The Landscape
A financial advice firm runs on more moving software than its adviser count suggests. The back office sits in something like Intelliflo iO, holding clients, cases, and the recurring fee book. Research and fund analysis run through FE fundinfo. The money itself lives on wrap and provider platforms, Transact, Nucleus, Aviva, or Quilter, each with its own valuations, statements, and separate login. A CRM, a cashflow modelling tool, and a document store usually sit alongside. None of these were built to share a single client record, so the same fact gets keyed in several times and reconciled by hand.
The pressure is regulatory and it does not let up. Ongoing service has to be delivered and evidenced, so an annual review cannot quietly slip past its date. Recurring fees have to reconcile against what each platform paid out. Consumer Duty expects a firm to show, not assert, that clients get the service they pay for, and most of that proof currently lives in spreadsheets and an adviser’s memory.
Common Challenges
- Annual reviews tracked in a spreadsheet, so a client’s review-due date is only as reliable as whoever last updated the row
- Recurring fee statements from each platform reconciled against the back office by hand, with shortfalls found long after the money was due
- Valuations and holdings rekeyed from a provider platform into the back office, then again into a review pack
- Clients with nowhere to see a portfolio summary, open their own documents, or message the firm through a secure channel
- Fact-find and onboarding details captured on paper or a PDF, then typed into the back office, the CRM, and the platform separately
What We Build for Financial Advisers
In an advice firm the software is rarely the problem. The trouble lives between the systems, where one client record becomes a back-office version, a platform version, and a CRM version that someone reconciles by hand. We build client portals where clients see a plain summary of their portfolio, open their documents, and message the firm through a secure channel instead of unencrypted email. Behind that sit the integrations that keep the back office, the wrap platforms, and the CRM carrying the same client record, so a valuation pulled once is not typed into the next system by hand.
On top of the data sits visibility. A reporting dashboard covering pipeline, recurring fee income, and which annual reviews are due or already overdue turns a quarter-end scramble into something a principal can read on a Monday morning. We build the onboarding and fact-find capture that takes a client’s details in once and routes them where they belong, and the plumbing that generates a suitability report from that data and moves it to an adviser for review and sign-off.
We are firm about where our work stops. We build the software; the advice stays with your advisers. The recommendation itself, suitability judgments, investment selection, and FCA compliance decisions are your team’s to make, not ours, and nothing we build makes them for you. What we remove is the manual handling between systems that eats time an adviser should be spending with clients.
How We Work With Financial Advice Firms
Advice firms hold sensitive personal and financial data, and they are right to be careful with it. We work inside that caution: access controls, a clear record of who can see what, encrypted document handling, and portals that keep client papers in one secured place rather than scattered across inboxes. A project usually starts with the single reconciliation or portal costing the most manual hours, earns its place there, then extends. Because your back office, platforms, and CRM tend to expose APIs or export routes, we can generally connect to what you already run rather than ask you to replace it.
We are not the right fit for a firm that wants an off-the-shelf back-office package. If Intelliflo already does what you need, keep it. We come in where the standard platforms stop and the manual workarounds start, the same ground we cover for professional services firms and across the wider finance sector on our industries overview. And if you are a newly-authorised firm rather than a scaled one, our free Financial Advisory Launch Programme walks you through the first ninety days.
Talk to Us About Your Firm
If your team spends more time moving figures between platforms than sitting with clients, that gap is what we close. Get in touch to talk through the one reconciliation or review process costing you the most, and what connecting it properly would look like.
