Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms are likely to dominate software offerings in 2013, according to Rubik Wealth.
The software development company said industry concerns about compliance mean the new regulations will be the focus of application changes sector-wide for the next 18 months.
"The way things look at the moment, I anticipate that we'll be doing FOFA-related releases for probably another 18 months," said Wayne Wilson, Rubik's managing director of wealth, with immediate responsibility for COIN.
"I think it's only once people start actually having to comply with the detail of the law that they'll find various bits and pieces that they want software to do, to try and take as much labour out of compliance as possible," Mr Wilson told InvestorDaily.
The recent Investment Trends 2012 Financial Planning Software Report found that leading application developers focused on FOFA compliance in their software updates throughout last year.
Rubik's COIN software was one of three leading applications that implemented client service package models to provide data for fee disclosure statement production and "best interests" test compliance in its Coin Office 4.0 software.
The software release was COIN's first significant tranche of FOFA compliance tools, with Mr Wilson noting that Rubik's focus on delivering software to cater for the reforms will continue in the short term.
"COIN 4.1, which is due to go out on March 1, has another round of compliance changes and about three quarters of that release is FOFA-related," Mr Wilson said.
"We have so much additional work to do in that that we're basically having three sub-releases of 4.1 which extend out about six weeks after each other. So, we'll have ultimately a 4.1.3 which we'll release in mid- to late-July and that's implementing as much of the change in as we possibly can."
