This week’s Update is written In The Field, live and in living colour from the intelliflo conference in fashionable London. As you may have spotted, there was a big announcement and we need to talk about it. But this is a departure from what I was going to bang on about, or more accurately what Steve was going to bang on about, which is a paper we’re launching with abrdn this week. We’ll do more on that next week, but before we dive into the intelliflo Wealthlink news here’s just a wee snippet.

The paper is about service. It’s not about who actually gives good service, and it’s not a puff piece for abrdn – in fact after the thank-you-for-the-support bit abrdn isn’t mentioned. Rather it’s an attempt to start quantifying what good service means in an industry where everyone disagrees with everyone else, all the time, loudly. It tries to get to grips with the constituent elements of service; where it is about people doing things well, and where it’s about no people at all. It takes the idea that you can take any serious notice of awards or star ratings or whatever out for a firm training walk with a collar and a short lead – and as a company that does service ratings as part of Analyser, that wasn’t an easy bit to write. There’s tonnes of adviser input and insight, the odd joke, and the whole thing is a really interesting exploration of the wider issue of a type you don’t often get to read. Kudos to Steve and Rich Mayor for writing it.

We’re doing a webinar to launch it properly at 10am tomorrow, and you can book onto that here.

Right, back to intelliflo. The ‘what’ first – yesterday (when you read this) intelliflo announced a partnership with SS&C (which you know as Hubwise) of a fully, deeply, integrated platform. Intelliflo isn’t a platform and isn’t going to be one, but what it is going to do is allow users to perform the Things that they would usually Do on a platform from within intelliflo itself.

What this means in practice is that intelliflo users will key client details in once, and then that’ll do the do on the new Wealthlink platform for getting things set up. That’s not unique. What is unique is that from that point on, users will have access to platform-style screens inside intelliflo itself, which are umbilically linked to SS&C. So you never leave intelliflo; you never see a Hubwise / SS&C screen; you only ever log into one system.

If you’re used to firing an account opening message from your CRM, and then going into the platform itself to fill in all the missing bits, do the investment instructions and all that, sort the SIPP stuff out and check everything’s OK, then this is exactly like that except you don’t do any of that stuff any more. You’ll stay inside intelliflo all day and perform everything you need to do on a platform from there.

SS&C Hubwise is a proper platform, with a proper range of tax wrappers, open architecture, access to DFMs and all the rest of it. It’s paperless and signatureless. And it’s available to all intelliflo users (in the fullness of time) via Wealthlink irrespective of size for a starting price of 0.15% for the first £250k, tiering down to 0.05% for anything above £1m.

This is – as Ron Burgundy might have said – kind of a big deal. There are other deep integrations out there, of course – as long as you stick to the script then you can avoid logging into the True Potential platform, and Benchmark have been busy in this area too. But these are vertically integrated propositions with in-house solutions – not necessarily easy to integrate this deeply, but a completely different box of frogs to an open architecture offering that welcomes firms of all shapes and sizes and statuses.

So I think it is a first, and it’s one that’s been a long time coming. Someone was always going to get this done, and here we are, it’s intelliflo and SS&C.

Going first is cool, but not if you’re not really solving a problem. Happily this scores on that front. We all know lack of integration and too much fragmentation is a problem, and if you need a refresher on that I’d love to point you to our A Fragmented World paper from September last year. So rekeying is a challenge, and here we have a proposition that eliminates that. If you want to work in an environment where not only don’t you need to rekey, but it isn’t actually possible to do so, then here it is.

Price is another thing. If you were wondering what the market anchor price for an IFA-facing platform was, I have an answer for you – it’s 0.15%. That rate has been available for big firms for a while, but what’s so potentially disturbing about this is that it’s open to all intelliflo users, big or small.

That sound you can hear is a gauntlet being thrown down.

So what happens now? Well, I suspect there are a lot of meetings happening in boardrooms all over the place. I should think a lot of platform pricing deals will be revisited over the coming months. And if platforms want to be there for the open market (as opposed to closed-shop, vertically integrated, which is a perfectly credible alternative model) then there is going to be a rush to be the second in line.

From the adviser side – normal rules apply. You’ll need to be happy using intelliflo, and happy with SS&C. There is lots of building going on – the rollout will be well controlled I think, but of course it’s a change and some of you may be wary of that. You’ll want to run your slide rule over the proposition, the servicing model and the financial strength (actually, you might as well know now that SS&C’s tech globally runs about $45 trillion, so there’s that). Price isn’t the same as suitability, so you need to ensure you’re happy the overall proposition is suitable first.

Intelliflo has, I’m informed, 47% of the adviser market. That’s enough to matter. Occasionally there are days that have the potential to move markets. This was one of them.

#LANGCATLINKS

• Not often we see the FCA holding up firms as an example of taking responsibility and doing things right. Fair play to Quilter, then, after its Lighthouse-related British Steel unpleasantness.
• Good news, you’re richer than you were. That must be nice. Still not enough to pay the increased leccy bills though…

• New podcat episode this week – in which Tom Selby talks about AJ Bell’s plans to simplify the various ISA regimes and Tom McPhail reminds us of one of the more daft films of the 1980s.
• Good piece in the FT about the advice gap, the trust gap and Consumer Duty…featuring this paper, natch.
• And your music choice is, as you have probably already guessed, the new Soen song. There’s a new Soen song, everyone! That’s the really big news this week. Here’s Unbreakable, and very good it is too.

Steve will Update you with more of the service report stuff next week. Be good in the meantime.

Mark