In his penultimate blog, our Associate, Alexander Craig, continues his analysis of Infrastructure and Platform as Services and how they could apply to the IFA sector.

Infrastructure is expensive.  Whether you’re a small IFA or an international financial services vendor it is likely your IT will devour a reasonable chunk of your annual budget.  To make matters worse, Moore’s Law kicks in and you have to replace the whole shebang every 3-5 years.  Ouch!  But help is (apparently) at hand.  The wonders of ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) and ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) promise to banish the woes of managing, maintain and upgrading racks of tin in a data centre – your server estate at least, will be replaced with a nice friendly and cost effective solution out on the Cloud that is someone else’s problem and that you can put down to OpEx.  But is it all too good to be true, does this Cloud really have a silver lining?
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The Market for new IT systems may be tough at the moment but that is not stopping a range of new suppliers coming to market.

Last week at Mortgage Business Expo in Olympia, Irish based BrokerCRM announced their intentions to launch into the UK market. At first glance this is a nice system with some good value adds. Its look is modern and its usability high. It has a useful market segmentation and propensity modelling piece – analysing client purchasing habits and then segmenting the client bank accordingly for all marketing activity. Currently however it is still clearly supporting the Irish Mortgage broker and needs a new set of integrations and some further localisation before it can be a real contender in the UK. This work is due to complete in February although I suspect this is a bold target.

BrokerCRM Lite screenshot

On the 30th of November another system will be launched. 2020 Adviser is a insurance based CRM system from the consultancy firm 2020 Management Limited. The key selling point for 2020 is the system is based on one of the biggest CRM systems on the planet – Salesforce.com. We have begun to see more and more IFAs use sales force for contact management and with 1.5 million users worldwide using it for exactly this purpose, is an IFA is simply looking for a place to keep client information salesforce is a great option. 2020 plan to further enhance Salesforce and build in the integrations that take Salesforce from a good CRM system to a good backoffice system. We will watch how this develops with interest.

This adds to a number of new entrants in the last year including Profida and Voyant. The market may be tough but it doesn’t seem to stop the entrepreneurial spirit from flourishing in the IFA software market.

Many of those that know me will have heard me rant about my dislike of the iPhone. In fairness, my dislike is more to do with the poor network coverage of O₂ and I have slowly come to admire the usability of the iPhone. Indeed, I believe that when it is shortly available on ‘real’ mobile networks like Vodafone and Orange/T-Mobile (when their merger is finalised) it will be an immensely powerful tool. Its usability simply is in a class of its own and it makes remote access to basic office applications on the move a workable reality and not a gimmick.

Thousands of applications are now available for the iPhone but until recently I have not seen a business application directly aimed at the financial planning market.

Last week I was pleased to see this is no longer the case when I visited True Potential, a company that provides the system and services infrastructure to support an IFA office. As part of their solution, True Potential offer their IFA’s a client facing website; it isn’t a traditional brochureware site, as many IFAs have, but a real communication tool. The site offers secure access to the client factfind, so that details can be reviewed and updated by the client prior to any meeting or review. It also offers secure messaging to help transport confidential documents and it provides tools to get the latest values for their portfolios so they can analyse and assess portfolio performance.

Excitingly, these functions are now available on the iPhone. To be fair, I don’t imagine many will complete or even update factfinds on the iphone (although sadly some will), but I can certainly see people reviewing their latest portfolio valuations on the move.

As a temporary Google Android user (having abandoned my iPhone for the moment), I am pleased to say True Potential now plan to provide similar functionality on this device and also for Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Mobile and eventually include the Palm Pre. With the expected growth in use of ‘smart-phone’ devices, it is interesting to see True Potential pushing the boundaries of traditional Adviser/Client communication.