Efficiency viewed as greatest platform differentiator for advisers
Two advice platforms have been identified by Adviser Ratings as standouts for efficiency as advisers become evermore fickle in their platform selection.
The research firm said a platform’s strength used to be based on their feature sets, but this is moving towards a platform’s operational efficiency and speed instead.
Speed to execute transactions was cited as the biggest driver of an adviser’s satisfaction with their platform, followed by speed to process requests as advisers seek to manage their time efficiently. This compares to previous years when preference would have likely been given to pricing or to platform features.
A platform’s efficiency was also the greatest driver of new flows, while the relationship between new flows and pricing was “negligible”.
“This transformation isn’t merely a preference change; it’s an economic imperative. With rising compliance burdens, fee compression, and the need to efficiently service clients to maintain profitability, an adviser’s time has become their most critical and constrained resource. Every minute spent wrestling with a slow transaction or chasing an administrative request directly impacts their practice’s profitability and scalability.
“Years of intense competition have compressed pricing into a relatively narrow band, and most major platforms now offer investment menus broad enough to satisfy mainstream adviser needs. The market has become ‘good enough’ on these core tenets for most advisers, forcing the competitive battleground ‘up the value stack’.”
CFS FirstChoice and Expand are specifically identified as two platforms that have stepped up their game in this arena.
“CFS FirstChoice exemplifies this dynamic, almost doubling its satisfaction scores in 12 months through focused operational investment. Similarly, Expand has engineered a dramatic turnaround, moving from negative sentiment to strongly positive adviser feedback following successful post-migration execution.”
If an adviser is dissatisfied with their choice, Adviser Ratings warned they will have no hesitation in switching platforms, and the large number of dissatisfied advisers are a potential target demographic for rivals. A platform that fails to meet an adviser’s need is likely to be at risk in a practice’s efficiency drive, it warned.
This is already being evidenced in their platform usage with the number of platforms used falling from an average of 2.31 in 2023 to 2.01 in 2025.
“Advisers will reward performance improvements with loyalty and fund flows, but they’re equally quick to abandon platforms that fail to deliver.
“Large pools of dissatisfied advisers represent the market’s most attractive and vulnerable targets for competitors. For platforms in this position, market share has become a liability requiring urgent attention rather than a competitive moat to defend.”
Other advice practices are taking their needs into their own hands with the advent of customised or bespoke platforms at large advice firms such as Centrepoint Alliance which launched an investment and superannuation platform with FNZ at the end of 2024.
If these work well internally, it is unlikely they may want to return to a third-party provider. It could even provide a rival to established platforms if these bespoke models are rolled out more broadly to other practices outside that network.
“Advisers experiencing seamless, intuitive in-house systems become increasingly intolerant of clunky commercial alternatives, forcing third-party providers to aggressively prove that their value extends beyond what a single firm can build.
“The success of these proprietary solutions also creates ‘commercialisation temptation’ – large licensees that have invested millions in superior platforms may look to offer them to the broader market, creating a new breed of competitor born from within the advice industry itself.”
AUTHOR
Laura Dew
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