Expanding Financial Planner and accountancy firm Cooper Parry Wealth is to launch a new in-house platform powered by white label provider Seccl.

The new platform is called CP Accelerate.

The ongoing platform charge will start from 0.15% for the first £2m, tiering down to 0.01% for assets over £10m.

Cooper Parry Wealth says the average client will save 0.05% in platform charges by moving to CP Accelerate, if a transfer is deemed suitable.

Cooper Parry Wealth (CPW) manages £1.4bn of assets for 800 families. The firm has expanded rapidly in recent years after moving to a Financial Planning focus in 2010. In 2023 it completed its first acquisitions, buying Future Perfect and Chamberlyns.

Cooper Parry Wealth says the tie-up with Seccl should “significantly improve client experience” and provide operational efficiencies. Seccl is owned by provider Octopus.   

So far CPW has onboarded more than 100 family groups and £160m of assets to CP Accelerate. It expects to have around £300m of assets on the platform by April 2024.

The new platform will also benefit from integration between fintech Moneyinfo and Seccl over the next few months, CPW says.

Since launch, CPW says its in-house platform team has seen the average time to complete a client’s end-to-end transfer fall by a week. The team is also able to handle the vast majority of platform-related queries on its own allowing clients to see queries resolved more quickly. 

Marc Patterson-Mik, head of platform operations at CPW, said: “The decision to become our own platform provider was a natural one, as we strive to continually improve our clients’ digital experience and retain our high level of service throughout our growth journey.

“Our new set-up, powered by Seccl’s modern and future-proof infrastructure, will help us to streamline our internal operations and provide ample opportunity for integration with other systems – not to mention future business transformation opportunities, whether that’s our own mobile apps or the creation of bespoke client onboarding journeys.

David Ferguson, CEO of Seccl, said: “Cooper Parry is a genuinely exciting business, with a maverick, entrepreneurial spirit that has underscored its impressive growth in recent years. Its rapidly scaling wealth business is characteristically ambitious and, with its enthusiastic adoption of technology and obsessive focus on customer service, it looks well set up to achieve on these ambitions in the years to come. 

“Across the advice industry, we're seeing more and more impressive, customer-centric firms grow frustrated with clunky platform processes and the pain they cause for advisers and their clients. We’re excited to track the positive impact of the new CP Accelerate platform, both on Cooper Parry Wealth’s own internal operations and on the overall experience their clients enjoy, and are delighted to be playing a part in this industry growth story.”

Financial Planning Today Analysis: The Cooper Parry Wealth in-house platform initiative continues a growing trend for Financial Planning and advice firms to launch their own in-house platforms. There are benefits to doing this but also costs which mean firms must be of a reasonable size to fund the investment needed. The larger platforms will need to take note of this trend to avoid potentially losing substantial business. However, it is an emerging trend and the path is by no means clear. Certainly it intensifies competition in the platform sector.