Tuesday 1st July marks the start of a mission-critical quarter for Empowered Wealth and the broader group of companies. 

Over the past 18 months, we've invested a huge amount of time and effort into systemising our group of companies, so that we can improve the products and services we're able to offer you, our customers. 

Whilst much has been accomplished and strong foundations have been laid, we recognise that the benefits are yet to have fully materialised from a customer service and value delivery standpoint. 

With this at the forefront of our minds, we're laser-focussed on bringing some key projects to fruition during Q3. 

So, let's take a look at our key objectives. 

Historically, a lot of knowledge has been held in the heads of certain individuals, without being properly documented and shared across our team.

This has made us overly-dependent on certain individuals and made it difficult to systemise recurring processes.

A great deal of work has been done over the past few months to document everything properly, so that knowledge can be shared across our workforce and we can start to layer in more automations, to improve response times.

During Q3 you will start to see more progress bars attached to the requests, which you have submitted and which the team are working on.

This will give you a better sense for what stage things are at and what needs to happen next.

To put this into a visual context, you will start to see something like this.

You will notice the progress bar, which showcases the amount of progress, which has been made.

Likewise the status updates in the main discussion thread e.g. your scheme administrator has updated the status from Stage 1 to Stage 2.

By clicking on the progress bar, you will be able to inspect all the stages in the process, so you have a sense for what to expect.

This has been and remains a large project, but we hope to start rolling out these improvements during Q3. 

During Q2 we began measuring our response times against our SLA's. 

Mindful of this being a mission-critical aspect of our business and a key measure of how well we're serving our customers, we have introduced a traffic light system to highlight whether we're:

Automated reminders are automatically sent to the relevant team members and escalated to management, as things pass through certain thresholds.

In combination with the SOP project, various automation initiatives and recruitment drives, we're working very hard to continuously improve our average response times.

This won't happen overnight, but we believe we're on the right track and will be able to demonstrate meaningful improvements, as we progress through the upcoming quarter.

The screenshot below provides a visual sense for the traffic light system we've implemented and are using on a daily basis, to measure and improve our response times.

As part of our commitment to centralising all operations on the Empowered Wealth platform, we're planning to incorporate all our existing webforms, which you've typically received via email, into our platform workflows.

Once this goes live, when initiating a new request, a comment will be automatically posted, which includes a link to the associated webform.

You will simply need to click the link, complete the webform as you normally would do and then the platform will be updated accordingly.

This may seem like a small change, but it will help us to track these webforms more effectively, so we can focus on reducing response times, as far as possible. 

In developing the Empowered Wealth platform, we have taken security very seriously. 

We want to continue in this spirit, by introducing additional measures to further protect your personal data. 

To date, we have made Two Factor Authentication (2FA) an optional feature on your accounts. During Q3 we're planning to make this mandatory, as it is a great way of defending against bad actors. 

We've also improved our document management mechanism on the platform, which allows us to track and protect documents, which contain sensitive data. We will leverage this functionality, as we work to incorporate additional security measures into our payment procedures. 

When it comes to security, we're in the habit of exercising constant vigilance and as with everything else, we're committed to continuously improving things. 

It has been in our minds for some time, to leverage electronic signature technology, in order make the process of signing, uploading and returning documents more efficient. 

We're constrained in some instances by 3rd parties who still insist on receiving wet signatures. 

With that being said, we're committed to exploring and implementing improvements in this area, wherever we can. 

This is one of our more optimistic objectives for Q3. It's not at the top of the priority list, but sooner or later, we will tackle it.

We recognise the transformative impact that AI is having in nearly every aspect of our society. 

We are committed to leveraging the power of AI in a responsible and sustainable manner, so that we can continuously improve the quality of service that we're able to provide to you, our customers. 

We have embarked upon some very early-stage research and prototyping, with a view to gradually working out the best way of incorporating AI into the Empowered Wealth platform. 

No promises for Q3 but this is something we're looking at very closely. 

We're working very closely with a number of investment counterparties, who have expressed an interest in being listed on our platform. 

In the majority of cases, these are investment counterparties who have been requested by you, our customers. 

One such counterparty that we're working very closely with and are hoping to onboard during Q3 is Crowd Property. 

Likewise, we're very much looking forward to the launch of the Empowered Cash Management Service during Q3. 

Building, maintaining and continuously improving the Empowered Wealth has been and will continue to be a major project for us. 

We're committed to making the improvements, which are necessary, in order to deliver the levels of service that you, our customers, both expect and deserve. 

Thank you for your patience and flexibility, whilst we work to push things forward during Q3 and beyond. 

On a final note, please keep your feedback coming. The results of the most recent client survey were invaluable, in terms of identifying key areas for improvement. 

We prioritise our efforts, according to your needs, so please be generous with providing your honest and unvarnished feedback. 

We will listen to you and we will always do our best to serve you.