The fragmentation tax is the cost a UK IFA firm pays for running its lead-to-proposal pipeline across multiple disconnected tools. It shows up in paraplanner rekeying time (commonly a third of a 40-hour week in fragmented stacks, in firms we've worked with), in error-correction labour, in integration maintenance, and in audit-trail fragmentation that compliance officers reconcile by hand. The all-in tax for a 20-RI firm typically lands somewhere around £95,000 a year above what a consolidated platform would cost. This pillar gathers the articles that lay out the maths, the decision framework, and the honest exceptions.
Three honest exceptions worth naming up front: firms whose competitive edge is institutional-grade cashflow planning (keep Voyant), firms mid-acquisition or mid-Consumer-Duty-evidence cycle (wait six months), and firms over fifty RIs (institutional cost of switching usually dominates). Outside those cases, the consolidation maths has consistently favoured single-platform alternatives in every UK IFA firm we've costed honestly.
Consolidate your IFA tech stack
The all-in total-cost-of-ownership maths for the typical 2026 UK IFA stack, and the consolidation decision framework. The cluster's anchor piece.
Read →Stop rekeying client data
The labour-line maths — roughly a third of a paraplanner's week on cross-system data movement in fragmented stacks — and what changes in a single-system pipeline.
Read →Single-system fact-find to proposal
A walk through the lead-to-proposal pipeline end-to-end — four-tool version versus single-platform version — on the same case.
Read →The Hidden Tax of Fragmented Systems
The original pain piece. The naming of the fragmentation tax. Where the cluster started.
Read →Reading order
If you read one piece, read the consolidation maths article. If you read two, add stop rekeying for the labour-line numbers in detail. If you want the pipeline walk-through with a single case study, read single-system fact-find to proposal. The original pain piece — The Hidden Tax — is the right read if you want the narrative version.
Cross-pillar links
Tech-stack consolidation touches three other pillars. Technology covers the AI side and the integration architecture. Regulatory covers the audit-trail and Consumer Duty implications of fragmented systems. CIP/CRP covers the governance impact when a CIP has to be enforced across five tools instead of one. (Some of those hubs are still filling out across this quarter.)
Pillar curator: Michael Fasosin · Last reviewed 15 May 2026 · Reviewed quarterly.