We hope this explanation can provide more clarity on how our research works.
Our objective is to be a tool for advisers to highlight the material differences between products, rather than a view of ranking them from best to worse, therefore, advisers are able to select their product and provider basket to what they are qualified to advise on (i.e., they can remove providers and alter products where required). However, in reality, price is also a significant factor during the advice process and both our pricing comparison and research rating are used by advisers to justify why a selection is being made.
For example, ideally an adviser will select all agreed value base products under non-taxable (agreed value).
In this set, Partners Life would have a research rating advantage by scoring 100%, but pricing disadvantage (as they are more expensive).
This is also the case with Agreed Value with TPD Booster:
If an adviser then decides they want to remove Partners because they are unable to place business with this company, this removes Partners Life from being shown in the premium comparison however, it would be inaccurate to then bump AIA to 100% because in this specific set Partners Life still has the highest score.
When it comes to Options and Extras packages, in an ideal world, an adviser would select the best products in the set to compare and again will have to consider the pricing comparison and research rating as a package.
Fidelity has a pricing advantage (cheapest in this set) and a research advantage in this example below.
However, removing Fidelity will remove the provider from appearing in the premium comparison, but it will not alter the research comparison – they still have the highest rating in the set and the other companies are benchmarked against this.
We believe it would be inaccurate if advisers were allowed to remove a company to then alter research ratings. They can, however, alter products but have to be able to justify it from a pricing and rating perspective.
We hope this provides some insight into how research ratings work and if there is a specific topic you would like us to share on, please send us an email on [email protected]
