Aviva was named Best Platform for Advisers at the Professional Adviser Awards 2025. Al Ward, pictured left, collects the trophy.
Aviva is the winner of the Best Platform for Advisers category for the 2025 Professional Adviser Awards.
In this interview, Aviva head of retail adviser proposition Al Ward delves into how the award winning platform has prioritised improvements based on advisers needs and why it will continue to push for "customer clarity and fairness" in the market.
What have been your priorities and significant achievements in terms of the development of your adviser platform over the past 12 months?
Aviva priorities remain consistent and focus on delivering the best possible service for advisers and their clients across all our touchpoints, we believe we have the broadest adviser support model in the market with over 100 people involved, from business development managers to distribution support and platform adoption specialists, plus our specialist investment business development management team and more.
The feedback we get tells us we are moving in the right direction, and our adviser net promoter scores have increased 34 points since Q2 2023. Our customer telephone NPS has also increased to 48% in the year to date which really reflects the hard work by everyone at Aviva. We appreciate the feedback we get from engaging with advisers, and this really helps prioritise our improvements.
We've listened to advisers' needs and made 170 improvements to the platform alone and more to our contact service offer – we don't stand still.
Some more notable developments include delivering a fully platform-integrated Junior ISA product with extremely attractive 0% platform fee for any customer with an adviser. No other accounts need to be held with Aviva and we hope this will support efficient tax planning, encouraging the next generation of customers to invest for the longer term.
How have you sought to meet adviser needs and respond to feedback?
We work closely with advisers to understand their needs over three key areas – features that support advice outcomes, improvements to the overall experience to make services more efficient, and fixing bugs so existing services run smoothly. This enables a clear understanding of needs driving the prioritisation of investment and change within the platform.
Valuable feedback such as this led to the launch of our Client Asset Transition Service which utilises robotic automation processes. This moves clients at scale quickly and efficiently, reducing risk and improving customer outcomes. Advisers can use the full end-to-end transfer service or modular elements to suit their needs. The automated robotic processes remove re-keying, show which customers can move easily, deliver customer packs with required documentation, and automate apply services from one data source. We plan to deliver further upgrades this year.
Platforms run extremely complex processes and hundreds of thousands of trades. Inevitably things don't always go to plan. Where we identify challenges or where advisers tell us things don't go as expected we pride ourselves on putting that right and taking action to ensure there is no adviser or customer loss. Our specialists focus on making sure these are dealt with accurately.
How have you demonstrated thought leadership and looked to improve customer outcomes?
We continue to take a strong stance on value and the issue of hidden costs, placing a keen focus on the transparency of our charging model. In Q4 last year we removed trading fees for exchange traded instruments held within models following adviser and discretionary manager feedback that these were having an adverse effect on the performance of model portfolios. This means we have further simplified our charging structure. We maintain a keen focus on pricing transparency and will continue to push for customer clarity and fairness in the market.
This article was produced in partnership with Aviva.
