Advicefront: The Platform for Financial Advisors with Their Clients in Mind

Advicefront is a London-based technology company that is developing a behind-the-scenes management platform built for both advisors and their clients so they can engage better in financial planning. It is split into three modules that can be used separately. Onboard is already available and helps with the first tasks advisers have when welcoming new clients, such as fact-finding, risk profiling, client agreements and digital signatures. A second product – due in autumn – will help advisers build financial plans for their clients, while a third is being launched shortly after to assist with execution.

I spoke to Jose Supico, CEO and co-founder of Advicefront, who started his career working in private banking. Later, Jose set up the first fee-based advisory firm in southern Europe with the support of Dimensional Fund Advisors. It was during this time that Jose found that the tools used by advisors were inappropriate.

“I had the idea of creating sort of a robo advisor. But then one of our investors, who was the head of Dimensional in London, opened my eyes and said that , when it comes to their money, people want a human involved.”

Thus, the idea for a B2B white-label platform for financial advisors was born. Jose says that since Advicefront is focused on the end-user, they consider themselves to be a B2B2C company.

Andre Costa, CTO and cofounder of the company, also provides product management. Jose describes him as follows:

“Our CTO and co-founder is a product guy. He started as a web designer and now he is a full-stack developer, but his passion is in product development, so I think we have a pretty good product-management system in place.”

Working within tough regulations in the UK

Jose believes that the UK market is much more heavily regulated than that in the US. There are more types of tax structure and tax record and these are more complex. However, Jose sees advantages in these tough regulations—they solve a number of problems and, because of this, other countries are following the UK’s lead.

“In our particular position as a company, I think [the tough regulations we navigate] could give us a certain advantage in terms of entering the US if there are those regulatory changes. We will be in a good position to give something to the advisors that they might need all of a sudden if there are big regulatory changes.”

On competition in the UK, Jose says many of Advicefront’s competitors are focused on pushing their products or on the dynamics of financial markets, rather than financial planning, client outcomes, and personalizing the client’s investments.

The Advicefront platform targets individual savings accounts (ISAs) and independent financial advisors that don’t have the scale and the technology to build in-house.

“We also work with networks that do have the scale to have systems in place, processes, etc. In the UK, these networks take on the regulatory risks for the partner. So it is a good way for networks that have a very scattered client base to have the systematic processes in place to help them monitor their base more accurately.”

The Advicefront platform is popular for its risk-management tool. However, the company’s clients may use it to give more value to end-users, streamline their processes, and make their advice more efficient and cheaper.

“In the UK, the regulated advice market allows advisers to give full advice, which involves a great deal of fact-finding and research into your client’s needs and goals. The adviser can then execute and manage the investments on their client’s behalf, or a client can decide to manage their own money. There is also the third way, which is execution-only, whereby a client can be directed to a robo-adviser and be offered a simple selection of products based on the client’s risk profile. Now the FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] is starting to explore this type of simplified advice and streamlined advice as legislation, but it is still undefined.”

What makes Advicefront different

To give advice, advisors have to collect a lot of information about their clients. To enable advisors in this regard, the Advicefront platform gives end-users tools to upload documents, fill out fact-finds and risk questionnaires, and set up payments, contracts, letters of authority, etc.