PlanTech wins risk rating friends

Damian Franco knows a fair bit about risk rating research. When he was state manager at Guardian Financial Planning a few years ago, he was given the onerous duty of sorting through all the major risk research and risk software providers and picking what he thought was the best one.

In the end, Franco says the choice was simple.

“PlanTech’s Proplanner left the market for dead,” he says.

Franco liked PlanTech’s software and research offering so much that in January this year he insisted Proplanner come with him when he left Guardian for a new job as an adviser at Lifespan Financial Planning.

Franco is not the only one enthusiastic about PlanTech.

Risk houses whose products PlanTech rates gave it an ‘excellent’ to ‘good’ rating in just about every category — from transparency of research delivery to quality of research — in this year’s Rate the Risk Raters survey.

Risk insurers also thought PlanTech was the research group most likely to have a significant impact on their business.

PlanTech started in 1998. It now has about 72 staff, mostly from a risk insurance background.

Director of operations Mark Young says: “I suppose the company’s background has been life insurance, so we have a very good understanding of advisers’ businesses and also the product is continually improving and it’s totally transparent,” he says.

Also performing well in this year’s survey was Melbourne-based research provider Plan for Life, which provides the product research on behalf of BOSS — another group rated in the survey — as well as providing its own stand-alone risk benchmarking research reports.

Risk houses were particularly impressed with the depth of the research house’s research team and the quality of its research.

Plan for Life consultant Stephen Dingjan says risk products that Plan for Life assesses aren’t given an overall rating, with only the features that make up the product being rated.

“Then the adviser can consult with the client and select how important that feature is. So the overall decision will depend on two factors; the ratings and the degree of importance of each feature,” he says.