Standard Life is set to invest £30m in its wrap platform to streamline adviser and wealth manager business processes and proposition delivery.
The ‘Accelerate’ programme will concentrate on supporting the centralised investment and retirement processes required to efficiently scale advisory businesses.
Key investment priorities include the delivery of ongoing drawdown reviews and withdrawal management, along with efficient execution of multi-tax wrapper, multi-goal investment strategies.
The group also stated it wants to develop deeper integration with adviser applications, segregated institutional grade investment capabilities via the investment hub and enhanced reporting to enable closer adviser oversight of client portfolios.
David Tiller, head of adviser propositions and strategy, said that Standard Life wanted to demonstrate its commitment to the market at a time of increasing uncertainty around the future of some platforms.
Last month, a report from The Lang Cat announced that platforms were dead, pointing to the fact that the market’s largest player in terms of assets under administration, Cofunds, has reportedly tried and failed to secure a buyer.
In September, Mr Tiller told FTAdviser that advisers should be preparing for the fact that some of the platforms they use may be closing, merging or turning into ‘zombies’ in the near future.
Today he stated: “There are many ambitious adviser businesses out there that can see the opportunity created by pension freedoms. They shouldn’t be held back by their platform technology being configured to support only simple retail accumulation product sales.
“With a shortage of advisers the only way to create the capacity required is for existing adviser businesses to be able to help more clients.”
Mike Pendergast, independent financial adviser at Zen Financial Services, commented that anything which speeds up provider processes is a good thing.
“We have had clients of other providers whose drawdown applications have taken several weeks to be processed; this leads to client frustration as they can’t understand why it is taking so long for their money to be released.
“There’s no point having a flexible approach to pension withdrawals when processing and payments take this long. Hopefully the fact that Standard Life recognise this and have invested to improve their systems will lead to other providers following suit.”
Alan Solomons, director at Alpha Investments and Financial Planning, said: “In general this is good news for those who use the Standard Life platform.
“This may accelerate the competition in doing likewise or focus minds on whether their business plan for their platform is viable and sustainable.”
ruth.gillbe@ft.com
