Financial planning group Storm Financial will undergo a major restructure of its research business to accommodate the group’s continued growth.
The group’s research business, Storm Financial Research, was originally created to support Storm Financial with research and financial systems, with the pairing of both groups giving Storm Financial a growth of 1,425 per cent in the past three years. The impressive growth has prompted the company to re-brand Storm Financial Research to service a much larger number of clients and advisers.
Under the re-branding, Storm Financial Research has been renamed Ignite Financial Systems & Research. The exercise is being undertaken so the entity can offer its front-end software systems and research/financial planning tools directly and via joint ventures to the financial planning market.
Ignite Financial Systems & Research’s newly appointed chief executive officer Michael Fenech said it was early days, though if he was to undertake joint ventures with another party the type of groups Ignite would align itself with would include platform owners, unit trust registries and other groups that “sit behind us in the value chain”.
“There is nothing concrete there. I mean, if you look at the entire value chain there are a whole lot of steps in the process from the original client to the fund manager at the other end. And what we’re saying is that if we met another party that had the same strength in other areas and there was a logical synergy, then we’d be happy to look at things like JVs [joint ventures] and, really, any partnership approach that gave a better value proposition,” Fenech said.
He said Storm Financial would not be affected by the re-branding, with the financial planning group and its 36 advisers fitting into the new research structure as a formal client.
“Storm Financial will become a formal client. At the moment, research is basically a department of Storm Financial. Going forward, there will be a formal separation and there will be contractual obligations that Ignite will have to meet with its client, Storm Financial.”
In terms of new developments on the horizon for the newly formed Ignite Financial Systems & Research, Fenech said: “We’ve got a development program in place to coincide with the re-branding, but there’s no major new release of a new component. But in July our next scheduled release will be a big upgrading of the software suite of programs that we have.”
Fenech steps in to replace Emmanuel Cassimatis, Storm Financial Research’s former chief executive officer. Cassimatis will continue as chief executive officer of Storm Financial’s planning business, and will become a director of Ignite Financial Systems & Research.
