Succession’s advisers use a panel of platforms, but at the end of last year the now Aviva-owned advice firm carried out a review of its providers.
As part of this review, Succession has now added Aviva’s platform to its panel. The last time Succession did a platform panel review, Aviva was going through a major migration.
When Aviva started out with its platform, ‘Aviva Adviser’, it was more of a secondary platform, but in 2018, it moved clients from Bravura to FNZ One in order to improve the offering.
The migration was fraught and led to a series of glitches, but post-migration Aviva has been battling to grow its platform usage and win back favour among advisers.
“One of the things we had a conversation with Succession about was whether they’d looked at the Aviva platform. They said they hadn’t done a platform review for a while,” Ward explained.
“The previous one was a few years back when we were going through a migration. So they did another review and said ‘yeah, actually we’re going to add Aviva to the panel’.”
Ward said while the adviser and platform businesses will remain separate, the provider does remain in regular dialogue with Succession advisers on what platform developments they want to see.
Alternative to adviser-as-platform model
A growing trend in the platform space has been the ‘adviser-as-platform’ model.
Firms such as Seccl, headed up by Nucleus founder David Ferguson, as well as Hubwise, Just FA, Third Financial, Platform One and Multrees all offer variations on this model.
The one common theme is giving the adviser more agency over the platform - whether that’s how it runs, looks, costs, or integrates with other services.
At the end of last year, Nucleus announced it was looking at giving IFAs more control.
“Technology change is a good thing. The market has got to grow, evolve and change,” said Ward.
“But there is more noise around adviser-as-a-platform than there is demand in the market. When we speak to firms, some of them are considering it.
“What advisers want is a voice at the table in terms of what the developments are. And they also want great service. Some of them are frustrated that they don’t get some of that.”
In Ward’s opinion, if a platform can communicate well with its advisers and deliver good service, the adviser-as-platform conversation “goes away”.
Price is secondary to this, said Ward, who said while the upfront cost of adviser-as-platform might be cheaper, it will likely be more overall to run for the average advice business.
