Today Platforum recognises the leaders in the retail investment platform market for excellence in the eyes of customers. Platforum awards are unique in that they are based on research and reflect the opinions and experiences of actual investors and financial advisers. This year, there are six Platforum Awards.
Adviser Platform Awards:
Among adviser platforms (investment platforms used by financial advisers), the Best Adviser Platform over £10bn award goes to Transact and the Best Adviser Platform under £10bn award goes to Parmenion. Based on over 8,000 user reviews from financial advisers collected over five years, these platforms have distinguished themselves as excellent in customer service.
“Transact is famous for good service to financial advisers and is praised for being easy to use and for showing a consistently good understanding of adviser businesses. This is the second year running that Transact has been recognised with this award.” Heather Hopkins, Research Director, Platforum
“Parmenion is praised for offering an integrated investment offering into the platform. Advisers tell us they view the firm as a business partner and praise Parmenion for continuing to invest in cutting edge technology solutions to make advisers more efficient in their own businesses. Parmenion gets the highest user reviews across all platforms we track.” Heather Hopkins, Research Director Platforum
Best Platform Partner Award:
It is vital that Fund managers and platforms develop strong working partnerships that support delivering great outcomes for their mutual customers, whether that is advisers or indeed the end investor. Increased regulation, coupled with a desire to continually evolve quality products has led to fund managers relying much more heavily on platforms to provide access to management information and customer insight.
The Best Platform Partner Award goes to FundsNetwork. Based on surveys with sales, marketing and senior management professionals at fund management groups, FundsNetwork was recognised for their proactivity, marketing activities and good quality Management Information.
“We introduced this award for the first time this year because the partnership between the fund groups and the platforms has become increasingly important. FundsNetwork was the clear winner in our survey of leading fund groups for the Platform Partner award. FundsNetwork has worked hard to create stronger relationships with fund managers through their fund partner Access programme, which helps keep fund groups closer to the adviser and end investor that buy their products, and that work has paid off with the fund groups praising FundsNetwork for being easy to work with and responsive to requests.”
Rohit Vaswani, Head of Adviser Distribution Relations, Platforum
Direct Platform Awards:
Over the last four years we have run ongoing ‘roadtesting’ using live accounts with direct platforms to assess what they are like to use from the consumer perspective. We assess the propositions across eight categories which are: brand strength, cost, customer service, content, guidance, investment choice, the mobile proposition and usability.
The Best Direct Platform for Service award goes jointly to Charles Stanley Direct and Hargreaves Lansdown.
“The winners of this award delivered service which was responsive, knowledgeable and consistent. Their staff were extremely familiar with their propositions and had a clear understanding of the requirements of self-directed investors.” Jeremy Fawcett, Head of Direct, Platforum.
The Best Direct Platform for Guidance award goes to Fidelity Personal Investing.
“Fidelity Personal Investing offers clear guidance to a range of ‘investment solutions’ and further help through its high quality online tools and access to specific guidance for retirement planning.” Jeremy Fawcett, Head of Direct, Platforum.
Our overall winner, the Best Direct Platform for 2015, is Hargreaves Lansdown.
“Hargreaves Lansdown scored highly across a number of assessment categories. The usability of the website and platform are good and they offer a strong mobile proposition. Their customer service is consistently excellent and their brand is most recognised by investors in the UK today.” Jeremy Fawcett, Head of Direct, Platforum.