‘People do business with people’: Laurie Jaques speaks plainly
It was a miserable morning when the Fundment Insider sat down with Laurie Jaques, the platform’s Director of Distribution.
But for all the rainfall, and the forecast’s pessimistic promise of more to come, Jaques is optimistic about what the future holds for Fundment, with continued user growth and significant platform developments on the horizon.
“We have built a really good foundation for the year ahead”, says Jaques, something he attributes to Fundment’s early strategy of working to develop good relationships with influential advisers in the sector.
“People do business with people and advisers talk to each other, especially in online forums on Twitter or Facebook’, says Jaques. “So, when we first started, we made a point of contacting advisers to say ‘try our new technology, we think it will make your life a lot easier, but if you need anything fixed at all, we’ll do it right away’. The hope was that Fundment would then spread by word of mouth.”
Jaques acknowledges that such a strategy was risky, but was born of a faith in the underlying technology and a belief that Fundment could make the user’s life much easier.
‘After all, what’s the point of setting up if you can’t back your technology?’, asks Jaques.
A tool, built on a challenge
And by delivering on its early promises of efficiency, whilst incorporating user feedback into the platform, Jaques feels Fundment has cultivated a strong user base and maintains a “great reputation for service and support” that will underpin further user growth in 2023.
Perhaps nowhere is this better reflected than in the roll out of the Advisory Portfolio Management (APM) tool last year.
The idea for the tool, which automates and expedites the process for contacting clients to secure consent for changes to a model portfolio, emerged from conversations with an adviser who challenged Fundment to build the software within six months.
Having been released in October 2022, Jaques suggests that APM has been a “gamechanger for the sector, speeding up the process of investment, driving efficiency and cutting advisers’ costs”, a view echoed by Lucent Financial Planning’s Steven Rowe, who claims Fundment has saved his firm “months of time and significant costs”.
“In 2023 we’ll be looking to unveil version two of the APM software”, says Jaques, enabling users to attach their own documents and videos to correspondence with clients. “There’s real opportunity here”, says Jaques. “40% of the market is currently building its own portfolio models, so we have the chance not only to grow as a business, but also to improve how the industry operates by providing a technological solution to time-consuming administrative functions”.
Further software developments are planned for the year ahead, including support for onshore bonds, junior pensions, cash products and Lifetime ISAs, all developed alongside further improvements to the Adviser Fee Flexibility tool in line with adviser feedback and feature requests.
“I think the integration of Lifetime ISAs are emblematic of Fundment’s approach”, says Jaques. “Even though we’re talking about comparatively small sums in Lifetime ISAs, it’s still an important change. Integrating these onto Fundment would enable advisers to offer a single platform for the whole family. It’s all part of our desire to make life easier for the adviser”.
Migrations, too, will form a key part of the next few months for Fundment. “We’ve developed software to make it easier to move assets onto the platform,” says Jaques.
In the months ahead, Fundment plans to further refine the platform’s bulk migration tools, utilising the platform’s existing electronic transfer gateway integration and bulk uploads features. “We’re talking about a system that will expedite a lot of the administrative effort that comes with migrating assets.”
The future, then, looks bright for Fundment and, after a decidedly up-and-down season for Jaques’s football team, West Ham, he admits ‘“it does make it quite nice to come to work and be part of a team on the up”.