Other implications
Back to Facebook. Much of what everyone was upset about was the tech giant doing exactly what it said it was going to do – share your data in a way you had agreed to with app developers. Where Facebook went wrong, at least in part, was that it didn’t read to the end of the story and police those developers, leading to the current accusations that some ended up being straight out of central casting for Russian bad guys. Unpicking what was expected (if sometimes iffy) practice and what was genuine malfeasance has become very difficult in the hullabaloo.
So what do we learn from all of this? I think everyone needs to do some things differently when these situations come about. This is a good time to talk about it, because we have two major platforms hitting their replatforming live dates in May 2018: Aegon will move its Cofunds retail book on to the upgraded version of its ARC platform (powered by GBST) early in the month, and with a following wind Ascentric will switch on its new Bravura-powered kit a few weeks later.
Before all this happens, here’s my potted five-point plan:
1. Remember replatforming is brutally difficult, even on a good day. As I’ve said too many times, imagine changing a car engine while you’re driving it around a racetrack.
2. Even a successful replatforming doesn’t mean that the platform will be error-free from day one. If you don’t like the car analogy, think of it as putting up a huge office block. You get the edifice up, with heat and light and loos that work and stuff, but you have a list of snagging as long as your arm, and you have to work your way down that list. There will be considerable snagging lists for both Aegon and Ascentric. The thing with platforms is that there is no victimless snagging – everything affects an adviser or a client in one way or another.
3. Advisers – you’ll be getting lots of emails with details of new processes and procedures. Don’t ignore them. You need to engage with all this stuff so that you too can work out the difference between defects and new ways of doing things.
4. Platforms – you have to make sure resources are in place to hunt and kill defects as they are found. That will be bilateral work with you and your outsourced tech supplier. Where advisers raise issues you have to acknowledge them, make sure they get on to the appropriate list – either major defect, snagging, or ‘needs better communication’ – and then close the loop by communicating the resolution back to advisers, especially the adviser who raised it.
