Mattioli Woods has become the latest firm to seek to capitalise on a growing demographic of do-it-yourself investors, with the planned expansion and roll out of its City Trustees platform as a direct-to-consumer proposition early next year.
Currently access to City Trustees, a specialist self-invested pension platform acquired from Lighthouse in 2010, is available exclusively for financial advisers to use with their clients.
Speaking to FTAdviser, Mattioli director Murray Smith, said the business is going to be developed by “offering more products like investment services, which will enable advisers to create new bespoke partnerships themselves”.
Mr Smith said the brand would move beyond self-invested pensions and would include “sophisticated planning” tools that could be used by DIY investors. He said the revamped service would continue to sign post to its own full advice service.
He Smith said: “We are investing a lot in the technology for platforms to offer that direct to DIY consumers who are growing in numbers.
“We want to have the functionality to offer holisitic and sophisticated planning - we can do that now with a Sipp direct but we want to widen that out for other products that we have spent years to develop.”
He said that while Mattioli Woods is investing “a lot” in the platform technology to drive that, the firm is not looking to compete with the likes of Standard Life and Hargreaves Lansdown “but we will be chipping away at their ankles”.
Mattiolis move would echo that made by a number of advice firms, such as Informed Choice last year, as well as others such as Sanlam, True Potential and Legal and General, which is seeking to utilise the technology behind its wholly-owned Cofunds platform.
Mr Smith said: “This will be rolled out in Q1 2015 but it will be a building process to have proper online functionality. Nowadays clients have expectations that there should be real online functionality but in reality so little use it but it is seen as modern.
“Eventually clients will be able to see returns and growth. We are currently having sessions as to what it would look like, what they might need but clients will tell us what they want or don’t want.
“We want to widen it out to transact to an extent. We have an adviser business at the heart of our proposition but we have to move with the times by offering direct functionality and another distribution channel.
“They may want advice in the future and we will be offering both of them.”
