The Quilter platform has reassured advisers it will not make the same mistakes as its predecessors in migrating its platform next month.
The first tranche of advisers, accounting for about £4.5bn of the assets under management according to the Lang Cat, will move over to the new platform on the weekend of February 22 and 23.
The company has budgeted to spend at least £360m on the project in the whole period it has been replatforming and has pledged it would not suffer the same problems as rival firms Aegon and Aviva, whose replatformings in recent years had led to an array of problems for advisers.
Quilter carried out its replatforming in stages, the first soft launch having started in February last year.
A representative of Quilter told FTAdviser: “We have strengthened our team of platform specialists across the country and they will be making their way around adviser offices when we do the initial migration.
"Alongside this, we have dedicated (ring-fenced) customer services and operational teams to support advisers and customers taking part in the first phase.
"As you know, we have been seeking to learn from some of the challenges that firms have had during migration.
"As such, we also have a hypercare support structure to tackle any issues our advisers or customers might be facing.
"We have tested and refined this over our three migration ‘dress rehearsals’. Hypercare is essentially an intensified customer and adviser support model.”
But Quilter's replatforming to date has not been without its problems. The process has taken much longer and cost much more than originally planned.
Quilter had originally hired IFDS to carry out the re-platforming, before replacing them in 2017 with FNZ. When it terminated its contract with IFDS it said it had spent over £200m on the platform, and expected to spend about £160m more. In June 2019, the company said the re-platforming was "on track."
In the company’s most recent trading update, Quilter chief executive Paul Feeney acknowledged that adviser nerves about the potential impact of the re-platforming have hit inflows.
Mark Polson, principal at consultancy firm the Lang Cat, said he thinks Quilter has learned from the unfortunate experiences” of others.
david.thorpe@ft.com
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