Unlevel playing field
Goss, who qualified as a financial adviser, went on and co-founded Sort in 1998, touted as the UK's first online investment adviser. Two years later it was sold to a US-based online adviser.
As his career in financial services developed and he looked back on that early period, he felt that the playing field was skewed against investors.
“Those consumers didn’t really understand what they were getting into. There was no suitability process, there was no good quality advice,” he says.
"As I spent more time in financial services, I felt that the combination of technology, internet-based technology, great best practice investment and financial planning can play a really important role in helping people fund the life they want, at a risk that is right for them, that takes account of their objectives, and does so in a really transparent and engaging way, so that we can help make planning your retirement 15 years from now as interesting as planning your next holiday.”
To enable the next stage in its expansion, Dynamic Planner received financial backing from private equity growth investor FPE Capital, as it looks to double its size in the UK and expand into Europe.
Goss says: “What they do bring is clearly more firepower in terms of financials, but they also bring expertise. We deliberately selected FPE as [a company that] shares our values about how business should be run.”
With all the technological change that Goss has seen in the industry and that has happened in financial planning, one thing that technology has been unable to change is the need for human interaction — something that even artificial intelligence cannot replace.
“The engagement with the client [with the use of technology and financial planning technology] post-Covid, has really radically increased,” he says.
“So advisers will send out something like 12,000 invitations a month from Dynamic Planner, to ask clients to complete some of the financial planning process to gather data and do some risk-profiling to review their circumstances.
“In doing that, hopefully the client engages a bit in their finances and gets to think about the information they’re providing. Technology can’t replace that human-to-human feeling.
“With some of the things that we’ve done with mobile technology and mobile friendly technology — the ability to enable clients to engage with their own financial planning — I think we’re scratching the surface as to what’s possible there.”
Another well-known passion of Goss's is the drive for diversity and inclusion, which he says is crucial to his business as it leads to diversity of thought from which better understanding and solutions for clients emerge.
