He adds: "What we found was that nothing quite did what we wanted it to do. We wanted things like automated terms of engagement, automated money laundering, and the fact find, they were the three key initial things that people were asking for.
"And we didn't really find anything that did all of those things without bringing separate pieces together.
"But also, it was the client has to do it, or the adviser has to do it, and everybody has to work in a certain way. And that doesn't really work for the adviser community.
"So the way we built this is that advisers use it as a tool, not a definitive 'this is how you must work'. So if they want to work digitally and use the digital bits, they can, if they want to still do it on paper and feed it in later on, they can.
"It's basically a flexible tool for advisers. And we just couldn't find anything that ticked all the boxes that we wanted, for the amount of money we'd be basically paying for it out there."
A phased journey
So far the journey has taken 18 months across four phases of development, designed to give the firm the option to adapt and upgrade the tech in the future.
Phase one was about onboarding clients and giving advisers the tools to service clients digitally.
Whenever the client interacts digitally during the onboarding, the system now automatically saves the document, does money laundering checks and saves client certificates.
This is followed by a fact find to be completed by the client, adviser or both, with an integrated risk profiling questionnaire.
The system also has built in paraplanning worksheets, allowing advisers to leave notes for paraplanners, and a calendar reminder alerting advisers to do their review meetings.
It also features a secure communication facility allowing the adviser and client to send documents to each other securely.
Phase two consisted of a CPD recording system separating out how many hours of CPD the adviser has done in which category and automatically pulling in any in-house training done.
Phase three cleans and organises income data for advisers, allowing them to download their income statement more easily.
Phase four, which goes live in May, will see the phase-in of German cashflow system Aixigo, a system all advisers in the group were in agreement on after a group-wide demo, according to Heath.
The system allows advisers to do a live cashflow analysis with the fact find as it pulls in all the information automatically.
