30
Special report profeSSional ServiceS
advisers three to four
hours per client to prepare,
Eatock notes.
“With electronic valuation
links, essentially all an
adviser has to do is click
a button,” he says. “This
gives them more time to be
actually servicing clients.”
Another benefit of such
systems is that they typically
give IFAs much better
visibility of their own businesses
than they have
had previously, says Paul
Yates, strategy and business
management director
at 1st the Exchange, a
division of Vertex, which
in turn has been owned
since 2007 by the US private
equity firm Oakhill
Capital Partners.
As advisers are “getting
their heads” around the
Retail Distribution Review
– an effort to boost finan
tax planning
The following companies
supply financial advisory
software:
n IntelliFlow
www.intelliflo.com
n 1st the Exchange
www.1stsoftware.co.uk
n Quay Software
(Capita Group)
www.quaysoftware.co.uk
n Plum Software
www.plumsoftware.co.uk
n JCS www.talkjcs.com
n True Potential
www.tpllp.com
cial advice standards in the
UK, which among other
things is calling for greater
use of feebased rather
than commissionbased
remuneration arrangements
– “people are start
ing to want to understand
their data better, in order
to understand their businesses
better”, Yates adds.
“We are finding our clients
are becoming much
smarter about segmenting
their data, and understanding
what sorts of clients
they have, which is important
if you are having to
start to charge for visits to
clients,” he says.
For those IFAs who
are competing for clients
against the wealth management
arms of banks,
which often have some
very sophisticated customer
relationship management
(CRM) systems in
place, Yates adds, software
systems such as 1st the
Exchange’s Adviser Office
range may also enable them
to “significantly enhance
their CRM proposition”.
SupplierS l Software as a service
Tax no longer taxing
The use of computers
by IFAs to look after clients’
records is, of course,
hardly new. What is new,
within the past 12 to 18
months, though, is the
extent to which this is now
possible using internet
technology, and in particular,
socalled software as
a service (SaaS), to bring
together live data from
various sources, including
fund platforms, and then to
access it around the globe.
This is because individual
advisers’ desktops,
laptops and even, increasingly,
‘notebook’ computers
are able to link up with
the company’s system,
which feeds into a central
hub that, in turn, has links
with other networks that
furnish it with data.
IFAs can take much of the burden out of tax planning
by outsourcing the job to a professional company; the
alternatives of doing research in-house or consulting
product providers are far less cost-efficient
By Daniel JuDge
Tax planning is core to the
job of financial advisers
but the specialist nature of
many aspects of it means
it is beyond many intermediaries
level of expertise.
The options they are left
with are to either hire an
inhouse tax consultant,
which can prove costly,
or make use of services
provided by accountancy
or law firms.
Tony Shah, associate
director, international
division, of London’s
Christchurch Investment
Management, says outsourcing
can often be the
best solution, given the
alternatives are doing your
own research or consulting
product providers.
“In many cases, a life
company may not help
because they are not
licensed to give tax advice,
or in other circumstances
they may provide some
information but with a
caveat that it should not
be used for advice, so its
usefulness is limited at
best. We will usually go to
a firm of accountants and
pay a fee to get tax advice
for a given country.”
l Questions answered
BDO Stoy Hayward is one
of a handful of firms that
has a service dedicated to
INTERNaTIONaL aDVISER [www.international-adviser.com] May 2009
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