Platforms have risen to the challenge of digitisation, a new report by NextWealth has revealed.
The firm’s latest tech stack report – entitled Paper Trails to Digital Highways: Assessing Digitalisation of Processes for Investment Platforms – found the overall number of processes digitalised across 19 of the 20 platforms surveyed, has risen by 3% from 2022 to 81% this year.
Last year’s report called out those platforms that had more to do to meet growing calls from advisers for better digitisation.
This year’s report showed that across all platforms processes relating to portfolio management, regular withdrawals and income drawdowns are the most digitalised.
Meanwhile, processes relating to orphan customers, death and trusts are the least digitalised.
The least digitalised processes are forms that require multiple signatures. Platforms say these cannot be fully digitalised easily and need a little more thought.
The research said three-quarters (72%) of advisers want to use fully digital platforms. However, there is still a gap in the number who use eSignatures.
It shows 61% of advisers are using eSignatures and the trend is on the upswing, with 13% more advisers reporting they are using eSignatures in the past two years.
NextWealth consulting director Emma Napier said: “Our report shows the largest platforms by assets are among the most digitally enabled. The largest seven platforms by assets are among the top 10 for digitised processes. This challenges the view that larger firms are slow to change and will redeploy project teams accordingly.”
She added: “One of the platforms that scored lower than others last year was Novia. Categorised then as a ‘digital laggard’, Novia has risen to the challenge and made the most progress of all platforms in 2023, with 46% of processes now requiring no signature.
“This is a huge improvement considering in 2022 65% of processes were still paper based. Paper based processes have now been reduced to 28%.”
Novia chief customer officer Lucy Bristow said: “While digital processes have been on the priority list for a while, the report highlighted that we had room to improve support to our advisers and clients when using the platform.
“Following the report, we put together a team of people to review all requirements for digital client sign-off and worked with digital partner providers to ensure these processes more accurately reflect the overall user experience of the Novia platform.
“We now have around 90 processes digitalised: the ones left are where there is a heightened security risk.”
