By Andy Robertson, Chelmer’s Director & Chief Innovation Officer
The common media image of financial market professionals looking at eight screens in fact represents the complete failure of technology. Software systems have piled up in the financial industry in an ad hoc way, with little thought for how they integrate.
The situation we have now is that wealth managers and financial advisers might have up to a dozen applications on their desktop, or some consolidation in a web browser application but running multiple tabs for each system, that lack standardisation and don’t talk to each other. Different value propositions means advisers may use different applications for adviser business needs and platform software for client needs. This involves a mix of solutions for advice preparation and delivery, alongside investment platforms where they’re executing the service and holding assets.
In an industry built on precision and client confidence, integration isn’t just convenient, it’s essential to delivering and executing.
While most firms still operate across several platforms, there’s an accelerating shift towards integrated technology solutions. We saw this reflected in the results of our Current state and future needs of wealth management technology: 2025 report. Just over 60% of respondents reported using between three and five platforms, but single platform usage has increased significantly, up 23% since our 2023 survey report.
Just under a quarter of respondents said integration capability was the greatest measure of success and effectiveness of the platform(s) they use. While over half of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with how well their systems integrate with other tools and platforms.
Advisers want to work across multiple platforms and applications, but with a single, consolidated view for operations, reporting and advice delivery. Having their clients’ whole-of-wealth central to their service offer, and the pressure to streamline their business processes so they can spend more time with their clients, is shifting the industry to address how they can integrate.
Integration needs to occur at two levels—for users and for data.
Connectivity at the user experience level provides a huge step towards the holy grail of a single adviser desktop. The good news is that there is growing momentum for an industry standard which would support multiple applications from multiple software and platform providers working like a single application. Led by market data and OMS/EMS application vendors, the ecosystem is widening and deepening and the standard is evolving to support wider use cases.
Consider this. There’s a news announcement about an asset. In order to keep their clients informed, the adviser looks at the latest asset price and market activity on a terminal. From the market data terminal, the adviser asks for all clients that hold the asset. The portfolio management system provides that list of clients and their holdings from across multiple platforms and custodians. That system provides the CRM the list of clients and their preferred communication channel, and passes that to an email or marketing system to automatically generate an email or push messaging using AI to each client, personalised with their name, holding etc. It’s achievable using a common messaging and interoperability standard.
AI’s heavy reliance on data means data connectivity is rapidly becoming critical. In the pre-trade area, FIX has been a global success but has limited uptake outside of listed assets or non-existent uptake in some asset classes which may appear not to follow an order/trade process (eg Term Deposits and Unlisted Funds). Despite this, interfaces using those standards don’t exist in the platform community. Worse still is the post-trade interfaces which are lacking industry standards, either locally or globally, despite some ad hoc localised attempts.
While there are standards that exist at a technology layer, such as REST webservices or GraphQL, this doesn’t provide a business standard. On the whole, platforms are still dominating the availability of information. The complexity of opening those systems up via integration capabilities means advisory firms are limited by what platforms want to enable. Even for the very small number of platforms that provide a modern technology interface, it’s still a longer and more complicated integration process than it should be.
But, bad integrations are like having no integration at all, more often than not lead to fragmented processes, bad or hard to maintain data, and ultimately poor and non-competitive services.
In the absence of industry standards, Chelmer is committed to providing rich integrations with platforms to enable streamlined and seamless business processes, starting with Netwealth in late 2024 and now Hub24. These interfaces are both pre-trade (ie. order generation off platform and passed to the platform or an external broker for execution) and post-trade, with transaction aggregation in a single portfolio management application and ongoing reconciliation. Coupled with off platform assets, banking interfaces and the ability to use AI on your data, you can provide your advisers and clients with an aggregated view and frictionless ability to grow and enhance your business.