Ascentric launches enhanced client reporting system

The Royal London-owned platform’s head of marketing Sarah Lyons said the typical length of time it takes for an adviser to complete a client report is one-and-a-half hours but Ascentric's enhanced service allows such reports to be completed in two minutes.

The service has been built by Sprint, a platform technology provider, and allows for customised branding.

Gary Shepherd, director of business development at Sprint, said: "If you look at the clients who use the service, and laid all of the reports they make out on the table, no two reports will look similar."

The service is available to Ascentric customers for £125 per month.

The contract is between the financial adviser and Sprint, rather than with Ascentric.

Ascentric’s existing platform reporting tool remains available to advisers on the same terms.

In building the new service, Sprint worked with Jason Hemmings, partner in the Edinburgh-based adviser firm of Cornerstone.

Mr Hemmings said using the service has saved his firm around 30 hours of administrative work a week, meaning, in his view, it had already paid for itself.  

In the first half of this year, sales on the Ascentric platform increased by 40 per cent.

Assets under administration grew by 9 per cent to £13.4bn at 30 June, compared with December 2016.

Jon Taylor, managing director of Ascentric, said while the pension freedoms legislation introduced two years ago had continued to be a factor in the growth of the platform’s assets it was the fact adviser behaviour had changed As a result of the platform's new simplified pricing structure that had really delivered the boost.

The pricing structure introduced in May means clients pay a single charge of 0.3 per cent of their assets, on any platform, up to £1m.

Assets of between £1m and £3m will be charged at 0.1 per cent, and assets of between £3 and £5m are charged at 0.06 per cent.

david.thorpe@ft.com