Iress’ Xplan continues to dominate the financial planning software market with a multitude of uses, despite newer players battling for a piece of the pie.
Netwealth’s 2024 AdviceTech Buyer’s Guide has emphasised the strong hold that Xplan has over the financial advice industry.
The report, based on research conducted by Newealth and CoreData over the last two years surveying over 350 advice firms, unpacked advice firms’ adoption of various technologies. It discovered that the usage of Xplan for several purposes has largely risen across the board.
Xplan remains as the main supplier of financial planning and modelling software at 62 per cent adoption. Beyond Microsoft Excel and Word, other key software players include AdviserLogic and Midwinter at 9 per cent respectively, and Plutosoft at 5 per cent.
Usage of Xplan for cash flow, accounting and budget aggregation grew from 40 per cent in 2022 to 54 per cent in 2023, representing a “strong upward trend over the previous four years”, the report noted.
Over one in three advice businesses (35 per cent) also use Xplan for cloud-hosted online document storage and sharing service, Netwealth discovered, up from 28 per cent in 2022.
It continues to be the dominant provider for customer relationship management (CRM) at 51 per cent adoption. The report also observed a strong proportion of advice practices adopting solutions from Plutosoft (13 per cent) and Worksorted (18 per cent).
Additional usages of Xplan include email campaign and newsletter management (29 per cent), investment tool research (28 per cent), off-platform asset management (30 per cent), and online fact find (36 per cent).
However, the software’s significant adoption has not come without criticism. Earlier this year, several financial advisers expressed their frustrations with Xplan. Advisers told Money Management they felt it was “clunky” and in need of improvement, but feel constrained to use it as smaller players may be more intuitive but did not yet necessarily include all the vital features.
Jaimie Ramsey, founder and principal consultant at Advice Business Consulting, said in February: “The challenge with Xplan is that it’s been around for a very long time, and you’ve really got to know how to use it and how to make it work for your business.
“[Xplan] doesn’t necessarily interact with other software as well as we would like. I think people see Xplan, to some degree, as a necessary evil, and the prices are certainly going up.”
According to Iress, the software holds approximately 60 per cent market share and has 38,000 users.
Earlier this month, Iress announced Xplan co-founder Jason Hoang will step down from his role as trading and market data chief executive. Hoang has been with the firm for 23 years, primarily as managing director for Asia which he held for more than 20 years in Singapore.
He was promoted to the trading and market data CEO role in April 2023. In light of his departure, Geoff Rogers was appointed as chief executive of trading and market data. Rogers joined Iress in 2022, most recently overseeing its South Africa and Canada division.
