On-line Investment Updates, Revaluations

Once you’ve set-up the required certificate, login name and password for each insurer (see “Setup, Online enquiries”), then to receive an on-line valuation simply go to any investment policy and click the purple “Zigzag / Uplink” button…

You’ll then see a dialogue like that shown below…

At the top left of this pop-up you can click…

· “Revalue all” in order to tick all the contracts for inclusion in the revaluation

· “Revalue none” in order to clear all the contracts, and exclude them from the revaluation

· “Online defaults” which will automatically tick the “Online” box for every contract where you’ve setup the provider’s details for contract enquiry

Note that all the above bulk settings can be overridden via manual ticks, unless you’ve expressly disabled this in the setup (see “Setup, Online enquiries”).

At the bottom left of this pop-up you can choose…

· To revalue all of the current client’s investments

· To only revalue contracts from providers setup for contract enquiry

· To only revalue the current contract

At the top right there’s also an important column called “Renew funds”, where you can choose to tick or clear the box for each contract where the initial setting will be as per your setup for RETAIN or DELETE (see “Setup, Online Contract Enquiries”). Note that if you have NOT ALLOWED this column to be changed in your setup then none of your staff will be able to alter these boxes - which is important if you wish to prevent them from accidentally deleting old investment transactions. With regard to the “Renew funds” boxes, if they are…

· Ticked - then those contracts will have all of their existing investment transactions replaced by just the current fund holdings, which is quick and simple - and a useful way of downloading initial fund data.

· Cleared - then those contracts will retain their existing investment transactions, which might include income withdrawals and switches from funds no longer present. This may involve matching any insurer-specific fund codes to standard MEX or SEDOL ones so initially will be more labour intensive, but in the long run will result in more detailed valuations and the ability to re-use your investment data with other tools.

During the revaluation process, if a contract enquiry fails, or the contract is designated for manual revaluation, you’ll see a pop-up like the one below…

In this case you can see the fund’s name, code and currency, and should be able to verify or update its “Latest price …at date”, then click “Confirm”. Alternative to leave it unchanged simply click “Skip”. Also note the setting for “Don’t stop to confirm…”, where you can agree in advance to accept all prices already in your funds table (typically updated via Financial Express) up to the specified number of days old (i.e. so the system won’t stop to confirm them).

Matching Funds

During an on-line valuation that “RETAINS” funds you may see a dialogue like that shown below. The “RETAIN” funds process cannot be fully automated because…

(a) you may have entered some incorrect funds in your Durell system

(b) you may have missed some funds in your Durell system

…in which case the provider’s details will not match up. The dialogue below shows the funds you’ve entered on the left side of the “Status” column, and the insurer’s equivalent ones on the right….

Use the “Move fund” buttons at the right to align the fund names (e.g. move the Invesco Perpetual High Income one on the right to align with the equivalent one on the left), after which you should click the “Match” action, whereupon “Match” will appear in the “Status” line. The system will remember each such match, so you’ll only have to do this once for each fund. If you mistakenly cause an incorrect match simply use the “Clear” action to remove it.

Sometimes you may have fund details that you wish to ignore, for example, after a switch, transfer or variation. In such a case you can choose to ignore a given line by clicking the “Ignore” action.

In the example above you can also see that the insurer has some cash in an “ISA Income Cash…” fund, which does not exist on the left. In this case you’ll need to temporarily skip it (i.e. click the “Skip” button), enter that new fund in your Durell contract, then repeat the valuation and match them.

Some insurers deliver on-line fund prices in a different currency from Financial Express (e.g. in pounds instead of pence) so if you see your on-line valuation is 100 times too much or too little you should use the “Set currency” button to adjust the funds accordingly. You can also do this at any other time, simply by double-clicking the fund on the contract’s “Funds” screen and re-selecting the currency, as shown below.

Contract Enquiry Request & Response – XML File

In the unlikely event that you wish to check the transmission between your system and the insurer, click the “View XML” button at the bottom right of the above screen to check the source code, as shown below…