Adviser business owners should not limit their search for the right technology to the traditional wealth space, as there may be better options elsewhere - you just need to look for them, says Wes Wilkes.
The founder of DFM and advice firm Iron Market confesses to having kissed "a few bad frogs" in his search for the best tech, and has even built a proprietary back office, but he ultimately found what he was looking for in the wider fintech space.
His firm, which operates the Net-Worth NTWRK, now uses a tool called Monday.com for its practice management.
It is essentially a project management tool, and manages everything from client onboarding journeys to projects and workshops and events the firm is running, as well as organising things such as social media scheduling and compliance audits.
“From a practice management perspective, having something tech that’s not built just for financial services is crucially important," he tells FT Adviser.
“Our reporting is almost fully automated, whether that’s board meeting reporting or quarterly reporting or whatever, because of the use of those kinds of tools that we probably find a little bit better than, say, the existing or incumbent financial services-based tools.”
The firm uses IO as its back office but for the daily management of the business, he says Monday.com is more intuitive and easy to use, “because it’s built for business and not built for financial services.
"That’s the thing with owning this kind of business: we need to think about managing the business first, and managing it as a financial services business second.
"That’s not to say financial services or compliance are any less important, but when you consider all the reports we have to do…really, what [the regulator] is asking for is a well-run business.”
But it's not the only tool that's potentially suitable for advice businesses, he says. Advisers just need to look more widely at what's available.
“I’d definitely widen the scope and look outside of just the standard kind of systems that are available for financial advisers.”
Iron Market had built its own CRM in the past but realised the upkeep of it was too difficult, especially as the firm wanted to keep growing.
“We got to the point of realising, well, actually, we're gonna have to keep doing this and keep developing this," says Wilkes.
"We're not coders, we're not developers, we're financial planners and investment managers. So we actually decided that time cost, and just pure cost, wasn't worth it in the end.”
Picking the right tech
Iron Market partly chose IO as its back office because of its personal finance portal, which Wilkes says is a “massive part” of its proposition because it onboards all clients digitally.
In choosing the right tech for their business advisers often opt for the best in breed, but for Wilkes rather than the best solution, it has to be the right solution for the business.
