The company offering planners free work-from-home tools

Social network XY Adviser is offering advisers free tools, including an all team chat with file uploading, and the ability to discuss different topics or subjects to ensure written conversation doesn’t get cluttered, to ensure business continuity as coronavirus forces advisers to start working from home.

“XY holds around a hundred comments a day, and a growing number of those were to do with remote work due to the coronavirus,” a spokesperson for XY told ifa.

“While we don't think this will have a huge impact on the health of the advice community, we do think this may change the way work is done for the next couple of months. And business can't afford to shut down for that long, so changes need to be made. We've spent the time to pull together the tools and resources, so we thought we could help out by offering them for free to the advice community.”

XY already conducts most of its teamwork remotely, and believes that advisers stand to benefit from the change to “business as usual”.

“The mindset should be 'digital meetings are more convenient for my client',” a spokesperson told ifa.

“This has been true for a while, and it's actually a lot easier for the adviser. So the first point is from a client's point of view – this is an advantage. Secondly, from the internal point of view, the use of cloud-based file storage via Dropbox for example (pending PI insurance), and holding written conversations in context by quarantining each conversation to its own channel is the best way to make sense of all the variable conversations.”

The tools will help to streamline work that would ordinarily be done over multiple email chains. XY also believes the tools are superior to other messaging services, including WhatsApp, which holds all topics on one wall – meaning work becomes more and more difficult to track.

“We understand working remotely can be easy if there is a bit of simple structure,” the spokesperson said.

“If conversations and files are held permanently, and outside of email – things can move along quite easily.”