Hi there, TCWU fam. It is Rich Mayor here, while Steve is on next week and Mark is… somewhere. Not sure.
What have I been up to? I have completed another orbit around the sun and immediately woken up with aches and hair in new and unusual places. I watched the mighty Portsmouth FC pick up two incredibly unlikely wins, considering how it has mostly been since August, really. It is the hope that gets you, innit.
Oh, and I went for a short jaunt to Killarney. Did some trekking. Saw a waterfall. Met a few owls and a hawk called George. A lovely time. Oh, and I got married. Oh, and State of the Platform Nation is oot and aboot too for its fourteenth edition. That is available to subscribers and advisers via Analyser and let us know if you would like to pick up a copy.
While Supreme Leader Polson covered the evolving shape and flow of business coming into the market over the past year, I am going to delve into another theme of the paper and of 2025 in Platform Land. Integrations and friction.
Platforms can do a fair amount of Stuff nowadays, and they generally charge less for doing it. Last year we crunched the numbers on average platform charges now versus ten years ago at all the usual pricing points, and broadly it is about 20% cheaper. That is the rack rate and of course there is plenty of deal making going on, even more so now there are a few big firms that can squeeze every last basis point out of a platform. That pressure has pushed platforms into new and exciting ways to make revenue, some more popular and successful than others.
The basic fundamentals of a platform though are the same. Provide access to wrappers and investments, enable switching, pay money out, and do some reporting on said things. We have 20-odd platforms nowadays, and typically the independent part of the IFA initialism means firms are using several regularly and loads less regularly.
That poses some challenges in data wrangling for reporting requirements, which have also skyrocketed over those ten years.
With the proliferation of new and genuinely useful advice tech, the next challenge is how you stitch it all together in a way that does not infuriate you. Fans of previous and free lang cat papers A Disconnected World and A Fragmented World will note that things are much better, but fair to say we still have plenty of road left to go.
Loads of work has gone into improving integrations between back offices to help businesses place money onto platforms. Part of this is because platforms would quite like you to place your business on their platform, please. More recently, acceleration has been aided by consolidation in the advice market. Bigger firms make it easier to square off the commercial challenge of wanting to integrate with a back office provider one way versus another way, particularly given the often unique setups of smaller IFA firms. Everyone wants it, but integrations are not all that cheap.
And so it went on, and no one was happy. But the rise in large firms means there is real commercial value in making and maintaining those integrations with different tech far more palatable. Everyone else who shares at least some of the same tech stack gets to benefit too.
All sorted then? Well, no.
While platforms have been quite good at removing friction when getting money on, advisers are telling us they would quite reasonably like to get the data out too, in a way that works for them. Integrations for data out to a preferred back office or CRM are much less prevalent than integrations for data into the platform, despite the fact that the majority of day to day work with a platform happens after the client’s cheque has landed.
In State of the Platform Nation, we asked an open question about what advisers would like from platforms in 2026. Overwhelmingly, responses focused on better integrations, and a lot of that centred on getting data out for reporting. CGT reporting, which is a whole other myriad of inconsistencies, ERI reporting, help with reviews, and reporting to the regulator. On the latter, we found in State of the Advice Nation that firms typically lose about a week a year to this alone.
To end on a positive, sort of, it is worth noting that data coming out of platforms is much better than it used to be. But that is from a low base, told you it was sort of positive. Firms now want more autonomy, and to do that they need good, reliable data feeds from the platforms they work with.
Platforms are the golden source of most portfolio data, and advisers need them to act like it.
Music choice this week comes from Maro. I’ve been obsessed with these vocals and interesting harmonies. Would recommend. Do recommend.
