It started with a blank sheet of paper, a vision, and the daunting realisation that what was about to happen would cost time and money.
"Right, let's come up with a system that advisers can use", David O’Hara recalls himself telling Paul Heath some two years ago when they sat down to discuss their new project: building a bespoke back office tool to make life easier for their advisers.
The co-founders and directors of adviser network Corbel Partners had decided their network's use of technology was inefficient and in need of an upgrade.
They had surveyed all their adviser members on what improvements they wanted and had scoured the market for the right tech - only to realise that it was not out there.
"It was akin to Alice in Wonderland," says O'Hara. "We went down several rabbit holes and popped out in different places.
"A lot of the features and the functionality that tech companies claim to have actually isn't there yet. And we could always get so far down the journey, but we could never get the journey completed was the problem."
At the time their advisers were using Intelligent Office, "one of the best back-office systems out there", but with an adviser side that was "quite poor", according to O'Hara.
The idea was to not replace IO completely but to build a tool that would sit in front of it, talk to it seamlessly, and make it easier for advisers to both onboard and service their clients.
The idea was certainly not to build a client portal that would sit between the adviser and the client, as many tech providers were offering, they say.
"But the more we looked at it, the more frustrated we grew with everything," says O'Hara.
"They seem to be determined to remove advisers from the client relationship, because the tech is all driven around what clients can do, rather than helping advisers do their job better and more efficiently and making life easier for them to help their clients."
Corbel Partners, one of FT Adviser's top 100 financial advice companies in 2023, is a network of about 140 advisers, including an in-house firm of advisers trading under Arcus Wealth.
It was founded 19 years ago and has plans to grow to 250 advisers in the coming years.
Technology will be an important part of that growth, so will the firm's ethos of total independence and whole of market advice, which it prides itself on and which was another major stumbling block when trying to find off-the-shelf technology.
"The way we are with our independence flag and so on, it made it very, very difficult to use the pre-built systems," says Heath.
