Standing Investment Instruction (SII) video guide

The 7IM Platform enables you to create and maintain a set of investment instructions that will automatically apply to new cash transfers, lump sums, or regular contributions that get deposited into a 7IM account. This is known as a Standing Investment Instruction or SII for short.

In this video, we’re going to look at how these can be created and amended and also the various tools available on our platform to help you manage your clients’ SIIs.

CREATING A SII

There are two ways in which a Standing Investment Instruction can be created:

1. For new accounts
2. For existing accounts

New accounts

When you use our online application tool to open new GIA, ISA, or 7IM SIPP account, you can set up the Standing Investment Instruction as part of the application.

During this process, you can choose whether this SII should apply just to the first payment only that arrives in the account or to all future payments. Choosing all future payments means that these instructions will remain attached to the account indefinitely until either you cancel them or they reach a specified end date. So if another contribution or cash transfer happens in the future, this will automatically be invested for you, minimising the risk that the client accidentally remains in cash, out of the market, and also reducing the amount of work that you have to do.

To see more about our online application tool, please watch the separate video in our Help Centre.

Existing accounts

You can also create a Standing Investment Instruction for any existing 7IM account, not just GIA, ISA, & 7IM SIPP.

To do this, go into the client account area and click on the Manage Investments tab.

The Standing Investment Instructions tab will list all the accounts that the client has on our platform and if there is no SII set up on that account, you will be able to create one by clicking the Add button.

In the SII screen, you can specify if all future cash deposits should be split between the available sub accounts… then you can choose the relevant investments for each sub account. This can be searching for a particular fund, choosing a model portfolio, or selecting funds from your Favourites list. For more about creating a Favourite funds list, please watch the separate video in our Help Centre.

You can also include an allocation to cash alongside each investment.

If you want to keep just cash in a particular sub account, then you don’t have to select an investment and the allocation can remain 100% in cash.

Finally, you can add an end date for this SII if you don’t want it to continue indefinitely.

Once you have finished, click the Create button and then again in the Confirmation pop-up message. The SII is now live and will apply to the next cash deposit that arrives in this account.

TOOLS

The 7IM Platform also has a number of tools to help you manage your clients’ SIIs.

Manage Investments Tab

In the Manage Investments tab of the client account area you can view, amend, or cancel an active SII for a client.

To view the details of the SII, click on the Edit button against the relevant 7IM account.

From here, you can make any changes to the SII, including the splits between sub accounts, different weightings between funds and cash, choosing different investments altogether, or adding an automatic end date for this SII. If you do make any changes, please remember to click Update for these to be saved.

The History button will export any changes that have been made since the SII was originally created, into a CSV file so that you have a complete history for your records.

If you would like to cancel the SII altogether, you can click on the cross at the end. You will see a confirmation message pop up and by clicking on the Delete button, the SII will be cancelled instantly.

SII Menu

Under the Transactions menu, you’ll find a dedicated Standing Investment Instructions section for your firm.

Here you can see all the active SIIs that your clients have set up and by expanding the view, you can see the details of each SII. To amend or cancel these, you can go to the Manage Investments tab for that client as we looked at earlier.

In this section, you can also see a history of the cancelled SIIs over a given date range which can be exported into Excel.

Perhaps most importantly, there is a tab called Awaiting Action which will display any transactions that require your attention and action.

Sometimes, even though you have set up an automatic instruction, there are situations where it isn’t clear what we should do with the cash that arrives in the client’s GIA, mainly connected to our process of subscribing new ISA contributions from the client’s GIA.

If, for example, some new cash is deposited into a GIA for a client who also has an ISA, and that ISA has an automated SII set up on it, then there’s a possibility that you might be looking to use some of this cash to make an ISA subscription for this client. Therefore, it wouldn’t be helpful if it all got invested in the GIA.

Because of this, and a handful of other scenarios, we hold fire on carrying out the automatic investment and allow you to decide what you want to happen with that cash.

You can either proceed with the SII by clicking on the Invest In Portfolio button or leave the money in cash by selecting the Leave In Portfolio button.

If there is an ISA subscription set up as part of the online application but the deposit amount received doesn’t match the ISA subscription (perhaps because the client has transferred two amounts to make up a full year’s subscription), then you’ll also be able to use the Transfer to ISA option, after double clicking in the Select ISA column to select the relevant ISA from the drop down menu.

There is also an alert section on our platform homepage to let you know, when you log on, if you have any SII notifications that require your attention. Please keep an eye on this dashboard so that you can take the appropriate action quickly.

New Platform Assets Report

Within the practice level reports on our platform, we have a report called a New Platform Assets report which shows a list of all the assets, both cash and in-specie, that land on our platform over the selected date range. This includes both money from clients and also transfers.

Many firms use this report regularly to track money that arrives on our platform to ensure that any cash gets invested, particularly where a Standing Investment Instruction hasn’t been set up for that client and hence you would invest that money yourselves online.

To help you identify whether you need to take action for any cash received, this report includes information about whether that account has an active SII set up or not and, for cash received into a GIA, whether the GIA is linked to an ISA for the purposes of possible ISA subscriptions.

For historical transactions it will also show whether there was an active SII at the time the cash was received, even if the SII has since been cancelled or ended.

We hope that you find the Standing Investment Instruction functionality useful.