Advice tech giant Intelliflo has partnered with global investment platform tech provider SS&C Technologies to create Wealthlink, which will deliver the “deepest ever integration between practice management software and an investment platform”, the firms said.
Wealthlink will enable advisers and planners to put their clients’ investment and pension plans into action – all from within Intelliflo.
The platform offers a full range of tax wrappers, external DFMs and open architecture investment choice.
Wealthlink will be going live with a user group of Intelliflo customers later this year and advisers are being encouraged to register their interest in joining.
Valuable time
Nick Eatock, chief executive of Intelliflo, announced the launch of Wealthlink at the ‘Intelliflo connected’ conference in London on 6 June.
Eatock said: “The industry has taken huge strides forward, but we can all agree that advisory firms are still having to re-key data too many times, learn too many systems and spend too much valuable time jumping from one system to another.
“With the launch of Wealthlink, advisory firms will only ever need to key a client’s details in once. They can then go through their client’s advice journey using all Intelliflo offers, from discovery, cashflow modelling and setting up the client’s plan, to getting the money invested and utilising the client portal.
“With Wealthlink, everything, from instructing transfers and building portfolios to allocating capital across tax wrappers, can be done without leaving the Intelliflo environment. Advisory businesses will only need to learn one system. The admin time per client will reduce massively, and the re-keying errors – a foreseeable harm the Consumer Duty legislation has highlighted – will be a thing of the past.
“We launched the first version of this kind of capability into the US to Intelliflo office users there towards the end of last year. We’ve got about 2,000 advisers there now and they’ve reduced account opening times massively, down from five to seven days to just 15 to 20 minutes. It’s reduced errors in submission, and eliminated paper and wet signatures.
“Fundamentally, it makes it easier for them to do their jobs. We’re very hopeful that actually what we’re putting in place here will be well received.”
‘Transform the industry’
Eatock added: “We’re proud of how we’ve continued to transform our industry. We had one-way integration, and then two-way integration. Now we’re taking it to a whole new concept – ‘intelligent integration.’ When we put the advice and planning community’s needs front and centre in everything we do, we deliver better outcomes for everyone. The deeper connections and closer collaborations support us all widening access to financial advice.
“It is a tighter integration than the marketplace has ever seen between a practice management system and an investment platform. The user journeys that an adviser or paraplanner, and the end client go through all sit in one ecosystem. That makes it much easier for them for them to use, helps reduce having to learn lots of different systems and improves the flow of information.
“We were conscious as part of this offering that we’re not a platform ourselves, and SS&C fulfils that role. We wanted to choose a partner that is innovative like ourselves, and has an incredible set of API’s that enable the kind of depth of integration that we’re trying to achieve here to be done. I think it’s a good partnership and we look forward to what the next few years will bring.”
Nick Wright, general manager for SS&C Global Investor and Distribution Solutions, also added that Wealthlink is part of a “broader evolution” of the advice tech industry rather than a “golden bullet”.
“We’ve been talking to Nick and his team for some time, and we had a very aligned view of the need to move to a more open architecture model in an automated way as you can,” he added.
“We were fortunate enough to acquire Hubwise and that enabled us to take it from a conceptual conversation into a real discussion on how we can make it work.”
Existing integrations
Intelliflo said during the launch that it remains “fully committed to its open architecture philosophy” and the launch of Wealthlink “will not affect existing integrations between Intelliflo and other investment platforms”.
Eatock added: “I certainly think, from my perspective, what we are collectively doing is something that advisers and our planners alike have been asking for some time, which is just things joined up more effectively.
“I suspect that other platforms out there will think that meets the kind of things that they hear advisers asking about as well.
“We’re still open architecture and will continue to be so. Whether investment platforms will look to do something similar along those lines with us, I don’t know.”
Wright said: “Our vision for the industry is open architecture and end to end processes. It would be fairly ironic if we made it a closed book. We didn’t want that and neither did Intelliflo.
“We intend to develop something that that leads the way with end-to-end integration. The world we live in, there will always be other people who created alternative solutions. But competition is a good thing. I think the industry thrives on competition and we want to put different models out there.”
Platform charges
The firms said that the platform charges are on a per client account basis.
They include:
- 0.15% up to £249,999;
- 0.125% from £249,999 to £499,999;
- 0.10% from £499,999 to £999,999; and
- 0.05% over £1m ($1.25m, €1.14m).
SS&C’s Wright added: “We definitely believe they are fair. We’ve obviously got Consumer Duty coming down the line. I think fairness, transparency, and all of those things are critical.
“We feel collectively, they’re competitive right now. You have to constantly review that. We think you’re going differentiate yourself on service, product and capability, but commercials undoubtedly come into it. We believe it’s competitive.”
Future of advice
Lastly, Eatock discussed what Wealthlink means for the future of tech – and where the advice tech industry will end up.
“We started life in 2004 and we started from the get-go of believing in open architecture,” he said. “That fundamentally means that advisers and planners out there can have the choice of the technology solutions from different third parties that they want to use, but working as closely and as well as those tools can work.
“I think we’ll continue to see a marketplace where that kind of offering worked, where firms choose multiple different solutions, doing different things from different people and expect those technologies to work.
“At the same time, you also want to push forward on ensuring that those integrations that happen are as deep as they can possibly be. We don’t just want light touch integrations.
“I think that was very much at the heart of the wealth capabilities. We want a really deep, seamless, meaningful, and real time integration that actually delivers value into those advise businesses. I suspect, if we are successful, it drives the marketplace to move more in that direction.”
‘Viable alternative’
Ian McKenna, chief executive and rounder at FTRC, said: “This development allows advisers a very viable alternative to going their own platform route without having to incur all the costs, operational overheads and regulatory responsibilities that making that move all the way entails.
“Neither the adviser, or Intelliflo are the platform entity but the SS&C proposition incudes a deeply integrated solution giving the adviser a consistent experience that can be conducted entirely peerlessly and using electronic signatures. This ticks so many boxes that advisers have wanted for so many years, it really puts pressure on established platforms to radically transform their propositions.
“The obvious way forward will be for platforms to embrace the new wealthlink approach and embrace change. Those who do not may face substantial loss of assets over the next couple of years.”
