PlatformsNov 25 2020

Platform launches with 0.1% fee

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Platform launches with 0.1% fee
Credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

Digital Wealth Systems has created ‘Digi’ — built upon Seccl, the Octopus-owned platform tech firm — in a bid to automate advisers’ recommendation and review process.

The cost for the service is 0.35 per cent, dropping to 0.1 per cent for higher amounts of money on the platform. This fee includes the platform, discretionary management, tax wrappers and use of the technology.

Digital Wealth Systems said the pricing was part of the company’s mission to ensure financial advice was affordable to the client and adviser alike.

Clare Beswick, head of sales at digital wealth systems, said: “Our products are designed to enable financial advisers to support more clients, which we believe is the key to enabling ‘advice for all’.”

The Digi product is paperless, can be completely branded and offers a client portal within which firms can share valuations, messages and documents with their clients.

It is also ‘open’ by design, meaning the platform can launch integrations with other software used by advice firms, including Intelligent Office and Iress.

Originally ‘soft launched’ through a handful of firms, a full market launch of Digi is expected in January 2021.

Digital Wealth Systems is a joint venture between P1 Investment Management, the investment and platform company headed by James Priday, and Nebular Holding, an IT company led by ex-Paradigm partner Paul Hughes.

Mr Hughes said: “The launch of Digi marks a significant change in the world of advice fulfilment. Utilising Seccl’s APIs, we were able to launch a platform designed exactly to our requirements in a fraction of the time and cost usually associated with such a build.

“We are also pleased to have been instructed by several other firms to help them build their own bespoke platforms – something that is now feasible for any wealth management firm that has the ambition to do so.”

Mr Hughes added the “only limitation” going forward would be the imagination of the people designing their investment platform products.

Digital Wealth Systems have already been approached by several large financial planning firms to instruct the firm to build bespoke platforms for them, expected to launch in due course.

Mr Priday said: “P1 is committed to progressively priced digitally enabled solutions, which is why we have backed the Digital Wealth Systems business and agreed to launch the Digi product. 

“We find it very exciting to be enabling firms to launch their own platform products – an activity we think will increase in the marketplace going forward, and which we are well placed to support.”

Fast-growing Seccl recently appointed stalwarts from Quilter, Embark and Ascentric as it eyes ambitious growth plans to triple the number of firms using its services in the next six months.

Seccl has previously argued that a shake-up of the relationship between advisers and platforms could help close the advice gap and that the idea of a platform as a “separate business” would change in the future and lead to better integration between advice firms and platforms.

imogen.tew@ft.com

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