This year Iress finally closed the old Adviser Office system and rationalised their practice management proposition to offer three distinct options to their customers in this area. For many small firms Xplan Essentials, an out of the box solution which also bundles the O&M cashflow planning tools and a client portal, may fit their needs. For medium size firms Xplan Plus includes everything in essentials, but with the ability to customise workflows reports and client facing documents using expand data for the largest firms Xplan One.
Before continuing to look at the rest of the practice management market it is important to recognise how much the landscape has changed in recent years. Many of the most significant players five years ago are now channelling their efforts elsewhere, or focusing on different parts of their business.
For example, True Potential, who have long offered one of the most comprehensive practice management solutions in the market, are now primarily focused on growing their wealth management practice. To be fair, they do continue to offer the support services and technology proposition to a significant number of external advisers but this is a relatively modest part of their income stream.
If you are happy to put business onto the True Potential platform which, to be fair, was the first ATP proposition long before Intelliflo made their much heralded moves, the solution is comprehensively integrated. This is a very clear demonstration of the huge benefits that the ATP approach can have over traditional platforms from both an adviser and client perspective.
Benchmark Capital are another long-standing advicetech as a platform proposition. The in-house platform is deeply recruiting advisers who want to take their end-to-end proposition as the whole package to save the adviser from worrying about choosing their software and helping them to increase the amount of time they can spend on advising. I have seen a couple of impressive case studies from Benchmark where they have been able to move single practitioner advisers from £250,000 turnover to £1mn with virtually no extra staff and a massive increase in net profit. When the numbers are like this, it's understandable why they have moved away from being a pure technology play.
Those platforms who are convincing themselves that the Intelliflo ATP model will not work need to take a long hard look at the success of both True Potential and Benchmark over the last few years.
The reality is that, post-RDR, practice management systems and the other advicetech firms use deliver far more value, for far less cost, to advisers and their clients than platforms do. The overwhelming majority of platforms have never really understood adviser technology and perhaps the biggest lie the platform market has told over the past 20 years is that platforms can replace practice management. The latter deliver a vast array of additional functions a platform will never deliver unless they have built a practice management service with a platform built in as Benchmark and True Potential have demonstrated.
