Rich Mayor: What advisers want from platforms this year and beyond

For just about every piece of research we put together, we’re in the privileged position of being able to speak with platforms, technology providers, advisers and our in-house regulatory experts.

We then combine those conversations with the wealth of data in our Analyser tool to come up with what we think is a pretty reasonable explanation of why things are the way they are.

State of the Platform Nation, our annual paper exploring the UK platform market, is now in its 14th year. That means there’s a heck of a lot of past stuff to look at. Some things change quickly. Others change at a pace akin to water on rock.

This year, we asked advisers to name the single most important improvement the platforms they work with could make. It’s an open question, which we then reverse code into categories.

As ever, no two people have exactly the same opinion. We try to call out conflicting views and are even more likely to highlight them when they are funny.

Integration, data flow and connectivity

Back in 2019, we wrote a paper with Origo called Disconnected World (free to download), which explored the connectivity, or lack of it, between different technology stacks.

Today, integrations are better than they have ever been, even considering the millions of possible combinations that exist

One of its findings was that firms were generally using seven systems, including platforms, on a day-to-day basis. A typical new-business journey involved information being re-keyed three times between those systems. Not one of the firms we researched could access real-time, two-way integrations between them.

We checked how things had developed in Fragmented World (also free) and we (Steve Nelson) worked out that there were literally millions of different combinations of technology available to advisers.

The sector was fragmenting faster than it could integrate. However, its future remained in the hands of those working within it, who had the opportunity to swing the balance back towards focused integration.

Today, integrations are better than they have ever been, even considering the millions of possible combinations that exist and have continued to grow amid the dizzying advent of AI.

But while things are better, the flow of data remains overwhelmingly the biggest gripe among advisers

Many of the improvements involve integrations into platforms, helping advisers to avoid re-keying data when submitting new-business applications, for example.

One by-product of consolidation in the IFA market is that the commercial case for building and maintaining proper integrations with advice CRMs becomes more realistic. Everyone else using those parts of the same technology stacks benefits too. We’ve also got firms such as ZeroKey helping to join up the plumbing.

But while things are better, the flow of data remains overwhelmingly the biggest gripe among advisers.

That does not just mean integrations. It also includes straight-through processing where integrations are unavailable, the standardisation of APIs, and the ability to enter data once and push it to multiple places.

While the bonnet is up, readily available help and support with handling regulatory data requests would be welcome too

Getting the data out again is the next area requiring major surgery in some corners of the market.

There’s a heck of a lot of data sitting on platforms that planners have placed there. But getting it out again for things such as, well, planning for clients is not always straightforward.

We’re talking about tax here, with capital gains tax and excess reportable income mentioned frequently. Although responsibility for the latter also extends to fund groups, the ultimate consequence of receiving incomplete or, worse, incorrect information is unpleasant for everyone involved. Getting it right would remove a massive pain point.

While the bonnet is up, readily available help and support with handling regulatory data requests would be welcome too.

Advisers increasingly see platforms and MPS as single system, research finds

Firms tell us they lose an average of one or two weeks a year dealing with these requests. It may be a smaller gain in the grand scheme of things, but they all add up.

Service quality and human support

Service is, as we explored in Answering the Call? (your third free paper here), an entirely subjective thing.

For one firm, good service means having a dedicated point of contact or team. For another, it means everything being entirely digital and operating without downtime. For someone else, it means seeing enough bars on their phone.

This time, however, the concerns were mostly about those fleshy organisms of various shapes and sizes: humans.

For all the time and energy spent outsourcing work to AI — whether that is producing bespoke reports with your company name on them or creating images of colleagues in frankly hilarious situations — there remains a great deal of focus on the human side of doing business.

Matching staffing levels to business growth is difficult when you are also dealing with significant variation in external demand

Many of the sentiments and themes raised will sound familiar: poor call handling; a lack of ownership of queries; long response times; and inexperienced staff.

With the acknowledgement that all of us were inexperienced once, there is a growing sense that service tends to drop off when a platform scales or outsources.

There was a certain nostalgia for the days when an adviser could say, “I used to just speak with Jerry.” Of course, that is quite a bit easier when Jerry has been there for a long time and only looks after you and Mavis at Mavis Independent Financial Planning.

We have some sympathy for platforms here. Scaling almost always means doing a bit more with a bit less and finding ‘synergies’ (eurgh!).

Matching staffing levels to business growth is difficult when you are also dealing with significant variation in external demand. Recruitment is hard. Experience takes a long time to develop. Things constantly change.

Much like the advice industry it supports, not all platforms are the same, even when they perform the same basic functions

But while getting it right is difficult, it is also essential.

We have consistently seen over many years that firms are typically pushed away from platforms rather than pulled towards a shiny new feature. Overwhelmingly, the reason they are pushed away is service — or the lack of it.

We are talking about the market as a whole here. Much like the advice industry it supports, not all platforms are the same, even when they perform the same basic functions.

That said, the firms contributing to our research use a wide range of platforms across the market, and becoming a Platform Whisperer for all of them is not nearly as much fun as you might imagine.

Ultimately, however, the findings are clear: data and humans remain the two key elements platforms need to get right.

Rich Mayor is a senior analyst at the lang cat