For many years practice management systems were the most important piece of technology in an adviser business. Post-RDR, while there is now far more focus on the tools that enable advice delivery, practice management systems are still a core part of an adviser tech proposition, and generally provide the foundation on which other services can be built.
By far the dominant player in this sector is Intelliflo which is now generally accepted as having a 50 per cent market share, so they are the natural place to start. Like anyone with such a large market position, they have their detractors, who invariably shout loudly. Google, Apple and Microsoft all face similar problems.
Conversely, I frequently talk to many very happy customers and the continued growth of their market share shows there must be far more happy clients than there are unhappy ones. It is only fair to say Intelliflo have faced some significant challenges in the last few years, from my perspective they have addressed these well.
For example, the time taken for pages to render was an issue 18 months ago. Since the company re-platformed their technology to Amazon Web Services they now score exceptionally highly in this area. Apdex is a global standard in this area where a score of between 1.00 and 0.94 is considered excellent. Consistently this year Intelliflo have scored 0.95.
During this year, Intelliflo have advanced their data intelligence tools to provide more adviser dashboards. This includes two very exciting external technologies, the machine learning, powered Amazon QuickSight business intelligence engine and Snowflake, a cloud-based data platform that I'm hearing a lot of people I respect getting very excited about.
In addition, I’m told in the last couple of years Intelliflo have rewritten 8 million lines of code in the product. Some of their competitors suggest Intelliflo is "old technology" but to me this suggests a significant ongoing investment in continuously refreshing the platform. In recent weeks I have heard very good things from beta testers of their new financial forecast tool, a light version of Intelliflo Planning, which will be available accessible through their client portal next year.
Their big announcement in 2023 has been the “AdviceTech as a Platform” wealthlink partnership with SS&C, which I understand they are on time to deliver early next year. This will be a huge step forward for their users. The arrangement has significant nuances compared to earlier ATP propositions, which I mention below, but these are to facilitate the arrangement with SS&C as the platform operator and are not anything that should concern advisers.
In the past what most advisers really bought a practice management system for was the core accounting capabilities and that is where Intelliflo has been king for many years. It was the same feature that really drove the growth of the previous dominant practice management system, the now shuttered Adviser Office system originally grown by 1st Software. Looking to the future I see significant changes in the ways advice firms will construct their charges, and the technology they will need to change this coming over the next few years, and that is an issue any firm wanting to continue as a market leader should keep an eye on, but that is an issue for another day.
