The challenge:
Creating capacity for growth
The Investment Quorum (IQ) team have big ambitions. The firm wants to increase assets under management significantly over the next three years, while staying true to the personal, advice-led approach its clients value – and without adviser or administration capacity becoming a brake on growth.
Like many established advice firms, IQ’s technology environment had grown over time into a patchwork of systems, processes and platforms. A core CRM, multiple platforms, spreadsheets, email threads and workaround processes all played a role in keeping the business moving.
As a result, too much time was being spent on administration, putting increasing pressure on adviser and support capacity as the business grew. Even relatively simple processes could involve a lot of manual work: producing client review packs meant pulling information from different sources, while teams were chasing providers for updates, reconciling data across systems and manually tracking progress on tasks that should have been visible from the outset. IQ needed to find a way to connect its existing systems, automate more of the work happening between them and free up more of the team’s time to service existing clients – and new ones.
Average digital onboarding time
Fastest digital onboarding time
The solution:
Technology that fits around IQ
IQ wanted to shape its technology around the way its business works, rather than shape the business around the limitations of a platform.
Seccl’s APIs gave the team the flexibility to achieve this. By connecting Seccl’s platform data and functionality with IQ’s wider technology stack, it could build its own adviser and client experience on top: The result is ‘Helix’ – IQ’s custom-built financial planning and client app.
Helix connects IQ’s Notion-based back office with Seccl, so information the firm already holds about a client can move between the systems without being re-keyed. It also brings live account, portfolio and investment data from Seccl directly into the front-end experience.
In other words, the platform is no longer a siloed system – or the gatekeeper of client data that IQ should control. Instead, data can move freely between systems to create a more joined-up experience for advisers and clients.
We simply couldn’t have built Helix in this way without Seccl’s embedded custody model and the flexibility of its APIs. [...] That gives us the freedom to design the experience around how our advisers and clients actually want to work, rather than around the underlying platform.
The impact:
Built for growth
Helix is already taking a lot of the manual work out of processes that used to absorb time across IQ.
Making onboarding much faster
What was once a paper-heavy process involving wet signatures, ID certification, post and manual account opening is now a digital journey that takes seven to eight minutes on average – and can even be completed in as little as two.
Clients receive a link to Helix with information IQ already holds in its back office and on the platform pre-populated. They can set up access, check their details, provide any additional documents and update out-of-date information themselves, all within a secure environment using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and passkeys.
Taking the admin out of everyday tasks
IQ works on a ‘capture once, use many times’ principle: if it already holds information about a client, it shouldn’t have to keep entering it again elsewhere.
Additional investments are a good example. IQ sends clients an ‘additional contribution letter’ confirming that their money has been received, where it will be invested and providing the relevant illustration.
Previously, the team had to confirm receipt of the funds manually – which could take several hours or even days – before creating the letter and generating a new illustration through the relevant platform.
Helix now handles most of that automatically. Because Helix and Seccl already hold the client, account, contribution and investment details, Helix can use Seccl’s illustration API to generate the illustration, create the document, send it through IQ’s approval process for adviser and client acceptance and store the approved version. The same approach applies during onboarding. Helix can open multiple wrappers at the same time and use Seccl’s API to generate the illustrations across them automatically.
Moving beyond the traditional review pack
IQ carries out around 500–600 client reviews each year. Previously, advisers would generate a review pack from information held in Notion, then visit separate investment platforms, produce reports and combine the different outputs into one document.
Helix removes much of that work. Advisers can work with live information and take clients through their financial position interactively, rather than preparing a bespoke snapshot ahead of every meeting.
Helix’s Mirror Mode lets advisers view the same information their client sees in Helix, so they can work through it together during a review. Because that information is live and already available in the app, IQ no longer needs to assemble the same bespoke review pack in advance.
Bringing investments into the wider financial picture
Helix also brings investments held through Seccl together with the rest of the information IQ holds about a client.
Portfolio accounts, holdings, units and investment performance can sit alongside property, cash, income, expenditure, protection and other investments. IQ can also perform its own performance calculations and present investment portfolios (including their own fund data and portfolio allocation information) alongside the client’s other assets.
For advisers and clients, that means a more complete, up-to-date view of the client’s finances in one place.
Taken together, those changes give IQ more capacity to grow without administration having to grow at the same rate – and give its advisers and administrators more time to spend on clients.
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