DST Global Solutions’ Spedding says the platform market has come to a point where providers are either helping to drive competitive change or just react- ing to it.
“A lot of that really comes down to the technology they have, how that technology works and how cost-effectively they can deal with change,” he says.
“The reality that all providers have to live with is the pace of change; and the demands are not going to diminish, they’re probably going to increase, if anything.”
The Bluedoor platform was built from the ground up to ensure a modern, open architecture system, Spedding says.
“The great advantage of those technologies is that they are highly flexible and configurable,” he says.
“They can be adapted very quickly, which means that the platforms can really respond to changes from advisers in terms of the functionality, the type of reporting [and] the online transactional capability.”
Bluedoor’s back office solution is web-based.
“It’s using the same business logic, it’s using the same data with no sort of ‘warehousing’ of data required,” Spedding says.
“It’s highly configurable, which means things like the FoFA changes and the raft of other changes coming down the pipeline, the system can already deal with all of that. “There are no functional changes
really required, it’s just a matter of con- figuration.”
Spedding says platforms are still a few years off from more advanced innovation but predicts the way advisers use tools with customers will transfer over to mobile computing soon.
He says planners need to be prepared to translate the hand-holding that they currently do with clients into the online, digital world.
“They can do that with customers in dealing with all of those transactional requirements and what’s required to implement strategies online in efficient ways,” he says.
Spedding says alternative strategies where modelling can be completed using real and historic personalised data is currently being worked on, as the rich customer data isn’t being utilised to its full potential.
“So you’ve got that tight integration between what’s being held in that back office and what’s being used, in terms of modelling, and how they can switch [and] automate a straight-through execution of those strategies.”
He says he is also supportive of iPad- type and tablet developments.
“Absolutely,” he says.“It’s just a natural extension for technology vendors that have open architecture systems.
“There’s a lot of ‘cottage industry’ go- ing on at the moment around iPad apps, which is not dissimilar to when businesses first started putting up websites on the Internet.”
FUTURE CHALLENGES Investment Trends’ Peker says that there’s still room for improvement in simplifying data transfers to and from planning software.
“And platforms must not neglect planners on the BDM support side of things either,” he says.
“Some planners are finding that keep- ing up to date with changes in technology is challenging. But for platforms, the good news is that only 14 per cent of financial planners said the challenge was related to their platform [being] outdated, difficult to use or unreliable.”
Hawkins says the platform market needs to figure out how to progress itself to the next level.
“Platforms have been around now for 22 to 23 years and we need to keep looking [for improvements] and making sure that we remain relevant and current,” he says.
“If we lose that currency or relevance, then we’re out of the game pretty quickly.
“In terms of product and service innovation, the key focus is looking at where we can help advisers cut out costs to their business. Clearly the areas [where] we see FoFA impacting them is both on their revenue and needing to reinforce the value that they bring to customers.”
BREAKOUT: LEGACY PLATFORMS AND OLD TECHNOLOGY Martin Spedding, executive director of DST Global Solutions (Bluedoor), says that in the new world of platforms, there is no room for legacy offerings. “They keep putting new wallpaper up and obviously try to dress up the technology,” he says.
“But the real issue here is that you have these disparate technologies, which have an ongoing integration task, and you’re trying to orchestrate a straight-through process by utilising the capabilities of a number of different systems with different technologies.”
There’s a limit to the integration that can be reached and there’s also a significant cost attached to that ongoing integration requirement, Spedding says. “What it means is…if we were in a steady state and there was not going to be ongoing change, then these issues become less [of a concern],” he says.
“But every time there is a change required, whether it be FoFA or whatever else, and you’re dealing with a highly integrated legacy environment, you’ve got to break a lot of things, change them and fix them, and that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time.” The implications are slow change and inevitable cost recovery, Spedding says.
AMP-AXA’s Burgess agrees and says legacy platforms that stay on the old technology will not be able to keep up with the fast-paced changes occurring alongside increasing demand.
“That’s the fundamental reason why with our legacy platforms, we are migrating them over to the new technology,” Burgess says. About 120,000 clients, along with several billion dollars of funds under administration, are in the process of moving over to the North platform.
“We don’t believe they fall into ‘legacy’ in the sense [of how] many advisers understand that word, which is obviously negatively,” he says. “Our whole strategy has been based on ensuring that doesn’t happen with existing customers and their advisers; so migrating those customers and that existing book of business over to the new technology will ensure that they stay fresh and up to date and they will pick up many of the modern platform features.” Burgess says AMP-AXA has always been public with this strategy and never intended to leave investors on old technology.
