Iress has further revealed its strategy in acquiring OneVue outlining a plan to combine OneVue’s managed fund registry with the Iress financial advice and trading front-end technologies to directly execute investment advice from Xplan and IOS and providing an interface for digital advice.
The strategy has been revealed at the company’s annual general meeting, with the chief executive, Andrew Walsh stating that it will be offering the new approach on a subscription basis “to drive recurring revenues for Iress and to reduce the cost to the end investor and other industry participants”.
He said the immediate priority was to integrate existing technology, Xplan and IOS, to existing infrastructure at OneVue within the first half of 2021 to deliver on “investment infrastructure as a service”.
“The value chain has become incredibly complicated with each layer needing to be paid, regardless of whether the investor is transacting or not,” Walsh said. “When it is all added up, the investor pays up to 185 basis points.”
“For the advice industry to operate sustainably and profitably, there needs to be a more direct link between the consumer and the manufacturer,” he said.
“The whole industry is under margin pressure. Things have to change. Fees have to come down and pricing needs to be more transparent. Industry consolidation and reorganisation may provide some temporary respite through cost synergies, but the real answer is the fundamental redesign of the systems. That’s our plan and that’s what we are going to deliver – a fundamentally better end-to-end technology and infrastructure, available as a service.”
