Unbiased admitted its prices had risen for the first time in four years, since it created enhanced adviser packages, but the price in most instances rose from £299 + Vat to £399 + Vat, just over a 33% increase.
For this yearly subscription fee, the not-for-profit organisation provides advisers with an enhanced listing through its search-by-region function. Advisers can also see information on who has looked at their profile and what interaction they have had from potential clients.
On top of this, intermediaries get inclusion in Unbiased’s ‘Blue Book’, which helps them develop press presence and allows them to upload testimonials and social media feeds.
Worth your wad?
Currently, Unbiased said its member breakdown is around 50/50 in terms of basic packages, which advisers don’t have to pay for, and enhanced packages which they do.
Karen Barrett, CEO of Unbiased, said paying advisers deserved to get a higher ranking when it came to investor searches because they are putting money back into the pot which is then used for making sure the website ranks highly in search engines and for developing white label services equivalents on national press websites, among other things.
She added the half of advisers who do not pay for an enhanced package are still benefiting from the one million visitors Unbiased.co.uk gets each year as the “number one portal for consumers looking for financial advice”.
In its original announcement Matrix Solutions, the company behind mylocaladviser.co.uk, used the context of unbiased.co.uk’s 69% increase in membership costs to flatter its own free access. Barrett explained this figure had been reported because over the years advisers had joined unbiased on various different packages. In some instances if they joined during an offer period costs might have risen by 69% but the service was looking to standardise its fees, which she said it has now done.
Matrix Solutions advertises itself as the most “comprehensive database of IFAs and investment, mortgage and insurance brokers”, information which it sells to asset managers and other product providers to use for marketing and sales purposes.
Matrix Solutions’ motive
Barrett questioned the quality of mylocaladviser’s data and said their new tool MyMarket Analysis was designed to clean up their data by getting advisers to input information about their businesses.
Gavin Haynes, managing director of Whitechurch Securities, said his firm had looked at Matrix Solutions as a potential source of information on IFAs when his DFM arm was marketing its outsourcing solutions.
He said the new benchmarking tool offered by MyMarketAnalysis, which allows advisers to compare their sales, fees and business models with regional rivals, could well be an extension of Matrix Solutions information gathering techniques.
He added: “It is useful for advisers to be able to assess the competition and I think there will be a demand to see charges are in line and also what services peers are providing."
But he added advisers should ensure they know where any information they put onto the site is going and what it is being used for.
How it works
Matrix Solutions said it is transparent in informing all advisers who sign up for a free listing on MyLocalAdviser.co.uk that their information can be used in our market intelligence databases which are licenced to the financial services sector.
By generating revenue from these databases, it said it is able to operate a free online directory service for FSA-registered advisers.
The firm added that the information in the MyMarketAnalysis tool is derived from one of its paid-for databases called Financial-Clarity.
This intelligence is provided, for free, to registered advisers on MyLocalAdviser.co.uk and made available through a simple tool called MyMarketAnalysis. It is an additional incentive for the adviser to sign up to the free sit.
An individual adviser will be able to see the 50 closest firms to theirs on a map, and can then see the total sales volumes for the whole group, as well as their ranking within it, for six different products. The adviser is also able to see how their fee levels compare to the 50 closest firms but these figures are rankings or aggregated figures, not tables showing individual performance of advisers, Matrix Solutions clarified.
