Cooper Parry Wealth launches new in-house platform, powered by Seccl
Seccl, the Octopus owned embedded investment platform, has been selected by Cooper Parry Wealth, one of the fastest-growing financial planning firms in the UK, to power its new investment platform, ‘CP Accelerate’.
Part of the Cooper Parry group, the UK’s largest accountancy B Corp that has been hailed as ‘the rebel of accountancy’, Cooper Parry Wealth currently manages £1.4 billion of assets on behalf of around 800 families.
The firm has expanded rapidly since its move to a financial planning based approach in 2010. And in 2023 Cooper Parry Wealth completed its first acquisitions, with Future Perfect and Chamberlyns coming on board.
With the introduction of its in-house platform, supplementing a technology-led client portal and a high-quality financial planning service, Cooper Parry Wealth aims to significantly improve client experience and provide operational efficiencies as the firm continues to grow.
To date, the firm has onboarded over 100 family groups and £160 million of assets to CP Accelerate, and expects to have around £300 million of assets on the platform by April 2024. Its new platform will also be one of the first to benefit from the enhanced moneyinfo and Seccl integration, which launches in the next few months.
Since its launch, Cooper Parry’s in-house platform team has seen the average time to complete a client’s end-to-end transfer fall by a week, compared to other platforms. What’s more, thanks to the widespread automation within the system, that same team is now able to handle the vast majority of platform-related queries on its own – allowing clients to see their queries resolved in record time.
The ongoing platform charge will start from 0.15% for the first £2m, tiering down to 0.01% for assets over £10m. The average Cooper Parry Wealth client will save 0.05% in platform charges by moving to CP Accelerate, if a transfer is deemed suitable.
Marc Patterson-Mik, Head of platform operations at Cooper Parry Wealth, said:
“The decision to become our own platform provider was a natural one, as we strive to continually improve our clients’ digital experience and retain our high level of service throughout our growth journey. Our new set-up, powered by Seccl’s modern and future-proof infrastructure, will help us to streamline our internal operations and provide ample opportunity for integration with other systems – not to mention future business transformation opportunities, whether that’s our own mobile apps or the creation of bespoke client onboarding journeys.
“In our experience, development with legacy platforms is rarely a shared or inclusive exercise. But by moving away from the existing retail platform model and working in close collaboration with a modern technology partner like Seccl, we have been able to take greater control over crucial parts of the investment journey and, ultimately, give our clients a better experience at a lower cost.”
David Ferguson, CEO of Seccl added:
“Cooper Parry is a genuinely exciting business, with a maverick, entrepreneurial spirit that has underscored its impressive growth in recent years. Its rapidly scaling wealth business is characteristically ambitious and, with its enthusiastic adoption of technology and obsessive focus on customer service, it looks well set up to achieve on these ambitions in the years to come.
“Across the advice industry, we’re seeing more and more impressive, customer-centric firms grow frustrated with clunky platform processes and the pain they cause for advisers and their clients. We’re excited to track the positive impact of the new CP Accelerate platform, both on Cooper Parry Wealth’s own internal operations and on the overall experience their clients enjoy, and are delighted to be playing a part in this industry growth story.”