Platform providers' $130-million total investment in improvements has paid off, with financial advisers' satisfaction at its highest level in nine years.
Investment Trends senior analyst Recep Peker said 84 per cent of planners rated their satisfaction with platforms as good or very good - the highest ever in the nine years of the survey.
"Platforms have been making changes, with $130 million in total spent on new developments," Peker said.
The "Planner Technology Report" surveyed 1412 planners in April and found the changes that rated most highly were better integration with planning software, support for dealers and business development managers, and lower administration fees.
Fees were a constant feature in the survey, with 40 per cent of planners saying they would change platforms if another had lower fees, whereas only 18 per cent said they would change if another platform's features were better.
Satisfaction was crucial to retention, Peker said.
"There is a very strong relationship between satisfaction and switching behaviour. Relative to their market share, platforms with lower overall satisfaction ratings from their users lose a higher proportion of planners to other platforms," he said.
Asgard Infinity eWrap, launched in October last year, was voted number one for value, he said, "with 83 per cent of planners liking its flexible fee structure".
The next two platforms by planner satisfaction were CFS FirstChoice and CFS FirstWrap.
As platform providers improved their offerings, 27 per cent of planners stopped using at least one platform for new inflows in the past year (24 per cent in the previous study).
Planners have now cut back to using 2.3 platforms for new inflows (3.5 in 2009), with the proportion of planners using more than two platforms falling from 44 per cent to 31 per cent in the same period.
Consequently, being a planner's primary platform was "even more critical than ever before", Peker said, as primary platforms received 77 per cent of total platform flows, up from 73 per cent last year.
The top three platforms by number of primary relationships were BT Wrap, CFS FirstChoice and Macquarie Wrap.
