Infocus integrates brokerage with CRM

The Platformplus software currently supports the Infocus network, which was around 150 advisers late last year according to the ifa top 50 dealer group survey, as well as a further 150 through external arrangements.

Infocus chief executive Rod Bristow told ifa the system had been developed “by advisers, for advisers”, and would look to incorporate a variety of upcoming Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) requirements including opt-in and fee disclosure statement generation.

“It came out of an existing financial planning practice and has evolved to support the dealer groups,” he said.

“With FOFA coming in we’ve been giving a lot of thought to what needs to change, what we need to do to be compliant with FOFA regulations, but at the same time need to be able to operate as advisers.

“With those two guiding principles we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about system architecture and what are the main points of integration.”

The system integrates brokerage, CRM, advice generation, and now it also integrates FOFA compliance, he said.

“If you choose to use the full version of the system the brokerage data is a pretty powerful way of generating advice and generating fee disclosure notices pretty easily,” he added.

Infocus has been working closely with its broker, EasyDealer, and EasyDealer data is now inside of Platformplus, he said.

Bristow said the group uses several investment platforms and maintains an open architecture approved product list. All of those platforms are data fed into Platformplus so advisers using any of those platforms will have up-to-date investment performance reporting available via Platformplus.