There has been significant M&A activity in the cashflow planning market in recent years. Voyant, was bought by US-based Asset Mark for a staggering $145mn (£120mn) in 2021. Before that, Intelliflo bought the i4C system which has now been completely rebuilt as Intelliflo Planning and, as referenced above, CashCalc (which was previously a very strong standalone supplier) became part of FE Fundinfo in 2021. Subsequently, they have built a very deep integration with FE Analytics which makes them a very attractive option for firms that are heavy analytics users.
The second group of suppliers are those where cash flow has been added to an extended suite of software, moving towards providing a complete end-to-end solution. The key suppliers to be aware of in this area are Intelliflo, Iress, Dynamic Planner and Defaqto.
Intelliflo is responsible for probably the most significant non-M&A move in cashflow planning in recent years by bundling their planning product into their core offering. This means that for the circa 50 per cent of the adviser community which uses Intelliflo for its practice management system, there is now access to a very powerful cashflow planning product, for no additional cost above what they already pay for their software. A small number of advisers are now beta testing the ability for advisers to create plans using Intelliflo Planning and share them with their clients through the Personal Finance Portal service. I am hearing very positive reactions from these early adopters.
Iress has two offerings in this area: Xtools was built alongside their core Xplan as a very detailed planning tool. They also offer their O&M ESP Profiler service which they bought in 2020 as a simpler system that has a wide range of other functionality. In recent weeks, Iress has followed Intelliflo’s lead and are now bundling the simpler O&M ESP Profiler product with Xplan Essentials - the out-of-the-box version designed for smaller advisers. XTools continues to be available as an additional product for users of Xplan Plus and Xplan One
Cashflow planning is available as an optional extra within Defaqto Engage. Equally, Dynamic Planner added a cashflow planning functionality as part of its proposition in November 2020. Choosing a cashflow proposition that is built as an extension to a wider software suite should give you far more detailed integration and fewer points where data needs to move between different systems. Ultimately, the question is does the in-house solution for your existing supplier offer the same functionality as a dedicated third-party system? If it does, this is probably the first option to investigate. If not, what are you going to lose in integration, to gain the deeper functionality of a standalone system?
