Synaptic Insight

Synaptic Insight helps providers to understand the key strengths and weaknesses of their individual product offerings, together with key indicators of new business success. 

Since the online versions of our well established Synaptic research applications were launched in 2006, our online user base has grown as we continue to attract new users and as our desktop users migrate across to an online solution.

The efficiencies of an online system not only benefit IFAs but also present a unique opportunity for us, providing a factual audit trail of how products are researched and what criteria is most important to professional advisers when selecting suitable products for their clients. The collation of this data provides a valuable insight to better understand what methods and criteria advisers apply when conducting research, helping us to further enhance the IFA software.

This same data can give providers the ability to tell which product features, fund sectors and ranking data options are typically being selected when conducting product research; whether specific products are being selected at the recommendation stage and therefore, of course, the converse – why they might not be attracting new business.

In 2008 Synaptic Insight was designed – a tool available to product providers, giving access to usage data (available for any product type displayed within Synaptic Product Research) to allow marketing or product design teams to interrogate as required.

Using our proprietary Synaptic Insight market intelligence tool, our experienced in-house research team have produced a number of analyses from the accumulated data, which have yielded some extremely interesting results. We published our first Synopsis report in January 2009, which looked at the selection of investment bonds over the preceding 12 months (2008).

In this first iteration of Synopsis, the resulting statistics were derived from over 10,000 individual pieces of research conducted. This included activity from directly regulated small 1-2 person practices as well as members of larger networks and nationals.

We opted to produce this first Synopsis report on investment bonds because our Synaptic Insight data suggested that bonds continued to be an area of focus for IFAs despite certain predictions that this would not be the case with the CGT changes that were announced in the 2007 Pre-Budget Report. A follow-up report is planned for January 2010 covering the research that has been conducted in this area over the subsequent 12 months (2009).