The Table shows the platform industry has £312.7bn AUM. This is a drop on last year, which is undoubtedly due to fewer responses from this year’s survey, as platforms including 7IM (2015: £9.5bn AUM) and Aviva (2015: £6.7bn) failed to respond to this year’s survey.
As with any Money Management survey, the form is sent out to be completed within a month – and, despite numerous deadline extensions, some platforms still failed to return it on time. We hope to see all respondents back in next year’s survey.
Covering all options
This year’s survey covers 19 different platforms and looks at a range of options. Table 1 also details the total AUM the number of clients and the average per account – giving a rough idea of the typical client on each platform as well as the client retention rate. Cofunds remains the largest platform in terms of assets, with £76.9bn, and FundsNetwork runs close behind with £62.7bn.
When it comes to the number of clients, Hargreaves Lansdown’s Vantage platform has the highest number of clients, with an estimated 813,000 as at 30 April 2016. This is unsurprising, as it is a D2C platform with 90 per cent of clients non-advised. The average pot for the platform is also one of the lowest among all respondents, with an average £70,603, which is much lower than the average £168,178 across all in Table 1.
As with previous years, many providers do not specify exactly where all their money has come from, so it is unclear how much money is held with institutional clients.
Table 2 looks into platform access, giving an idea of the type of client on the platform. All platforms are available for advisers, except survey newcomer Charles Stanley Direct and Vantage, which are both available on a D2C basis.
While there has been a rise of D2C availability in the market (10 out of 19 survey respondents allow direct clients, one up from last year), advisers still have a wide range available tailored to them.
There is still some debate over how many platforms advisers should be using, and whether one is enough for their clients. For Steve Owen, head of proposition at AXA Wealth, there is no one answer.
“And quite rightly so, it depends entirely on an adviser’s business, how they run it and the types of clients they choose to work with,” he says.
Pros and cons of the single platform
There are pros and cons to using just one platform. Alistair Wilson, head of retail platform strategy at Zurich, says that while many see this as a positive, it may be a necessity. “However, managing a large number of platforms in a business will be challenging. This will increase the risk for advisers and, ultimately, for clients with assets held on them.
