Single-system fact-find to proposal — what a joined-up IFA pipeline actually looks like

The typical UK IFA firm runs the lead-to-proposal pipeline across four to six separate systems — CRM, analytics, risk profiler, cashflow tool, proposal builder, sometimes a separate fact-find. Each handover between systems costs paraplanner time. The 2023 Scottish Widows Paraplanner Survey found 83% of UK paraplanners say their technology could be improved — up from 64% in the prior survey — with rekeying named as the top frustration. A single-system pipeline collapses those handovers. This piece walks the whole pipeline end-to-end, shows where the labour lives in each version, and is honest about when one-system isn't the right answer.

It's Thursday at 11:23am. A lead came in through the firm's website yesterday afternoon — a 58-year-old approaching retirement, asking about consolidating two old pensions and a small SIPP. The adviser had a 20-minute discovery call this morning. The follow-up meeting is booked for next Wednesday, at which she'll expect a recommendation. Between now and Wednesday, the firm has to take her from "interested lead" to "signed proposal". Walk through how that journey actually works in 2026. It depends on whether the firm runs one platform or four.

The four-tool version

In the typical UK IFA stack, the journey looks like this. The lead arrives in a website form that emails the firm and (sometimes) creates a Mailchimp entry. The paraplanner opens Intelliflo, manually creates a contact record, types the seven fields she captured from the discovery-call notes. The adviser sends a fact-find document — usually a PDF or a Word file — for the prospect to complete and email back. When it arrives, the paraplanner re-enters the answers into Intelliflo's fact-find module. So far: two hours of paraplanner time, none of which has produced anything the client sees.

Next: risk. The firm uses Dynamic Planner. The paraplanner generates a risk questionnaire link, the prospect completes it Tuesday evening, the score lands in Dynamic Planner. She copies it into Intelliflo. Then portfolio analysis. The two existing pensions and the SIPP need a look-through view; the firm uses FE Analytics. She types the holdings into FE — bulk-import would be nice but never quite matches Intelliflo's format. FE produces the analysis. She exports the PDF, attaches it to the Intelliflo file.

Cashflow. The prospect specifically asked about whether she can retire at 62 or whether she needs to wait until 65. The firm uses Voyant. The paraplanner enters the holdings into Voyant — third entry now — and the income, expenditure, planned changes. Voyant produces the chart. She exports the screenshot. Attaches to Intelliflo.

Then the proposal itself. The firm uses a Word template the senior paraplanner maintains. She opens it, fills in the placeholders by copying from Intelliflo, FE and Voyant. Six pages of recommendation. The portfolio illustration goes in as an image. The cashflow chart goes in as an image. She formats the page numbers. Saves the PDF. Emails it to the adviser for sign-off. Wednesday afternoon, the adviser walks into the meeting with a printed proposal.

Sarah's spent — and we're being conservative — about nine hours on that one client between Thursday and the following Wednesday. Three hours of it is judgment work she trained for. Six is data movement.

The single-system version

Same lead. Same firm. Same prospect. Different starting position — the firm runs the whole pipeline in one platform.

The website lead arrives in lead captureand creates a shell client record. During the discovery call, the adviser fills in the structured discovery fields — objectives, household structure, the three things the prospect is worried about — and saves. The fact-find shell is now half-populated. The fact-find link goes to the prospect by email; she completes it in the browser, structured into the platform's fields directly. There's no PDF round-trip, no manual re-entry. Vulnerability indicators, ESG/SDR preferences, capacity-for-loss inputs — all captured in the same form, written to the same record.

Risk runs off the same record. The capacity-for-loss inputs feed the risk module without re-entry. The questionnaire link to the prospect produces a score that lands directly against her client record. Portfolio analysis follows — but this is where the leverage shows. Because the firm uses Intelliflo for some existing clients and the prospect's existing pensions are on platforms the firm already integrates with, the holdings come in via the Letter of Authority workflow and land in portfolio analysiswith live Morningstar look-through. No third entry.

Cashflow runs against the same income, expenditure and holdings inputs. The proposal builder reads off everything. The paraplanner reviews and edits — adds the case-specific commentary, the firm's recommendation paragraph, the bits that need actual judgment. She prints the PDF.

Total time on the same case: about three hours. The six hours of data movement collapsed to about 20 minutes of review.

The labour-line maths, generalised

One case doesn't matter. The pattern across a year does. From the IFA firms we've worked with, paraplanner time spent on cross-system data movement commonly lands in the range of a third of a 40-hour week — roughly a working day — per paraplanner. At a fully-loaded paraplanner rate of around £35 an hour, that's £15,000–£20,000 a year per paraplanner for the work of being a transcription layer between four tools.

A single-system pipeline cuts that materially. Detailed worked example in our rekeying article and our consolidation maths article. For a firm with three paraplanners, the freed capacity typically lands somewhere around £40,000 a year. Whether the firm spends it on growth, on a pay rise, or on saying yes to clients it's currently saying no to, is the firm's call.

Where single-system isn't the right answer

Three honest exceptions, the same three we name on the mid-firm solutions page.

First: firms whose competitive edge is institutional-grade cashflow planning. If Voyant or Timeline is your differentiator and clients hire you for that depth specifically, a single-system platform that also does cashflow will not be as deep. The right call is to run WA for the rest of the pipeline and keep the specialist tool for the cases that need it.

Second: firms mid-acquisition or mid-Consumer-Duty-evidence-cycle. Migration is real work. The right call is to wait until the pressure eases, then revisit.

Third: firms over fifty RIs. The institutional cost of moving a larger organisation often dominates the labour-line saving. We'll still talk, but the maths gets less clean above that size.

Where single-system clearly is the right answer

Small to mid-sized UK IFA firms — anywhere from one RI to about fifty — running a four-to-six-tool stack inherited over a decade, where nobody designed the workflow on purpose. That's the WA shape. Pull your real subscription numbers, your real paraplanner hours-per-week on data movement, the integration spend you're not counting because it sits with a consultant. Compare against a single-platform alternative for your headcount. The headroom is what tells you.

Every Wealth Analytica article is fact-checked against primary sources where applicable. Read our editorial policy for our sourcing and review standards.