Aviva’s platform boss has said it will be Succession’s advisers who decide their own platform fate, following the provider’s £385mn acquisition of the advice firm earlier this month.
On the day of the deal (March 2), FTAdviser spoke to Doug Brown, chief executive officer of UK & Ireland Life at Aviva, who said ‘discussions will be had’ later down the line - suggesting a platform migration of Succession’s advisers to the Aviva platform could be on the horizon.
But since then, Mike Hogg, Aviva’s strategic platforms director, has confirmed it will be Succession’s advisers - not Aviva - that decide which platforms their clients end up on.
We’re not doing anything to bring on any kind of tissue rejection.Roger MarsdenCurrently, Succession has a panel of platforms it works with which includes an in-house white-label version of Ascentric, now owned by M&G. At present, Aviva is not on Succession’s platform panel.
“What we need to emphasise is it's [Succession] an independent financial advice model. Ultimately, I think the advisers will decide,” Hogg told FTAdviser.
“Advisers will decide if they like what we have to offer, and if they do they will choose it. And the other platforms [on the platform], if that's what is right for the customer and the IFAs want to keep using them, they can continue to do that as well. It's not for us to set that out really.”
Roger Marsden, Aviva’s retail director, added that the product provider is wary of doing anything which could “bring on any kind of tissue rejection”.
“We bought it because of the business it is. The last thing we want to do is go in and undermine the capabilities that [it] brings.”
When Aviva started out with its platform, ‘Aviva Adviser’, it was a “filler” or a “second platform”, according to Marsden. Post-migration from Bravura to FNZ One, him and Hogg came onboard from Aviva’s retirement business and Abrdn respectively, to oversee remediation of the platform after a series of glitches proceeded its replatforming in January 2018.
Since then, Marsden claims he and Hogg have grown Aviva Adviser into a front-runner in the advised platform market.
“We have a lot [of advisers] who have been there [on Aviva’s platform] for a very long time,” said Marsden. “They’ve been continuous supporters. Others we’ve switched back on again since the migration issues. But we are attracting an awful lot of new advice firms to use the platform now as well.”
He continued: “Historically, if we go back five years ago, we were very much entering into the market, trying to be a filler, to be people’s second platform. We're not there anymore. We are very much aiming to be the primary platform for a large proportion of the market.”
On a weekly basis, Marsden said Aviva has “25 or so” IFA firms putting “over a million on”, with an “awful lot” of these being new users.
“The work that we've done has not only worked for our long term supporters, but we are starting to see new users as well which is very encouraging.”
According to Fundscape, Aviva made net sales of £1.4bn in the final quarter of last year - more than any other advised platform. It also topped the list for net sales throughout 2021, hitting £5.5bn.
The firm’s advised platform serves around 13,000 advisers. Around 15 per cent of this figure use Aviva as their primary platform and 11 per cent use it as their secondary, according to an Investment Trends survey last year.
“We're currently not on the panel with Succession and their advisers,” said Marsden. “It would be strange for us not to think we have something to offer though in terms of our platform and our offering, given our market status.”
Platform developments
Since moving to FNZ, Aviva has been able to reach a level of scale where it’s doing 50mn transactions a year according to Hogg.
Following the migration, Hogg’s team spent a period of time listening to feedback. This meant that last year it could come out with some more interesting developments.
Its ESG reporting tool went live in October, garnering around 4,000 adviser users in the first few months. “That has accelerated,” said Hogg. It allows advisers to click through into individual funds and individual companies in those funds.
The platform provider is now gearing up to roll out a presale ESG tool. Currently, the tool looks at what clients have already invested in. The new version would allow advisers to filter the fund universe prior to investing.
Hogg is also interested in data integration. “It’s so key to adviser efficiency,” he said. With different adviser models emerging, the platform boss said data ultimately belongs to the customer.
Aviva currently releases transaction history through the Origo Hub. It is looking at client onboarding, and how to take data from an adviser’s system to speed up the onboarding process.
Hogg reckons pension dashboards will drive platforms to open their data. “Advice models are data hungry and without that data it will be challenging for advisers to achieve efficiency,” he explained.
“We do see increasingly advisers wanting to allow clients to serve themselves. Within the parameters of the adviser, we’re looking at how we can allow clients to do certain things themselves eg, certain transactions.”
Hogg said with the move to digital remote relationships, data and self-service should be much higher on every platform provider’s priority list.
ruby.hinchliffe@ft.com
