INTRODUCTION
Dear Adviser,
Welcome to June’s Adviser Update.
I’ve been in my new role as CEO for 3 months now and I’m more excited than ever about the prospects for Transact and the financial advice sector. As I hope you know, I’m committed to our existing strategy to make financial planning easier. Our priorities remain personal service, digitalisation and integrations. Your support continues to drive our performance with more transfers in and fewer transfers out each month. Thank you – we don’t have a business without you.
As part of our digitalisation programme, we released the ability to instruct pension crystallisations via the website. This includes various drawdown types (partial, top up and phased) determined based on the inputs you enter. This new functionality has already proved very popular since our mid-May release date. More detail is provided in article 2 below.
Our developers are becoming more experienced at digitalisation changes so the pipeline of digital enhancements continues even as we allocate more developers to integrations and API development. In our June release we have just launched online family linking, making it easier for you to link family groups and access potentially lower portfolio charges. We will also make the process of rebalancing more efficient with up to five automatic reattempts at rebalances. This will benefit advisers and third party discretionary managers using the platform.
Our integrations programme is not just about launching new APIs or integrations. It is also about helping you implement a range of process efficiencies. As a result, we are launching mini Transact integrations events with specific back-office (or CRM) providers. We will start with Xplan and intelliflo events and further details are provided in article 3 below.
In last month’s adviser update I touched on the importance of cyber security and multi-factor authentication (MFA). We have seen a significant increase in the number of advisers, secondary users, super users and end investors using MFA. Thank you for embracing security and getting ahead of our plans to make this functionality compulsory later in the year.
I wanted to bring to your attention another security issue: cheque fraud. It’s no surprise to anyone that letters to financial institutions may contain cheques of high value, hence they are a target. We therefore urge you and your clients not to send us cheques in the post. The chance of a cheque being intercepted is just too great. It’s best not to take that risk. There are much safer (and faster) ways to send clients’ money to Transact. Most inflows are now via bank transfer and direct debit – out of the reach of organised crime.
This month Mark Fenlon, our Head of Technical Services wrote a piece published in Money Marketing on improvements that could be made to the LISA. Definitely worth a read here. Meanwhile our technical articles in this update focus on pensions and gifting. I encourage you to take a read as they may give you some insights or ideas that could help your clients.
- A study in gifting – too late to change after death? in article 8.
- Investment Bonds – topping up versus a new policy in article 9.
- Salary sacrifice – is change on the horizon? in article 10.
Please call our direct technical line if you want to discuss any of these articles in more detail on (020) 7608 5330 or email technical_direct@integrafin.co.uk.
As part of our focus on Consumer Duty, we have put more support in place to help service our mutual clients with vulnerabilities. We can provide large print, audio and braille for clients as needed. Please contact your client service team if you have clients who would benefit from this support now or in the future.
We would appreciate you sharing your views in industry surveys. The first is the 2025 Schroders UK Platform awards. If you think we’ve helped your business this year, we’d be very grateful if you could consider giving us your vote, which will take no longer than 3 to 5 minutes to complete. The second is the quarterly Platforum survey. This rolling quarterly survey helps us benchmark our service versus our competitors to ensure we continue to provide the best service we can. Completing the survey should take 5 to 10 minutes and, on completion, allows you to download a free copy of Platforum’s Choosing an Adviser Platform report, which supports platform selection and due diligence. In addition, you will be eligible to enter a prize draw to win one of four £50 Amazon vouchers
Thank you to everyone who came to our Connect event in Leeds on 4 June, it was great to see you all. While we have a short break before Connect events resume in October, you can attend one of our smaller, more personal breakfast events to meet your regional BDM and ASM, as well as other advisers in your local area. A full list of events and joining instructions can be found here. Please do join us!
Kind regards,
Tom Dunbar
Chief Executive Officer
1. Introduction
2. Transact Online (TOL) – Recent enhancements
3. Integrations – mini-events
4. Trusts – the new business process
5. Overseas fund regime
6. Successions planning update – employee ownership trusts
7. Transact – BlackRock MPS update from Ben Roberts (MPS Manager)
8. A study in gifting – too late to change after death?
9. Investment bonds – topping up verses new policy
10. Salary sacrifice – is change on the horizon?
11. Interest on cash
12. Transact events 2025