SFE insight | Raison d’être – or why?

Anthony Rafferty
Chief Executive
Origo

I would imagine most business people will be familiar with Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’. His premise in the book is that companies need to be able to clearly articulate their purpose – their Why? – to their internal and external stakeholders and customers, if they truly want to be successful.

Origo is fortunate, in that our Why? was established over 30 years ago and has largely remained the same ever since – which is to connect the financial services industry for the benefit of everyone. Through our technology solutions, we have been able to achieve significant efficiencies and cost savings and help to vastly improve service to customers across our industry.

Putting our why into practice

If I take just three examples, to illustrate this.

In 2008, we launched the Transfer Service, which automates the transfer of assets from pensions, as well as ISAs and general investment accounts (GIAs). This service reduced pension transfer times for personal pensions from an average of 50 working days to today’s median average of just 5 calendar days.

Over 150 brands now use Origo’s Transfer Service and we process around 95% of all pension transfers in the market.

We also publish the Origo Transfer Index, an industry recognised data set published quarterly, which tracks the average transfer times for 30 of the leading providers in the market, accounting for around 90% of all transfers through the Origo Transfer Service, who voluntarily allow Origo to publish their data as a way of creating greater transparency, with the aim to help drive up transfer performance across the board.   

More recently, we launched two other industry changing solutions.

The Origo Integration Hub provides a single central integration point for all providers, platforms and software houses serving the financial advice market in the UK. This is offered for key processes, such as customer asset valuation (individual and bulk), remuneration, transaction history, account opening and others.

Outside of the Hub, integration between companies is carried out between individual companies (point-to-point). This has proven to be inefficient, costly and requires ongoing maintenance resources and costs to boot. It also hinders competitiveness in the market, as due to the resource and capital costs involved, each integration is made on the basis of individual business case, which favours established businesses where there is a clear commercial benefit.

Origo Integration Hub helps democratise the process, by enabling businesses to integrate once, with the Hub, and then be connected to any other user for the processes relevant to their business. Hence, smaller and newer companies that might not have met the business case criteria for point-to-point integration are able to integrate with their customers and partners and take their businesses forward.

Currently, over 50 companies use the Hub, covering more than 100 connections, with many more to come in 2024. 

No place for paper-based processes

Addressing paper-based processes is another area where we are making a huge difference. It seems ludicrous that with AI and other digital solutions increasingly a part of financial services, we have processes that are still paper-based. Often these sit in the back-offices of companies, and exist due to legacy resource issues – as well as, sometimes, an ‘if it ain’t broke…’ approach.

One such process is the Letter of Authority, a process required for a customer to give their financial adviser authority to act on their behalf. This must be done for every provider with which they hold a product or investment. The market has grown up so that every provider has a different way of dealing with the process and the industry still largely works on a paper-based system. Customers have to sign numerous pieces of paper which are then posted (or faxed!) to each provider, to be manually processed. This way of working is immensely frustrating for financial advisers, who want to do their best for their clients and get on with the job but can be left waiting for weeks, and sometimes months, before they receive a reply from the various providers.

We built a solution, Unipass Letter of Authority, which digitises the process, removing the analogue processes from start to finish for both providers and advisers, to make the experience more uniform and consistent and give customers the level of service they have become accustomed to outside of financial services.

Leading companies such as Legal and General, Royal London, Aegon, LV= and Aviva are onboard and we expect others to quickly see the light – not least as the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation, introduced in July 2023, applies to the back-office too. Leaving an individual waiting weeks to be able to transfer their assets, potentially causing them to lose money in the process, falls squarely under the Consumer Duty rules.

And, of course, in 2021, our longstanding success and reputation in the market, helped us to win the contract to build the central digital architecture for the Pensions Dashboard Programme.

2024 and the future

So, what of 2024 and the future?  Originally set up and owned by a group of product providers, in 2022 we moved from this multi-ownership to an independent status, backed by private equity house Vespa.

This has not changed our ‘Why?’. In fact, being independent, we now have the ability to be more wide ranging in the solutions we can provide for the financial services market. And we are looking at not only where we can help and better connect our traditional markets, the pensions, investment and advice markets, but also where our technology can be introduced to benefit other areas of our industry.

We can see plenty of opportunities and I am very excited by the prospect that in 2024 and beyond, we can make some significant differences for financial services businesses, helping develop and improve their business processes and better serve their end customers. As they say, watch this space.