Abi Hortin, Implementation Specialist, Plannr Technologies Limited

Plannr launched to the UK financial services market at the start of 2024 and has been changing the face of backoffice software. Firms are now adopting this CRM software which is designed to be‘ beautifully simple’. An intuitive and easy to use tool, Plannr has taken away the woes of financial planners burdened by regulatory requirements, and the frustrations of working with archaic processes and platforms. How have they achieved this?

In my early career I worked for a niche pension administration firm, a SIPP and SSAS provider, and back-office systems were no more than a collection of spreadsheets and a mountain of paper files with file check notes rubber banded to the front, stacked on managerial desks ready to painstakingly and manually check off one transaction at a time. As I progressed through a number of roles and firms, from large private banking organisations through to the IFA world, back-office software began to play an important part in a busy office environment and we wrestled with gathering crucial client information from all the many places it had been stored, to save it more locally, and obtain a single source of truth for our clients.

Gone were the stapled sheets inside the paper file front cover with the roughly photocopied page 2 from the factfind, we now scanned the paper factfind and saved it to a mysterious piece of file storage software that sat on our computers alongside the back-office CRM. If someone had mistyped a date of birth, we could open the scanned factfind and double-check it! We could also log on to a platform provider and look at our client data there, rebalance portfolios, instruct new business, and then head back to our back-office CRM to enter the dates, times, notes and tasks saying what we had done and what we were still waiting for from each of the providers. The hum of the photocopier became a thing of the past. It felt like leaps and bounds had been made and we watched with glee as the office movers wheeled out the now redundant metal filing cabinets that lined the walls. We were paperless!

Innovation continued and back-office software providers realised that, ideally, you would be able to link up your client’ s personal information with their investments, so they bolted on the ability to see that plan data inside the CRM. Adviser tools also began to be bolted on so it was

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