Stop rekeying client data — the hidden cost in every UK IFA firm

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 manual rekeying between systems repeatedly named as the top friction. In firms we've worked with, that translates to a meaningful share of the paraplanner's working week spent moving client data between Intelliflo, FE Analytics, Voyant and a separate proposal tool. This is what the fragmentation tax looks like in its purest form — and the firms that have stopped paying it run tighter operations on smaller technology budgets than the firms still rekeying.

It's 9:47 PM on a Wednesday. Your paraplanner is at the kitchen table, the dog at her feet, the laptop showing three browser tabs open to the same client's record in three different systems. The CRM has the client's name, DOB and address. The fact-find tool has the same plus their objectives and risk score. The planning tool needs both, in slightly different field names, with a separate audit trail for each. She's been at it for forty minutes. The client meeting is at 8:30 AM.

This isn't a story about an unusually hard week. It's a story about Wednesday. And Tuesday. And the last six months.

Where the hours actually go

Across the paraplanner workflows we've audited inside UK IFA firms, the working week splits roughly into three buckets. The biggest is the work the firm actually trains paraplanners for — fact-find, suitability-report drafting, ongoing-service review preparation. A second, smaller bucket is meetings and admin. The third, and biggest source of pain, is the work that adds no information to the firm: rekeying, reconciliation between systems, fixing data-mismatch errors, reformatting reports for different software. The exact share varies by firm and tool combination, but it's never small.

Take a directional cut. If a paraplanner spends roughly a third of a 40-hour week on cross-system data movement — a figure that lines up with what we hear most often — that's about 13 hours a week. For a paraplanner on a £45,000 base plus on-cost (a 2026 mid-market figure), that's roughly £14,000 a year of rekeying time per paraplanner. A four-paraplanner firm could be paying £55,000 a year to move data between tools.

The fragmentation tax

We call this the fragmentation tax. It's the cost a firm pays for the fact that the tools they bought separately don't talk to each other coherently. Every IFA firm of any size in 2026 is paying it. Most have no idea what the bill is until they sit down and add it up.

The tax has three components and they compound:

Direct rekeying time.The paraplanner hours we just costed. Visible on the salary line.

Error-correction time.A field gets typed wrong in one system and the downstream report breaks. The paraplanner backtracks, finds it, fixes it, reruns. This is the second 8 hours a week. You don't see this on a salary line either — it's just "the week she lost on that client review".

Opportunity cost.The third hour you don't recover is the new business the firm didn't write because the existing book was eating capacity. This is the part that doesn't show up anywhere in your management accounts and is by some distance the biggest of the three.

Why "just integrate them" doesn't work

The instinct in most firms when they notice the rekeying problem is to ask the IT side — or the consultant — whether the existing tools can be integrated. The honest answer is usually some version of: yes, with engineering work, and the result will be brittle.

Adviser-side software in the UK has a long tail of legacy data models. A field in your CRM called "annual income" might mean "gross household earned income before pension contributions" or "net taxable income". A field in your fact-find tool called "annual income" might mean something different. Until both systems agree on the definition, the integration runs but the data is wrong. Many of the firms we've worked with had integrations in place that produced subtly wrong reports for years before someone noticed.

And every integration is an ongoing cost. Software-vendor APIs change. Field semantics drift. Someone has to maintain the integration. In a firm with no in-house engineering capability — which is almost every IFA firm — that someone is a consultant on retainer.

The single-pipeline alternative

The other approach is to stop integrating and start consolidating. Pick a platform where the client record exists once, captured at the point of first contact and carried forward through fact-find, risk assessment, portfolio analysis and proposal. The data doesn't move between systems because there's only one system.

That's what Wealth Analyticais. The fact-find pre-populates from your Intelliflo OAuth. The portfolio analysis uses the same client record. The proposal builder writes off the same fields. Your paraplanner enters a piece of information once, and it propagates everywhere downstream. The integration problem dissolves because there's nothing to integrate.

The number that comes out the other side, in firms we've moved over, is 8 to 12 hours a week of paraplanner time back per RI. Not 31% becomes 0% — there's still some reformatting and reconciliation work — but the rekeying line on the workload breakdown drops from 31% to about 6%. And the error-correction line drops with it.

What that recovered time funds

Twelve hours a week per paraplanner is a piece of a working day. Across a typical firm that's the equivalent of a whole new person on the team — without the salary line, without the pension contribution, without the National Insurance, without the desk. Firms we've talked to who've consolidated their stack typically do one of three things with the recovered capacity:

Some take on more clients, growing the book at constant headcount. Their AUM-per-RI metric rises. Some keep the headcount and the book the same, and the paraplanner stops doing the 9 PM Wednesday. Retention improves. The third path — the one we see most often — is somewhere in between: a small book expansion, a small reduction in unpaid evening work, and a culture-of-the-firm shift toward "this is a job you can do without it eating your life".

All three are valid. The point is that the recovered time is real money the firm can deploy.

How to find out what it costs your firm

Don't take our number. Pull your own.

For one normal week, ask each paraplanner to log time against categories: client work, suitability drafting, ongoing-review prep, rekeying-or-reconciliation, error-correction, admin.
Compute the total of "rekeying-or-reconciliation" plus "error-correction" across the team.
Cost it at fully-loaded rate (salary + on-cost, divided by working hours).
Multiply by 50 to annualise.

The number that comes out is what the fragmentation tax is costing your firm this year. It will be larger than you expected. We've yet to see a firm where the answer was under £20,000 a year, and we've seen plenty where it was over £100,000.

Once you have the number, the next question — whether to keep paying it or do something about it — is genuinely yours to answer. We have a strong view, obviously. But the number is the number, and the number is yours.

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