Was 2018 the year that broke life companies' platform dominance?

Tough year for the sector

Tom Ellis
clock • 3 min read

2018 was a tough year for the adviser platform sector as a whole but, asks Tom Ellis, amid the general suffering, are net-flow figures suggesting a shift in the balance of power among the most popular players?

Aviva recently published its net platform flows for 2018 and they did not make for pleasant reading - net business dropped from £6.2bn in 2017 to just £3.8bn in 2018. This was a year in which the business struggled to get to grips with a multitude of issues on the new platform it transferred all advised clients to and launched last January, and there is hardly a better measurement by which to judge how in-vogue a platform is with advisers than its net flows data. Let's not be too quick to pass judgement, however - according to Fundscape figures, net sales for the sector as a whole in ...

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