The platform sector needs shaking up, a leading analyst says, as he criticised increasingly ‘clunky’ interfaces and poor reporting for clients.

Mark Polson, founder of the Lang Cat consultancy in Edinburgh, suggested that performance and service is set to become increasingly central to the battle to win clients from competing platform providers.

He told Financial Planning Today: “Reporting for clients is terrible. Interfaces are non-intuitive and getting clunkier as time goes by. The sector needs shaking up; those who disrupted need to be disrupted in turn. We can start by remembering who it is that pays for these things; and it’s not advisers.”

He said: “I think we might be starting to see a bit of a change in the market.

Platforms, to our mind at least, haven’t fulfilled their potential of making transformative change possible for advisers and clients.

“They’ve gone some of the way, but why, if Financial Planning is what matters, don’t more platforms allow you to record a goal and measure progress against it like even the most basic robo-adviser does? That’s a huge miss.”

He also believes the price war has crawled to a near halt over the last year but said the new battle front for competing platforms was service.

The market is “probably relatively price-insensitive at the moment”, he said.

He said: “In our work for firms analysing who’ll fit their requirements, we find that the nature of that competition has become much more service-orientated and by that I don’t mean nice people on the phone.

“It’s more and more about hard metrics, and about how the kit actually works.

“Advisers are not daft, and if they’ve been oversold once they won’t be again. If your business now depends on model portfolio functionality, you’ve got a vested interest in really crawling all over it, not trusting what the nice man in the 3-series says.”

He said that for Financial Planners and Paraplanners using them, the best way to approach platforms is as a service being bought in on behalf of clients for a “particular need, not as a sort of cure-all that you don’t study too closely in case it stops working”.

He said: “As with most things, platforms work fine if you know what you need and have picked a system that can deliver it. Go off-platform when it’s right (your point of aggregation is still the back office), always poke your platform with a stick, and expect the best.”

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