Hillross leveraging AXA merger
AMP-owned dealer group Hillross has been increasingly leveraging benefits from AMP's merger with AXA last year, including rolling out AXA's North platform to its financial advisers earlier this year.
Hillross managing director Hugh Humphrey said Hillross had delivered on its promise to licensees not to unduly disrupt them through changes resulting from the integration, but said the group had also been able to cherry-pick a lot of the good work that had happened in AXA historically.
"We do a lot of knowledge sharing around things that are working or aren't working," he said.
Hillross ran a trial with a number of its advisers on the North platform at the end of 2011 to get a sense of how these advisers viewed the platform compared to other platforms they had been using - such as Hillross' primary offering, Asgard's PortfolioCare, as well as other AMP and Macquarie Bank offerings.
As the feedback from the trial was positive and there was demand from other advisers within the group for North, Hillross announced at its dealer group conference in January that North would be made available to all its advisers, Humphrey said.
"It's been a great outcome for Hillross advisers to have access to such a great wrap platform but also to have [access to] those capabilities and resources from the AXA business," he said.
Hillross has also adopted the customer relationship management tool Salesforce that AXA licensees have been using internally to manage relationships, and Humphrey said it had improved the efficiency and the productivity of Hillross licensees.
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