Welcome to the October Adviser Update. 

Our flagship adviser event in London

I would like to encourage all readers to sign up to our flagship adviser event in London on Wednesday 21 October. We are encouraging all advisers, paraplanners and administrators from across the UK to join us. I will present the new Transact strategy to make financial planning easier and enable agentic AI processes for advice firms. There will also be guest speakers including Louise Cooper and Philip Calvert. But most importantly, there will be time for advisers to network and to share best practice related to technical financial planning and technology adoption. Ultimately advisers learn more from their peers than platforms broadcasting to advisers! Visit our events page to view and enrol for upcoming events

Raising our game on personal service

Through one lens, I am delighted with our service levels. Turnaround times are good, front-line staff are more experienced than at any time since I joined Transact and increasing the level of proactive engagement with advisers remains an area of focus for us. However, through another lens, it is clear we can do better. As regulation evolves and risks change, we have had to strengthen some of our controls and requirements. While these changes are important, we recognise that they can cause frustration. We need to continue evolving how we apply these requirements and how we communicate them to you, whilst remaining open to making sensible improvements where we can. This is a priority for us to get right and make Transact easy to do business with.

Making it easier to recommend Transact

We are pleased to confirm that the Transact platform has achieved an AKG rating of “A (Superior)” for Overall Financial Strength. The “A (Superior)” rating is the highest rating that has been issued in the platform sector. Our rating will now appear via Defaqto making it easier for advisers to select Transact. We are also engaging with all comparison tool providers on how they incorporate cash interest and we are excited to share positive progress in the comparison tool update. 

Regulatory change: ISA reforms and Budget speculation

You can be confident that Transact will deliver and support you on the pension and ISA changes due next year. We have an adviser support campaign in place over the coming months, starting in this edition we have included an article on the proactive steps you can take to manage the impact of the ISA reforms. We have reports to help you identify high cash holdings and take actions. Some actions related to investment strategy changes can be quick to implement but others including new Cash ISA applications can take longer. Please act well in advance of the April 2027 deadlines. We have also written an article to help you stay ahead of the Budget and speculation related to CGT changes.

Further integration with Intelliflo to support advisers

Over the coming years we will launch new APIs and transform the level of integration between Transact and other adviser systems. I am delighted to announce this month that we have upgraded our Contributions & Withdrawals App on Intelliflo (IO). This includes a new feature ‘Transact C&W Sync’ which goes beyond identifying differences and allows you to push contributions and withdrawals data into IO. We have piloted this new feature with advisers with excellent feedback. We have also developed material to help advisers with the IO – Transact account opening journey. Please reach out to us if you are an IO user looking for further efficiencies with Transact.

If you have time, please complete the quarterly Platforum Adviser Survey to give your views on the effectiveness of the platforms you use and you can enter a prize draw to win one of four £100 amazon or John Lewis vouchers.

Thank you for your continued support.