For context, research by Origo conducted in 2019 showed that most advice businesses typically use five standalone systems in the delivery of advice, planning and portfolio management – and two investment platforms. While 85 per cent believe that a lack of integration between these systems creates major internal efficiency, as staff are forced to rekey the same information between them.
In short, managing client portfolios on platform still requires plenty of administrative effort – negatively affecting firms’ ability to control and optimise their own client experience.
Democratising the platform market
Though the sector has lagged behind, APIs and cloud-based systems have started to gain ground and positively change the adviser platform market – replacing legacy technology with automated systems that can cut through the clunk with seamless, entirely paper-free processing.
It promises to dramatically reduce manual intervention, powering significant efficiency gains that can flow throughout the sector. (To put it in perspective, the cash operations team at Seccl, the API-first custodian, can manage around 30x the number of client payments per year than the industry average.)
This new level of automation can bring clear benefits to the adviser and their client. For one, it promises to create a platform service that is better, faster and likely cheaper, thanks to the ease of integration and the streamlining of once inefficient processes. What is more, it provides advisers with new and unrivalled access to every single piece of data and change event, at a client level: a new world of reporting possibility, with complete ownership of how and when data is used.
But there is another, less immediately obvious impact, too. For those willing to take the leap and assert greater influence on the platform experience, the opportunity has never been greater – thanks to a new, cutting-edge and low-cost infrastructure of custody, client money, wrapper administration and trading services.
The quest for control in the platform space
Through an online survey of advisers, the technology consultancy NextWealth recently found that nearly half (47 per cent) of firms with over £250m of assets under advice were planning on launching a platform of their own within the next three years – while 8 per cent had already begun to do so.
It is an interesting statistic, for two reasons. First it shows that a highly significant minority of the market are looking to influence a part of the value chain that has typically fallen outside of the adviser’s reach (or concern).
