Verona Smith, head of intermediary at Seven Investment Management (7IM), has said the headlines about ongoing replatforming issues hurt the whole industry, not just the firms involved.
Asked whether companies such as Aegon and Aviva should have resolved their respective platform problems sooner, Ms Smith said: “I’m sure those companies are working as hard and fast as they can to get the issues sorted.”
She explained: “The sheer volume and the technology that underpins that is massive and it should not be underestimated.
“We see all these headlines and some people say to me, ‘they must be great headlines because it’s all your competition and it’s not you’.
“I always think, headlines like that when it comes to platforms actually doesn’t do any of us any favours, because it tarnishes us as an industry.”
Ms Smith, who was recently appointed head of intermediary at 7IM, having previously been head of platform, said the industry should develop trust “and prove we’re here to support you [advisers], not to cause any issues”.
Both Aviva and Aegon have experienced outages as they moved their platforms onto new technology, which prompted feedback from advisers about the problems they were having as they tried to use the revamped platforms.
This week, in a 48-page discussion paper published this morning by the Financial Conduct Authority, the Bank of England and the Prudential Regulation Authority, the UK's regulators stated senior managers should take responsibility for creating back-up plans if their systems go down.
Asked whether the consolidation would be of benefit to end clients in the long run, Ms Smith replied: “Absolutely, you hope that the consolidation will lead to much better client outcomes and maybe a lot of that will come down to ability to invest more, to give clients maybe a better online experience, or just a better service experience.”
On her new role at 7IM, Ms Smith said: “7IM’s always worked really well with the advisory firms that we partner with and we will continue to do that.
“I’ve been lucky and I’ve stepped up to this role at a really exciting time. There are so many challenges, but these challenges are huge opportunities for the whole intermediary market and specifically for financial advisers.”
She identified one of the biggest challenges for the industry was the Baby Boomers that are about to hit retirement under the pension freedoms regime.
“What all that means is that we no longer have clients and advisers going into an annuity and knowing they’re going to have a set income, basically until they die. Now they’ve got a pot of money going into drawdown and that pot has to last them for the rest of their lives,” she explained.
