“It would usually take three months to open an account to get the client ready to invest; we radically decreased that lead time.”
The next step is to make this information intelligible. Now the company is launching a financial planning module where advisors can create a financial plan and prepare the suitability reports that are required by the FCA.
The recommended financial plan is then delivered to the advisor. Once the advisor accepts it, the platform connects to complete the execution, including online account opening and strict reprocessing of the orders, rebalancing, and then doing the (annual or biannual) review of the client’s situation.
“I would say what differentiates us is we are client-first. We give the tools to the end-user to do a lot of the work, so that makes the process highly scalable, because [traditionally] the bottom line was on the end-user side. We are an open-architecture platform, so we connect to all of the software that the advisors are used to working with.”
The company endeavors to make the user experience intuitive and seamless.
Among other features, the Advicefront platform has customer relationship management (CRM) that allows advisors to design a workflow for their clients and processes, invite clients and track everything they are doing, and communicate with them at different steps of the process.
“Our CRM is … still in an early stage, although in some sense it is more advanced than the storage that is in the market. And we have a lot of features in the roadmap for the CRM part of things.”
The platform offers a document-sharing feature; this means that every document that has been generated by the client, the platform or the advisor may be uploaded.
Integrations and data security
Advicefront integrates with a number of technology companies to enable financial advisors to offer their clients more tools without leaving the Advicefront platform.
Jose names the following companies with whom Advicefront have provided, or are in the process of providing, integrations:
- FNZ, a provider of technology platforms in the UK.
- Transact, one of the leading robo platforms in the UK.
- CashCalc, a financial-planning tool.
- Oxford Risk and Portfoliometrix, risk profile partners.
- Stripe, a payment-processing platform.
“We just closed a funding route with FNZ, the platform provider behind Barclays. We are in the process of integrating with the FNZ API, so that we [can] make all of the platforms at FNZ available to our potential partners.”
The company is aiming to integrate with challenger banks and SoftService. Jose states that Advicefront tries to connect what people use on a day-to-day basis and give them context to be their own advisor and to better manage their personal finances.
The Advicefront platform is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant. According to Jose, they are also working on methods to make information that is collected from end-users compliant with the regulation.
“I think that the partnership with FNZ [will allow] us to follow the right standards and have access to specialists that have a lot of experience in the market. So it is very important for us, obviously.”
Software development and product management
Advicefront has eight people in its team, including CEO and two people in the marketing team, one of whom does digital marketing while the other does traditional marketing.