Without innovation today’s Facebook can swiftly become tomorrow’s Friends Reunited – and it is this fact that must have made some top execs at Aviva bite their nails nervously at night back in 2017.
At the start of this year Aviva for Advisers was supposed to make the world a better place for advisers by switching to technology provider FNZ.
But the switch led to the platform being unavailable for six days.
Just one day after it came back online after the upgrade, investment advisers found they and their clients were locked out of the platform.
There were then problems with adviser charges not being paid.
Now there are problems with advisers finding ‘rogue funds’ in their clients’ portfolios.
An adviser noticed a number of ‘rogue funds’ appearing in his clients’ portfolios following the switch-over to the new platform.
He believes Aviva may have accidentally switched his clients into newer versions of investment vehicles they held.
Aviva did not want to comment on the specific issues raised by the advisers FTAdviser spoke to this week but a spokesperson said: “We take all comments from users of our platform extremely seriously.
“We have teams in place who are working to resolve issues as quickly as possible.
"We acknowledge there have been problems and we apologise for the inconvenience caused. We will take action to ensure that customers are not disadvantaged as a result of issues experienced.”
Aviva has held its hands up to the problems and opened a ‘whiteboard’ function where any ongoing fixes are detailed so advisers can see what progress is being made.
But advisers rely on this technology to do business.
They don’t want to know about progress – they want to know WHEN the platform will be problem-free again.
Technology moves at such a swift pace these days that you can’t afford to stand still for a second if you want to stay ahead of the game.
But as Aviva struggles to put right the things that are going wrong with the platform, it must know rivals are working on their next innovation, which will make their solution look less and less perfect over time.
The least it can do is give advisers a date for when these issues will have all been dealt with.
emma.hughes@ft.com