recently launched our Financial-Clarity plug-in application for Salesforce.com, which delivers the power of the product in a simple-to-download app.

Please take a look at the new factsheet about this product in the Factsheets area of the Learning Zone.