Platforms, as we know them, are dead, the head of the Lang Cat consultancy has stated.
Speaking to 800 people at the True Potential annual Outlook and Opportunities forum in Manchester yesterday (28 January), Mark Polson claimed platforms in their current form had concentrated too much on making things easier for the user - the adviser - and had not spent enough time generating benefit for the consumer.
Likening platform development of the past 10 to 15 years as a “kind of Grand Theft Auto” experience, he asked the delegates whether they, or their children, had ever played GTA.
He asked them whether they had ever used their smartphones to send emoticons - little smiley faces - and whether they used them to conduct transactions.
“Technology really has changed the way advisers work, but platforms as we know them are dead”, he said.
He pointed to GTA as a ‘sandbox’ kind of game, describing it as a “multi-linear environment in which you can do anything you like, and this is what platforms have been for the past decade or so.
“But platforms have grown fat - providing benefits to managers and advisers and not enough benefits are getting through to the end users”, Mr Polson said.
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Unless platforms truly do start to benefit the client then they are dead, he said, adding if platforms had really got to grips years earlier with goal-setting technology then “we would not be hearing about robo-advice”.
With more than £350bn sitting on platforms in the UK, he said we needed to get efficiency “on the rails”, moving away from just focusing on how the technology can help advisers do switching or bulk transfers and get the client “firmly into the heart of the process.
“If you start with some powerful technology and then strip away everything extraneous and superficial, you get what is important and beneficial to the client, engaging them from the start and enabling advisers to build up a better relationship.”
The forthcoming Financial Conduct Authority paper on due diligence would bring this more to the fore, he said.
The paper, expected some time this year, is a result of the FCA’s work in 2014 and 2015, when it started its thematic review into due diligence and research undertaken by firms in relation to products and services they recommend to clients.
Mr Polson said this review was likely to highlight issues of “suitability” - the “buzzword of 2016”, and said the whole platform/adviser/client process could be made more transparent, more suitable and more beneficial if one were to follow the formula: Client Needs > Adviser Needs > Provider Needs.
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