Powerful advice platforms predicted

Advice platforms represent the future of the financial planning sector, according to a panel at Financial Newswire’s Advice, Wealth and Super: Rewired 2025 Conference.

Those advice platforms will have the scale and buying power to extract better pricing from fund managers and platforms, AZ-NGA Group chief executive, Paul Barrett.

He said his view was based the reality that financial planning group, Entireti has $105 billion in funds under adviser and “you ought to be able to go to fund managers and platforms and drive better pricing”.

“You should be able to do that. As the distribution world changes shape and size there will be new platforms – advice platforms,” he said. “Power that you’ve never seen before.”

The panel made up of Barrett, Oreana managing director, Jonathan Christie, Fiducian General Manager, Professional Standards, Richard Press and AdviceIQ general manager, Paul Harding-Davis also traversed the decisions being made around advice technology and a shift by some groups from Iress’ Xplan to Microsoft.

Oreana’s Christie said the future of the industry is data capability and technology and traditionally firms had relied on third parties to be their CRM and data house and so they had to ask who are the technology partners globally who are going to help businesses to grow over the next ten years.

“Well, that’s Microsoft,” he said. “So the data that we hold for our businesses be that financial adviser or client has to be in a Microsoft environment so the first step is moving CRM data into a Microsoft environment.

He said that for Oreana it is a case of getting that data from Xplan into a Microsoft environment and then being able to use that data.

Christie said he believed technology was going to be the major expense lever firms were going to have in the budgets.

Fiducian’s Press said the group was spending on technology both in terms of in-house development and increased use of Microsoft tools.