Described as one of the new breed of financial planning firms, North London based Serenity is overhauling its website just one year after the company’s rebrand in 2010.

The new website is designed to enable greater interactivity with site visitors and will give clients online access to their financial life plans and their investments.  Clients will also be able to upload documents to a personal, private and secure area on the website which can be stored for future reference or shared with the Serenity team.

In a bid to illustrate and clarify the company’s service proposition, Serenity is increasing use of content-rich graphics which portray individual steps within the financial life planning process.

The Serenity website also sets out to represent best practice in design by encouraging communication and interaction amongst site visitors.  Clients and casual visitors looking for answers to personal finance questions will be able to use the site’s ‘Ask the Experts’ feature to communicate and interact with each other, including asking questions which can either be answered on the site or privately.

Tina Weeks, Co founder of Serenity Financial Planning in North London said today: “It’s vital that IFAs don’t let their website become stale.  We last changed ours a year ago, and even though it was bright, modern, fresh and still gets fantastic feedback – we’re determined to keep our clients and professional connections interested, returning and interacting with us regularly.

“It is vital that the site is not merely a static advertisement for our services – it needs to be interactive and engaging and become a hub for their financial affairs.  What’s more, we fully embrace all aspects of social media because these tools provide new, proven and easy ways for us to communicate with Internet-savvy clients.”

There are still many IFAs who do not even have a website because they believe that their older clients are not interested in the Internet – despite a wealth of evidence that the web enriches the lives of ‘the grey market’.

Tina Weeks, who was recently voted IFA Personality of the Year continued: “We find that clients of all ages enjoy using the Internet on a daily basis and we intend to make ourselves eye-catching to them through an engaging web presence that provides real value and which makes our proposition crystal clear.”

Differentiation post RDR:  High touch and high tech

A post RDR world will unquestionably create greater competition between IFAs, and Serenity is confident that its service proposition with clear focus on Financial Life Planning – combined with a compelling and persuasive web presence will prove to make the company stand out from the crowd.

Serenity’s overall online presence is not just restricted to its website.  Using a variety of social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and new ‘Geo-location’ tools such as Foursquare, the Serenity brand will be able to reach a wider but targeted audience.

Serenity is one of the first IFAs in the UK to join Foursquare – a popular software application which helps consumers to discover, assess, contact and refer local service providers via their mobile phone. Through its link with IFA Life, Serenity’s Foursquare listing will be highlighted to local users when using the software on their mobile phones.

And in an industry first, Serenity will be making use of QR codes (Quick Response) on its website, at its seminars and at client networking events in order to provide additional information and services to clients via their mobile devices.  QR codes can be used to display text, video, PowerPoint presentations, website URLs, PDFs and other data on mobile devices.