Insignia Financial maintains its spot as the largest platform provider controlling a fifth of the platform market according to data from Plan for Life.
Thanks to its takeover of MLC Wealth, Insignia’s platform business holds $207.2 billion in FUM as of the end of the March quarter.
Insignia (then IOOF) finalised its acquisition of MLC Wealth in May 2021, while spending the second half of the year migrating client FUM from old IOOF platforms onto Evolve.
Whoever buys BT Panorama will acquire the second largest platform, which holds a 17 per cent market share and $175 billion in FUM.
Panorama is expected to be sold by 30 September with several buyers in the works.
Market hit
After reaching a trillion dollars at the end of 2021, market performance has meant the collective platform FUM has declined to $995 billion.
The combined platforms ended the year to March 2022 up 9.2 per cent but lost $29 billion during the last quarter.
This 2.8 per cent drop was due to the fall in global investment markets, according to Plan for Life, which notes that decline continued beyond March as central banks started normalising their monetary policies to control inflation.
This decline doesn’t take into consideration the RBA’s two consecutive monthly cash rate increases which begun in May.
Year on year inflows jumped 16.9 per cent to $174.4 billion with outflows of $146.6 billion. That $27.8 billion net inflow was significantly higher than the average of the last two years of under $2 billion.
Rise of the smaller players
HUB24 has seen the largest growth over the year (43.3 per cent), jumping to $51 billion FUM, followed by Netwealth with growth of 37.6 per cent to $57.5 billion, and Praemium which grew 22.7 per cent to $20.7 billion.
Smaller platforms have seen an increase in flows since the Hayne royal commission with the exit of banks from advice. However, they are still in the fight for scale and previous data from Investment Trends found all three continue to dominate in functionality ratings.
Praemium offloaded its international business to Morningstar last year, while rebuffing a prospective acquisition from rival Netwealth.
| Platform | FUM (in billions) | Annual Growth | Market Share |
| Insignia Financial | $207.2 | 168.2% | 20.8% |
| BT Financial Group | $175.1 | 5.8% | 17.6% |
| Commonwealth/Colonial Group | $143.8 | 4.9% | 14.5% |
| AMP | $143.8 | 2.3% | 14.4% |
| Macquarie | $117.3 | 17.3% | 11.8% |
| Netwealth | $57.6 | 37.6% | 5.8% |
| HUB24 | $51.0 | 43.3% | 5.1% |
| Mercer | $29.1 | 10.5% | 2.9% |
| Praemium | $20.7 | 22.7% | 2.1% |
| Others | $49.6 | -70.9% | 5.0% |
| Total | $995.3 | 9.2% |
Source: Plan for Life as of 31 March 2022
