Söderberg & Partners Wealth Management sees itself integrating well into the other parts of the UK financial services tech stack, its chief executive Nick Raine says.
Raine heads up the Swedish wealth giant's platform business in the UK, aiming to be "the best platform partner to IFAs in the UK".
Söderberg saw an opportunity and believes it was well placed to tap into the £7trn assets of the UK market, according to Raine.
"I think the opportunity is the size of the prize,"
The firm also aims to not just come in as an aggregator or consolidator.
"I think those words get used quite widely," Raine said. "We're not going in buying 100% of a firm, it's buying a proportion of a firm, and then saying to them ‘we still want you to grow'."
If the advice firm has got opportunity and ambition, then Söderberg will "almost put you on steroids to succeed," according to Raine.
"We'll give you access to funding and technology to really help your business grow."
Consolidators tend to buy businesses that either want to be fully sold or want to step away from the market, but they then fold them into their way of working, he added.
"What we want to do is keep them independent, so they have still got their own choices and do use whatever systems and platforms they want."
Raine continued: "We can bring a system and setup that helps them really grow and then gives a better client outcome."
Söderberg sees itself as integrating well into other parts of the financial services tech stack.
"Our platform has the opportunity to be a building block within that wider piece."
He added that the firm has got several other discussions going on around other tools that it wants to integrate into, including tools it wants to pull in from Sweden.
"In terms of the wider piece, where we fit into that is the real key element," Raine continued. "We want to be a platform that drives real efficiency to help advisers to run their businesses more easily."
The reason why Söderberg partnered with Seccl as its model B provider is because it's a paperless platform, so people don't have to "waste their time" getting a signature, Raine highlighted.
"I don't mean cheating either by getting a DocuSign signature, this is genuinely no signatures required."
A fresh start
Raine noted that as Söderberg joined the UK market from the Nordics, it has no legacy issues.
"We have yet to build a legacy over here in the UK, so we haven't got to spend a lot of time trying to deal with old processes and reevaluating them and addressing them for the new world."
"It's a clean piece of piece of paper, so we want to try and make the right decisions," he added. "It's taking that look at how do you drive those real efficiencies with none of those legacy issues."
The key for the platform is driving real efficiency to help advisers to run their businesses more easily, Raine highlighted.
"I think we've got that ability to really drive data moving through systems to," he added.
Raine then highlighted its integration with Plannr as the back-office provider for its preferred tech stack, which is "going to be true two-way integration".
"That's not kind of the stuff that you or I have seen previously."
Another aim for the platform is to get to a point where the platform is invisible so that it is all happening from the back office, Raine said.
"Everyone asks you ‘do you?' but no one asks ‘how?'," he added. "We want to be the platform that can do things better and think about handling things in a different way."
One of the examples Raine gave was the way cash gets managed on Söderberg's system.
He explained that it works by instant deposits, so the money lands immediately like a bank transfer.
"If you look in most platforms in the industry that happens overnight at best, and normally two or three days, because you're sat in a processing queue."
"I think speed of change will be our differentiator," Raine concluded.
