Centrepoint announces plans for new platform

During its half-yearly results webinar this week, Centrepoint Alliance announced a partnership with FNZ to launch a new platform.

Expected to launch in Q3 of this calendar year under the brand “IconiQ”, Centrepoint chief executive John Shuttleworth stressed that despite the business developing its own platform, advisers will still be able to use their preferred platform.

“One point I just want to reiterate is that Centrepoint is an open architecture business and our commitment is to be open architecture,” Mr Shuttleworth said.

“We provide advisers with a broad choice of platforms and investment managers and have a very expansive approved product list.”

However, Mr Shuttleworth said that even “modest penetration” in the Australian platform market could “drive significant funds under advice”.

“If you look at the Plan for Life data, their latest releases, they estimate [the] platform market to be a $975 billion market,” he said.

“Our funds under advice and the $67 billion is a subset of that because most of the money is on platform.”

If the new IconiQ platform were to reach just 1 per cent penetration within the Centrepoint network, Mr Shuttleworth said it would drive around $675 million, while 5 per cent penetration would be over $3 billion.

When considering the size of the platform market as a whole, he said a 1 per cent share of it would be just under $10 billion.

While Centrepoint has not yet disclosed the specific pricing for the platform, with Mr Shuttleworth stating more information would be given closer to the launch date, he did note that it would have “competitive pricing” on launch.

“It’ll be a low administration fee, obviously have aggregated pricing for household groups and capped fee structures,” he said.

“We’ll have an extensive range of managed accounts along with managed funds and equities.”

Mr Shuttleworth added that working with FNZ, which had most recently partnered with CFS to develop its CFS Edge platform that launched in August 2023, was in large part due to its experience and scale.

“They have over $2 trillion in assets under management around 30 countries, [and] they’ve done 650 implementations,” he said.

“Centrepoint Alliance has a large community and significant scale. So the partnership makes complete sense.”

Overall, the CEO said the platform would meet advisers’ needs and help them provide the best quality service to clients.

“It’s a good time to be an adviser and it’s a good time to be at Centrepoint. So we’re very positive about our market business momentum, very positive conditions for advisers,” Mr Shuttleworth said.