Eight jobs your technology has to do, six questions that tell you whether a platform really does them, and an honest account of what fragmentation costs. Written for principals and advisers deciding what to run their firm on.
Not a feature list — the jobs. Judge any platform, ours included, on how well it does these eight and how much of your day each one costs you.
Names, dependants, income, property, documents, every email and call. If an adviser has to check two systems to answer a client question, the record has already failed. This is the foundation — everything else reads from it.
Enquiry to completion, with the stage, the value, and what it is waiting on. The test is whether a principal can see the firm's position without a Monday-morning ring-round.
A digital fact find the client can complete themselves, that prefills from what you already know, and that feeds the case rather than becoming a PDF nobody opens again. Joint applicants each get their own.
Whole-of-market product sourcing plus criteria search — the two are different jobs. Sourcing ranks products on price; criteria answers whether the lender will lend to this client at all.
AML, suitability, vulnerability, Consumer Duty, file review. The technology's job is to capture the evidence as a by-product of doing the work — not to add a second admin task after it.
Chasing, uploading, OCR that reads a payslip or bank statement and maps it onto the case, e-signature, and a vault that survives a file review four years later.
Email and SMS from the firm's own mailbox, a portal the client can log into, and automated progress updates. Most complaints are about silence, not outcome.
Pipeline forecasting, commission reconciliation, adviser performance, and firm health. Without it a principal is running the business on memory.
Most UK brokerages did not choose a fragmented stack. It accumulated — a tool at a time, each one sensible on its own.
CRM, sourcing, e-signature, mailbox, accounting, ID checks — each with its own password, its own bill and its own support queue.
The same client details typed into four systems. Every re-key is a chance to introduce an error that surfaces at offer stage.
Nobody can answer "where is this case?" without opening three tabs, so the answer becomes "I'll find out and call you back".
At file review the trail is spread across an inbox, a shared drive and a spreadsheet. Reconstructing it costs days.
Including us. A platform that cannot answer these plainly is asking you to take its word for it.
Ask whether the fact find, the case, the documents and the suitability letter share one client record. If a piece of client data has to be typed twice, it is several systems.
A nightly CSV export is not an integration. Send an email from the platform and check it appears in your own Outlook Sent folder. Change a case stage and check the report moves.
If evidence capture is a separate screen an adviser has to remember, it will be skipped under pressure — and that is exactly when you need it.
Ask which models, in which region, and whether client documents leave the UK. Ask whether your clients' data trains anyone's model. A vendor who cannot answer plainly has not thought about it.
Most mortgage platforms treat protection as a checkbox. If your firm writes protection, ask to see policy tracking from submission through underwriting to on-risk.
Ask before you sign, not when you leave. Export format, notice period, and who owns the client bank. The answer tells you how the vendor sees the relationship.
Adviser IQ is a single platform rather than a suite. The fact find, the case, the documents, the suitability letter and the report all read the same record, so nothing is typed twice.
FCA-regulated workflows, Consumer Duty monitoring and protection depth are in the product, not on a roadmap. See the CRM →
Mortgage Brain, L&G Ignite, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Didit, with Companies House, the FCA Register, HM Land Registry and ONS data built in. See every integration →
Suitability letters, document reading and case analysis run on Claude models in the AWS eu-west-2 (London) region. Client documents are not shipped abroad to be read. Read the security detail →
Free migration from Smartr365, 360 Lifecycle, Finova, Acre and IRESS Xplan, with parallel running and a named migration lead. How switching works →
Longer-form material on the same subject, free and without a form.
A 30-minute demo using your case types, your lenders, and the stack you run today.