Standard Life is promising improved Financial Planning support as part of plans to enhance its wrap platform.

The developments are designed to boost its aims to deliver “high quality advice and tax planning at retirement and beyond”.

The upgrades will “address the need for better integration between the investment management and Financial Planning worlds to support the best client outcomes in the post pension freedoms environment”, the firm said in a statement.

Standard Life Wrap officials said it would move towards a new “fully integrated wealth platform model” offering “solutions to suit both advisers and private client managers”.

The aim is to bring together the cleanness and transparency of the best wrap platforms with the key aspects of the best private client platforms.

The promised enhancements included:

• The introduction of new tailored portfolio functionality enabling the automatic execution of personalised client mandates reflecting requirements such as asset exclusions, substitutions, ethical and CGT management strategies
• Ability to segregate investment management and financial planning with a new dedicated interface and technology for back offices
• Improved ‘look-through’ of multi-manager fund strategies including MyFolio ‘superclean’ funds
• Improved reporting including brand new income and withdrawal reports
• Extended support for retirement planning and intra-generational wealth transfers including a suite of junior products, tax efficient AIM portfolios and new modelling tools and alerts for at retirement clients.

Mike Hogg, head of proposition for Standard Life Wrap, said: “The plans announced today have been specifically developed to support their business growth strategies, which increasingly depend on combining the very latest in portfolio management techniques with sophisticated tax and Financial Planning services. Bringing together these two capabilities into a single platform will mean wealth management businesses can deliver a fully integrated service to their clients.”

David Tiller, head of adviser and wealth manager propositions at Standard Life said: “The post ‘freedoms’ world is well established and we are seeing more people in control of increasing amounts of pension wealth. As a result adviser businesses are adopting more of a ‘family office’ type approach by employing key experts, and so, in turn, are looking for more from their platform provider.

“The new model wealth platform must deliver individual solutions in an efficient manner through combining highly scalable process automation with the ability to tailor investment portfolios and tax strategies at a client level.

“The best wrap platforms are clean, transparent and able to deal with multiple tax strategies, while the best private client platforms are great at supporting scalable portfolio management. This plan for Standard Life Wrap brings together the best of both disciplines.”