Terry Huddart summarises the lang cat’s findings from the new edition of its advised Platform Market Scorecard

A massive period of disruption is underway in the UK advised platform sector, affecting, by our estimate, £464bn (89%) of AUA. By disruption we mean a major business change event such as a technology upgrade/move, floatation or sale of a significant element of the business. Of this AUA, £275bn (59%) is in transition as a result of replatforming.

Now, if that’s got you warmed up for some more stats, here are a few. But you’ll need to be a subscriber to get the real detail. Contact us to find out how to do that.

• The advised platform market burst through the £500bn mark for the first time EVER
• Q4 2017 saw record gross advised channel sales of £20.3bn (compared to £18.6bn, £17.7bn and £17.9bn in Q3, Q2 and Q1 respectively).
• And once again the big guns, Standard Life, Aviva and Old Mutual Wealth, took the lion’s share of the all-important net advised sales, recording £4.2bn between them, that’s 40%
• 80% of platforms offer STP for ISA top-ups
• But only 40% do it for re-registration

MARKET INSIGHT

As ever, we cover all the moves in the macro and provider-specific environment you need to know about. Aegon, AJ Bell, Aviva, James Hay, Nucleus, Standard Life, Transact and Zurich all feature heavily this quarter.

THEY’RE FEATURES AND THEY’RE SPECIAL

Two special features for the delectation of subscribers this time.

For the first of these, we got our process geek on and teamed up with NextGen Planners to take a detailed look at the degree of Straight Through Processing (STP) currently supported by adviser platforms. We assessed propositions across 16 core processes, and you can see a couple of the key findings in our top ten facts above.

In this section, you’ll also find some top insight from Rohan Sivajoti, director of Postcard Planning and founding member of NextGen Planners, into just why STP is so important to advice businesses.

THE IMPOTENCE OF BEING EARNEST

In the first of a bumper two-parter, we’re looking at financial accounts. To be strictly accurate we’re looking at the process of looking at financial accounts. In part one, we examine some of the issues the industry faces when assessing platforms, financial performance and why taking a very narrow view of profit and loss may do more harm than good. Platforms are complicated creatures and there are many more factors to be taken into account. As well as defining which accounts you should be looking at for each platform, we break down the business models, looking at whether each has an asset arm, advice arm, multi-channel distribution and parent company. Few platforms have the same comparators, and Earnest takes you into the detail. For good measure, we also set out what this means in practice when analysing the market for the likes of due diligence and competitor analysis.

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