Consolidate your IFA tech stack — the true cost of running five tools

Every firm's stack grew by accident. A founder bought a CRM in 2013 because their consultant recommended it. The analytics tool came in 2017 because the back-office firm's referral programme was generous that year. The cashflow model was added in 2020 because Consumer Duty was on the horizon and everyone said you needed one. The proposal builder showed up in 2022 because the analytics tool's PDF exports were embarrassing. Nobody designed this stack. It happened.

And it's now the operating reality of the firm.

The typical 2026 UK IFA stack

A snapshot of what we see at firms with three to twenty advisers. Your stack will vary; the pattern won't.

• CRM— Intelliflo Office, Xplan, Plannr or similar. £60–£120 per user per month.
• Analytics— FE Analytics or Morningstar Adviser Workstation. Quotation-based; £80–£250 per user per month effective rate.
• Risk profiling— Defaqto, FinaMetrica, Dynamic Planner or FE Risk Profiler. £20–£60 per user per month.
• Cashflow modelling— Voyant, Timeline or CashCalc. £30–£70 per user per month.
• Proposal builder— sometimes a separate module, sometimes a CRM add-on. £15–£40 per user per month.
• Fact-find / document workflow— varies enormously; many firms run their fact-find inside the CRM, others use a separate tool. £0–£50 per user per month.
• Compliance / suitability assistant— increasingly an AI-assisted tool. £20–£80 per user per month.
• The spreadsheet— the one your paraplanner keeps because the analytics tool doesn't quite compute the thing you actually want. £0 in licence; an unknown number in paraplanner hours.

Sum the midpoints and a typical RI-month subscription bill sits at around £240 per RI per month, or roughly £2,900 per RI per year. For a ten-RI firm that's £29,000 a year in licences alone.

What the licence line doesn't include

The subscription bill is the visible cost. The invisible costs add up to more.

Rekeying time. Detailed in our stop-rekeying piece. From the IFA firms we've worked with, paraplanner data-movement time across a fragmented stack commonly lands at roughly a third of a 40-hour week — call it 13 hours. At a fully-loaded paraplanner rate of around £35 per hour, that's £20,000–£25,000 per paraplanner per year. A four-paraplanner firm pays about £80,000–£100,000 in rekeying labour.

Error-correction time.A separate slice of paraplanner time, harder to quantify cleanly but typically 6–10 hours a week per paraplanner. Same cost mechanics.

Integration maintenance.Where you've custom-integrated tools, somebody maintains those integrations. Often a consultant on retainer at £80–£150 per hour, perhaps 4–8 hours a month. £4,000–£14,000 a year for a firm that's invested in custom integrations.

Onboarding new staff.Each tool has a learning curve. Bringing a new paraplanner up to productive speed on a five-tool stack typically takes 8–12 weeks. With a senior on hand to answer questions, the cost of that ramp is real even though no one bills it.

Audit and compliance overhead.When the same client data lives in five systems, the audit trail is five audit trails. Compliance officers spend time reconciling.

Add the invisible costs to the visible and the all-in number for that ten-RI firm — £29k subscriptions, £85k rekeying, £40k error correction, £8k integration maintenance — comes in north of £160,000 a year. That's £16,000 per RI per year, or about £1,300 per RI per month, just to run the stack.

What consolidation does to the maths

A single-platform alternative collapses several of those lines.

Subscription cost.A flat all-in platform at £149.99 per user per month is £1,800 per RI per year. For a ten-RI firm: £18,000. Versus £29,000 in the stack version. £11,000 of headroom.

Rekeying time.A single client record across the pipeline means rekeying labour drops from roughly a third of paraplanner time to a small single-digit fraction. The £85k figure becomes about £17k. £68,000 of headroom.

Error correction.Drops with rekeying for the same reason. About 60% reduction in our observation. £40k becomes £16k. £24,000 of headroom.

Integration maintenance.Goes to zero — there's nothing to integrate. £8k of headroom.

Totted up: £117,000 a year of headroom on a stack that was costing £160,000. That's not the headline you put in a brochure; it's the number that comes out when you do the actual maths on a real firm.

The honest cases against consolidation

None of this means consolidation is right for every firm. There are three durable reasons to keep a multi-tool stack.

First: specialist depth in one area. If your firm's competitive edge is institutional-grade cashflow modelling and Voyant is the only tool that gets you there, the £30k a year on Voyant is funding the differentiator. A single platform that "also does cashflow" will be less deep on that one capability. Consolidation makes sense across the broad workflow; for the one area where you compete on depth, you may keep the specialist.

Second: switching cost during a high-pressure period. Migration is real work. If your firm is mid-Consumer-Duty-evidence cycle or mid-acquisition, the right answer is to hold the stack and revisit after the pressure eases.

Third: institutional inertia. If your compliance officer trusts a tool brand, your paraplanner has built a personal workflow around it over a decade, and your senior advisers wouldn't move if you paid them — those are real institutional facts. They have a cost; that cost may be lower than the cost of a fight you don't want to have.

The decision framework is: pull your real numbers, weigh them against the institutional cost of switching, decide. We've yet to see a firm under thirty RIs where the maths didn't favour consolidating; we've seen plenty over thirty RIs where it didn't, because the institutional cost of moving a larger organisation was the dominant term.

What to look for in a consolidated platform

If consolidation is the direction, the criteria that matter are different from the criteria that matter for an individual tool. You're not picking the best analytics or the best CRM — you're picking the best pipeline. Things to check:

• Single client record across the workflow— fact-find, risk, portfolio, proposal all share the same source-of-truth
• Live Intelliflo (or equivalent CRM) integrationif you're keeping your existing CRM in place
• Look-through analytics on funds— allocation that reflects real holdings, not style boxes
• Branded reports built into the platform, not an add-on
• Flat pricingrather than module-by-module quotation
• Implementation timeline measured in days, not weeks— the platform should be usable within a fortnight or you're back to "another project plan"
• Audit trail and source-of-truth methodologya compliance officer can read in fifteen minutes

Wealth Analyticasits at the consolidated end of the spectrum and is built around exactly that criteria set — we're explicit about it because we built the platform from those constraints. There are other consolidated platforms emerging; check them against the list.

The decision in one paragraph

Pull your firm's invoices for the last twelve months across every adviser-tech subscription. Add the salary line for the time your paraplanners spend on rekeying, reconciliation and error-correction. Add an honest figure for integration maintenance and onboarding overhead. That number is what your current stack costs. Compare it to a flat single-platform alternative for your RI count. The gap is the headroom. The institutional cost of switching is what spends that headroom. If the headroom exceeds the institutional cost, consolidate. If it doesn't, optimise the stack you have. Either way you'll have the number that lets you decide.