Financial Services is very suited to the style of guidance provided by Cincom MiGuide.

Whether it’s guiding an agent through a complex process or delivering self- service guidance on the web MiGuide enables the subject matter expert, rather than the programmer, to build guides quickly and easily.

To deliver financial services guidance the process needs to meet a range of criteria including:

• Compliance – the guidance process must be robust, deliver predictable outcomes and be in a format that can be reproducible
• Linear – the guidance must be linear so that all the questions are answered and not skipped
• Help Text – help and additional information must be provided at every stage so that information is available at every stage of the process
• Opt –outs – the user should be provided with the ability to go back and change a previous answer, go to another section or start again
• Keeping good records – once the guidance session has finished and an outcome has been achieved the guidance process must be stored for future reference

To demonstrate what we mean we have used the Stakeholder Pensions Decision Trees created and published by the UK Financial Services Authority; they have been available for some time, are tried and tested and show how MiGuide can meet the needs of the financial services advisors in a “real” situation.

Just like the published Stakeholder Pension Trees the guides are broken down into sections – this makes building, testing and maintenance easy.

There are separate trees for the Employed, Self Employed and the Not Employed all bound together with a simple Introduction tree;

Stakeholder Fig 1

The screen shot shows the administrator environment (for the non-techies, this is where the guides are built!) it looks like a familiar Office type layout with all the menus, buttons and gizmos.   If you can build simple excel spreadsheet you can build guides in MiGuide………………..

There are simple questions, easy answers and for those that need help or information options that can be selected for those too.

As the guides are being built they are stored in an edit repository so they can be tested and tweaked – once completed (and approved by compliance) they can be moved into the production repository.

Fig 2

The next screen shot (fig 2) is of the MiGuide tree for those who are employed with current pensions. A bit more text but still logical and easy to follow; the panel on the left shows the layout of the tree and the panel on the right is where the builder enters the text for the questions and answers.

The trees are built up of Questions, Possible answers, Actions and Results. Each of these can be dragged from the menu bar by clicking on the appropriate icon and then the text created in the panel on the right. Actions are where the real power of MiGuide is unlocked, but more of that later……………….