by Patrick Garrett 2020 will be remembered as a year of exceptional growth at Six Park. As our team reflects on the service enhancements we’ve introduced, we’re profoundly grateful to our clients, subscribers, partners and shareholders for the role you’ve played in Six Park’s development. Thank you.
Many of these enhancements are a direct response to feedback from our clients and partners, which we use to help guide our priorities and development of new features.
Like most Victorians, the Six Park team moved to remote working in mid-March. Flexibility has always been a part of our company DNA so this move was less challenging than it could have been. We adapted quickly to our new and uncertain environment and pressed ahead with our ambitious plans for the year, knowing that a changing financial landscape would further amplify the role we could play in helping our clients and partners.
Here are the top seven ways we have helped our clients and partners through service enhancements in 2020:
1. We made affordable investment management more accessible by halving our minimum investment when markets crashed.
When markets fell in February/March, the Six Park team was alarmed to see reports of everyday Australians taking to “day trading” (akin to gambling), without any professional guidance. ASIC issued a strong warning about this short-term trading, while the RBA also cautioned investors to consider their long-term financial situation before making rash decisions to buy or sell.
In response to this trend, we lowered our minimum investment from $10,000 to $5,000 to make our service even more accessible. We trialled this for three months before permanently lowering the minimum due to the strong demand and feedback we received from clients.
2. We gave clients the ability to invest sustainably through new portfolios.
Clients have increasingly asked for a way to choose more sustainable investments, and our recently launched sustainable portfolios are a new way of offering Six Park’s investment acumen without sacrificing low costs or global investment diversification.
We’ve introduced a way for clients to choose a standard or sustainable portfolio during the account set-up process. Our sustainable portfolios use different exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for exposure to Australian and international shares (hedged and unhedged) and omit exposure to emerging markets.
Our expert Investment Advisory Committee has carefully selected the ETFs in these portfolios, with consideration to key principles including transparency of investment criteria, cost, and the level of investment diversification.
3. We worked with advisers, accountants and wealth coaches to help more people access professional investment management through our partnership program.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended markets at the same time as it removed the ability for planners and accountants to meet their clients face-to-face and provide support, Six Park supported a wide array of financial professionals and organisations to rapidly embrace digital solutions.
Our partnerships with wealth coaches and consumer-led platforms such as Rollit Wealth helped more people access professional investment management at a time when they needed reassurance and support, while Six Park’s white papers for financial advisers and accountants showed how digital solutions are reshaping the financial landscape.
4. We gave our clients access to multiple accounts, within one dashboard.
Over time, we had been noticing that more and more clients were opening more than one account with Six Park. Some clients opened different accounts so they could achieve more of their life-goals; others opened additional accounts to invest on behalf of their children.
Our clients wanted the ability to see all their accounts without logging out and back in with an alternate email address. Our team responded by building a new set of features for these clients, and by making it easier than ever to open a new account. Roughly a quarter of our client base now has more than one account.
5. We made our client dashboard and onboarding more user-friendly through a new design.
At the start of the year, the team agreed that the Six Park user experience was in need of a refresh. The onboarding process and client dashboard didn’t accurately reflect the progress we’d made as a business in the preceding years.
As a result, we set out to modernise the experience and provide more intuitive access to client information; in the process we unlocked significant potential for future enhancements. We’re excited about the possibilities and hope to deliver an even more engaging experience to clients in the near future.
6. We improved the way we share knowledge and content with the public through a new website.
Six Park was at the beginning of its business journey when we launched our first website in 2016. The old website didn’t reflect the humanity we aim to bring to our business; it was also built before we launched our solutions for financial professionals, which meant it wasn’t supporting all of our different audiences.
Our new website is modern and visually appealing; it’s more user-friendly and helps us easily provide the information our clients and partners need. All of this means it’s a more accurate reflection of the business that we’ve become in the years since we launched.
7. We supported our clients and partners effectively during a period of extreme market volatility.
When market volatility began in February/March, our entire team mobilised to offer the support our clients and partners required. This came in many forms:
- Providing clients with regular communication that explained our Investment Advisory Committee’s views and observations;
- Adjusting clients’ asset allocations once sufficient data had been gathered to make well-considered changes to our long-term outlook;
- Supporting new partners to quickly adopt digital solutions that enabled them to support more clients at a time of need;
- Lowering our minimum investment to provide even more people with access to affordable investment management.
Finally…
Managing people’s money is a privilege and responsibility that our team takes seriously. The funds we manage collectively represent thousands of people’s dreams, plans and legacies, and we’re proud of the way we’ve served you throughout a year of extraordinary challenges.
Thank you for your trust – we’re excited about how we can continue to enhance our service to you in 2021 and beyond.