Technology & Tools
One timed client file says more about a research tool than a demo ever will
Research tools for advisers are usually compared on features and depth of data. Anthony Marris argues that two other numbers matter more and are rarely seen together: the full cost per adviser once every module on the invoice is counted, and the paraplanner time spent making the research tool, the CRM and the proposal agree. The piece recognises where deep fund history earns its place, and sets out a one-morning test on a single anonymised client file that any firm can run on its current tool and any alternative.
Nearly twenty years on the same desk. That is how long FE Analytics has been the default research tool in UK advice firms, and the comparison piece making that point is written by the team building an alternative, which it says at the top.
So read it with that in mind. I am not going to spend this arguing about which tool wins. The more interesting question is how seldom a firm tests the one it already pays for.
Depth is a real strength
The comparison is fair on this. FE's fund history is the deepest in the market, and a sentence that begins "the FE data shows" is one compliance teams rarely stop at. A firm running long-horizon backtests, or needing a consistent twenty-year series, gets its money's worth out of that.
Other firms work differently. They open the research tool to check a fund's charges and sector, run a comparison, export a report for the meeting, then move across to the CRM and the report writer. The depth sits there, mostly unopened.
Both patterns are legitimate. They simply point to different tools, and most firms have never checked which pattern they are.
The two numbers nobody sees together
One is the full cost. FE's pricing is agreed by quotation, with no public list price, and the comparison notes that modules such as the risk profiler, cashflow and proposal tools usually sit on separate lines of the invoice. No outsider can tell you what your firm pays per adviser once all of that is counted. Twelve months of invoices can, and the adding up is about an hour.
The other is time, which is harder to see because nobody sends an invoice for it.
It is the hours a paraplanner spends getting the research tool, the CRM and the proposal to agree on what a client actually owns. An overnight export reconciled here, a holding retyped there. The comparison describes firms accepting that rekeying because building something better themselves looked harder than living with it.
Neither number turns up in a demo. Both turn up in the accounts, one as a subscription line and the other as headcount.
A test that costs a morning
Take one client file and anonymise it. Run it through the tool you have and through anything you are looking at, ours included. Time the lot, from gathering the fact-find to a finished proposal, and let the paraplanner who would do the work for real be the one who does it. Note every moment they retype something or check one screen against another.
Then price the modules that test actually used, and set that against the modules you pay for.
It will not tell you everything. One file says nothing about how a tool copes with a complicated trust, or with a client who arrives holding six old pensions, and little about what the support is like when something breaks. What it does is swap a feature comparison for a measurement taken inside your own firm, which is a far better footing for any conversation with a supplier, including the one you are already having.
Switching carries its own cost, and the comparison is honest about that too. A firm wired deep into its current back office, or one that needs decades of consistent fund data, has good reasons to stay where it is.
The morning is still worth spending. If the test confirms what you have, you have finally priced it properly. If it does not, you found that out on your own terms and on your own client file, rather than in a sales meeting.
Give it to the paraplanner. They know where the time goes, and the timings land harder coming from the person whose week they describe.
When did anyone in your firm last time the research workflow, first fact-find to finished proposal?
Every Wealth Analytica article is fact-checked against primary sources where applicable. Read our editorial policy for our sourcing and review standards.
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