Most of your clients will have cash as part of their investment portfolio. After all, it makes sense to have the peace of mind that there’s a buffer fund available to pay for any emergencies. There will also be some who might feel nervous about investing in the market and who choose to keep higher levels of cash reserves, so they don’t risk losing their hard-earned capital.

Whatever their reason for holding cash, it’s probably true to say that your clients are earning very low rates of interest on it – most likely 0.5% or under.

The money sits there doing very little except acting as an insurance policy or as a rainy day fund. According to the Bank of England*, in December 2019, UK households held 1,587 billion of cash in building societies, banks and premium bonds. That’s a considerable sum that is effectively an unused asset. The problem is that moving cash from one provider to another is such a time-consuming, manual process that clients often leave their hard earned cash languishing in low, often zero paying accounts.

Cash planner service

By offering your clients a cash planner service, you can help them take advantage of a much higher rate of interest. You can also retain both sight and control of those funds. Two further benefits of a cash planner service are that it enables you to enhance the level of service you offer, and gives you another reason to get in contact.

With a cash planner service like the one offered by Akoni, once on-boarded, your clients will have access to a whole marketplace of deposit providers. This opens up access to some of the best interest rates on offer and allows your clients to change providers seamlessly if rates should change. Using this type of service clients can often increase the interest they receive on their dormant cash assets by up to 10 times.

A cash planner service also ticks the box of reducing client’s risk exposure to just one bank. The ability to spread cash deposits between different banks, enables your clients to maximise protection with the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

If you include a cash planner service as part of your proposition, once your client has opened their account, they can open multiple deposit accounts across a wide variety of banks on the Akoni platform, matching products with their personal risk-return and governance preference. There’s no need to fill in any more forms or sign anything else.

It’s a great way of adding value to your client relationships, while at the same time keeping more of your clients’ funds under your own watch and ensuring their dormant cash is not stuck in an account earning little or no interest.

About Akoni: Akoni is an award-winning UK cash platform, which provides a marketplace to SMEs and charities, as well as to individuals through our white label distribution partners including IFAs, wealth platforms, accountants and SME hubs. Akoni uses innovative technology to personalise cash planning solutions for clients, and also provides a full API solution to banks and insurance clients.