Focus Solutions Launches New Offerings - How Will Wealth Clients, Advisors Gain?

Tom Burroughes

23 November 2018

UK-based financial software firm . (Since 2011, Focus Solutions – founded in 1995 - has been fully owned by Standard Life, operating as a standalone entity.)

The focus:wealth product, the firm says, provides a single client management and engagement platform extending across Client Portal, CRM, Workflow, Compliance, MI with the option of delivering a full range of propositions through the software’s financial planning and digital engagement capabilities; it is modular and can slot into existing wealth management systems.

As for the Wealth Hub offering, this gives clients the option of having a suite of services that they can buy as a package, or they can take individual elements, Upton said.

Focus Solutions has been working in the financial advice market for over 20 years and, as it also started to delve into the discretionary fund management space, its team realised that there was a need to integrate financial advice technologies and DFM capabilities into one package. Until that point, vendors had generally treated these areas separately, Upton said.

An existing business relationship with firms such as BITA Risk spawned the Wealth Hub idea, as did its awareness of what IMiX is doing, he said. The “hub” provides clients with a “collection of capabilities that a company may use one or more of”, he said. “This is not an all-or-nothing solution,” he said.

“Because we have a financial planning background we are seeing a lot of private client businesses that want to offer extra services in and around financial planning….we are also seeing large advisory firms going into the DFM space,” he said. “What we have got is an enterprise single solution that supports the DFM and financial planning capabilities,” he continued.

Upton said that during client presentations over the past six months people have been “very excited” by this joined up capability.

This publication asked what were the qualities of a consolidated package that made it more attractive to the wealth management firms it’s aimed at? “An issue at present is that even in relatively modern wealth management firms, many tasks such as checking client suitability and tracking what work has been done has to be logged manually across disparate systems – soaking up enormous time and labour. A solution that puts these functions together in one place and lets managers have a clear audit trail of where, what and when has been done is invaluable,” Upton said.

How does the client benefit?
All this speed and efficiency is great for advisors and for firms’ bottom lines – once the installation costs have been absorbed – but what do clients get out of this? Will they get a cost saving?

“Well, that is down to our customers, the firms kit is really good and what they’re doing is game-changing,” he said. “People will be happy with the outcome."

“We like kit that sits well in our environment……we are looking at other systems…..there are potentially others,” he added, when asked if other firms’ offerings may eventually be included in the mix.

Asked if these moves are mainly about scaling up in order to be more attractive to a bigger player sooner than would otherwise be the case, Upton replied: “They indeed bring opportunities to all three of us and enhanced credibility. Given that the underlying Focus software has reliably delivered to major banks in the advice market for years, the partnership is more about taking the existing proven capability and widening the offering into the wealth space.”