"More recently we have added the capacity to screen share, and to take over the adviser's screen, and it helps advisers not just to have us solve the problem for us this time, but for the adviser to know how to solve it in future.
"Those things are very popular, advisers are switching to those and away from phone calls. We have gone from having 10 staff on live chat to 20 on it in a very short period of time. That’s why I think the platforms that focus on service will win.”
He agrees that the industry as a whole has a long way to go on some aspects of client service, noting that around one third of all transfers between platforms do not go through first time for technical or other reasons, which he believes should be easily surmountable.
Although he was always aware of platforms through his friendship with Taylor, it is the more sedate world of management consulting that Gunby spent the bulk of his career.
He worked for a business called NMG, a management consultancy in the financial services space, and as a result worked around the world.
Gunby says: “I worked across the world and it was great fun. It got to the stage where I was living in the US, and a project came up in Mexico City, and I agreed to take it on simply because I hadn’t been there.
"But as you get older, the appeal of that wanes, and our children were getting to the stage where education was more serious, so we moved back to the UK. I was wondering where I would work next and Ian invited me to join Transact.”
Part of the reason platforms may be said to be facing an existential crisis is that many of those businesses grew rapidly in the decade after the financial crisis as asset prices rose sharply, delivering higher platform fee income.
But with markets much more volatile than many clients had expected, and the assets under administration for platforms having taken a hit, how can platforms create business models that are less reliant on market sentiment, especially given how hard it is for advisers to transfer between platforms?
Gunby acknowledges that to some extent the revenues of a platform business will always be sensitive to market movements, and indeed Transact has tried to diversify their revenue streams by partnering with BlackRock to launch model portfolios.
Gunby says these portfolios have gathered “£70mn of assets from 40 firms. A lot of the firms have put a little bit of their clients' money into it, to see how it performs, which is understandable, so we are very happy with how that is going.”
