Iress: ‘We weren't really doing enough for our clients’

Alex Hore, managing director of wealth in the UK, said last year the company completed "a really long restructure" which saw it split from its Australian operations to achieve “strategic and operational autonomy” in the UK.

It wants to use this as the basis for further expansion in the UK and to innovate around the products it offers to advisers.

Hore, who took over the role of managing director in July, said: “Iress UK is in a really interesting spot in the sense that we've been through some pretty transformative changes and a really long restructure.

“We came out the back end of that in July and made some really positive changes and started to kind of see some green shoots and wins as a result.”

He added: “One of the challenges we've had with Iress UK was we definitely tried to force fit the Australian version of our global software solution into the UK.

“There were also some challenges around the operational opaqueness. What I mean by that is key areas reported into Australia and that definitely created some chaos.”

Hore said the business had never been busier and was "starting to win lots of new clients as a result".

As of July, the firm's product team as well as the tech team and the engineers work for the UK.

Although the Australian Plc still owns Iress and will retain that ownership, it has given the UK firm more control.

“We tried to force fit that model and do too much and we weren't really doing enough for our clients,” Hore said.

“We're going to leverage the best bits out of Australia and then absolutely do what we need to do ourselves", he explained, saying that late last year the firm had released its first UK specific product roadmap.

It comes as former chief executive officer Simon New resigned in September, just five months after taking up the role.

New was named CEO in April as part of changes to Iress UK’s operating structure and senior management team. However, in September he stepped down from the role.

Vision and goals

Hore said the firm's current leadership team was they best one they'd had.

“With respect to my predecessors, they were constrained by some different challenges, this is the best wealth team in the history of Iress and we're about to do some really great things,” he said.

“To boil it down to what we want to do, we want our clients to focus on what they get paid for, which is advice and investment management. It's not really to worry about tech.”

He said in the past Iress had “tried to do too much, to be everything to everyone” but it now has a plan in place to change that. 

“What we want to do is ensure that our software promotes adviser efficiency,” he said.

“Do more, lower pace, less confusion quicker. We want to provide the compliance guardrails, keep our clients out of jail, we want to kind of help them remove operational costs and complexity, a great user experience, digital and everything kind of that underpins everything we want to do.” 

Hore said the roadmap in place so far has been tested with clients and if Iress can't do something, it doesn’t plan to embellish. 

“We don't exaggerate. We [are] just like this is what we're going to do and we're starting to win lots of new clients as a result.”

The other important area Iress focused on was user experience. 

Hore said: “We know how competitive it is here. And it's a non-starter not to have invested in that space so we've got some great people looking at how we can make things more intuitive and easier to use.”

sonia.rach@ft.com

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