Survey: Re-registration process remains unclear

Surprisingly, when asked how long the re-registration process should be expected to take, 35 per cent suggested between 10 days and four weeks. There was also a lack of consensus on respondents’ expectations that the process would take either less than five days or more than one month.

The RDR made it a requirement for all platform providers to facilitate re-registration of assets, but what these results show is a lack of uniformity as to how long the process should take.

Speaking to Investment Adviser recently, Skandia’s Peter Mann was highly critical of the process, noting that the onus was solely on platforms to facilitate re-registration.

He said: “In any re-registration process you can only complete it when all parties have completed their tasks. The current rules do not apply to all parties. For a good proportion of fund managers this doesn’t matter as they have been making good progress, but there is slack that needs to be picked up.”

The FCA’s guidelines provide little clarity on the length of time the re-registration process should, in reality, take to complete, stating only that it should be “within a reasonable time and in an efficient manner”.

Research carried out by CoreData in July this year tallies with Investment Adviser’s findings, with 21.8 per cent of respondents to the CoreData survey citing the ease of re-registering assets on and off a platform as a key driver behind which provider they use for the majority of their clients.

But while re-registration is an issue for advisers, it isn’t the main reason behind choosing one provider over another.

Similar to the 2012 Investment Adviser Platform Survey, and the results of the CoreData research, ‘ease of use’ tops the list of important factors when it comes to choosing a platform on which to conduct a significant amount of business in this year’s survey.

This was very closely followed by the cost efficiency of a platform and the quality of service offered to the adviser.

Just a little more than 20 per cent of advisers considered the ‘availability of funds’ an important factor to consider.

Craig Phillips, CoreData’s principal for Europe and UK, explains: “We are entering a perilous stage of market development – think Mutually Assured Destruction, but where fallout is not from mushroom clouds but clouded pricing.

“With platforms short of profits to reinvest, systems will start to creak and fall over – more human error will occur as under-resourced teams struggle to meet demand. And adviser efficiency will consequently suffer.

He adds: “It becomes a race to the bottom – not quite Apocalypse Now but certainly a bleak scenario. Platforms need to focus on service and justify their charges through differentiated service – not playing ‘me too’ in a game of pricing Russian roulette.”