While financials and materials dominated trades leading into 2024, the popularity of other sectors like healthcare and information technology followed generational, and even demographic, lines.
The representative working group is lobbying the government for a broader section of study to be eligible for credit within the ‘equivalent degree’ requirement for advisers in the hope that more people will be encouraged to join the profession.
Practifi looks to expand its Australian footprint
Move over Salesforce; Australian wealthtech provider Practifi has announced its plans to expand further into the Australian market following extensive investment into its data-driven wealth management platform.
Practifi is actually powered by Salesforce, but is more specifically built for the wealth management industry. Australia’s wealth management industry is in a state of flux, with regulations, reforms, disruption, competition and dwindling adviser numbers. Despite this, the demand for financial advice has never been higher. That means an adviser’s customer relationship management (CRM) database is a critical piece of the firm. Staying up-to-date on every client and prospect and how best to serve their needs isn’t an easy task. Especially when this data is often spread across a number of platforms.
Practifi’s focus is to solve the dislocation and duplication of data prevalent in financial planning firms owing to the number of software platforms required to service clients. Advisers on average use three wealth management platforms to access financial products: the alternatives range from the big banks to BT Panorama, Macquarie Wrap, HUB24, Netwealth, Commsec, Ausiex, and Praemium. Advisers may also use Xplan to combine numerous data feeds from the bigger platforms to generate statements of advice and investment reports. Salesforce is often used for sales and customer service.
The issue here is that these systems don’t ‘speak’ to each other, meaning that important client data becomes isolated in separate platforms. As a result, business efficiency stalls, client relationships suffer and businesses struggle to scale-up. Built on the world’s leading enterprise cloud, Practifi is safe, trustworthy, and scalable. The platform has a huge list of industry APIs and best-in-class integration partners such as XPLAN.
According to Practifi, its “product suite solves this problem by providing a single, unified workspace for every role in an advisory firm. With rich client views, intelligent automation, sophisticated analytics and a user-friendly platform, Practifi helps advisory firms scale sustainably and build better client relationships.”
President and co-founder Adrian Johnstone said, “People talk about how the advice industry in Australia needs to change, but a lot of this boils down to the technology and the tools that drive it. Financial advice is a technology-enabled industry so this must change for the industry to thrive here. Practifi is not simply an advice or CRM platform; we are an end-to-end business performance optimisation tool.”
Practifi delivers “role-based” applications that manage every role in the firm. This allows each team to access the proper data required for their specific role so that they can make better decisions. The start-up has completed its Series B funding round, raising $24 million. which is being reinvested in developing an Australian-focused platform to revolutionise the industry.
“The advice industry here in Australia has been in turmoil but the firms that have emerged strongest are those with a value proposition that goes well beyond basic transactional advice where adviser success is tied to the performance of the portfolio. Advice businesses with a deep and holistic understanding of clients will thrive, and all others will continue to contract,” commented Johnstone.
Johnstone says the next 12 months will be important for Practifi as the company looks to execute on its global growth strategy and accelerates its vision for the Australian market. He says, “Our strategic focus is on making the market aware of the value of data-driven logic across all roles. This year we will also be launching a comprehensive business intelligence platform, a new app dedicated to supporting M&A and growth activities and many new integrations. We’re excited to power more possibilities for the industry and provide the technology data-driven businesses need to scale and accelerate.”
