Platform provider Skandia has terminated it’s partnership with Bluedoor Technologies, saying the vendor’s Wealth.net registry solution was too far-reaching to be installed effectively.
A year-old heads of agreement between Skandia and Bluedoor was cancelled on February 6, one of the first actions of Skandia’s general manager of retail, Andrew Black, who arrived from St. George Bank to replace Mark Papendieck in January. Black said that Wealth.net’s ambitious objective – to replace Skandia’s separate systems for registry, imaging, workflow, reporting, planner desktop interface and call centre management with a single streamlined solution – “;didn’t seem capable of being delivered in a timely fashion…the complexity meant it was hard to get everybody on the same page in terms of implementation.”; Bluedoor’s head of sales and marketing, Karen De Angelis, said her firm had met all its milestones under the heads of agreement, and that the decision not to proceed to contract was due to failure to agree commercial terms. Wealth.net has been successfully installed at Axa North, the protected pension product. “;Everything from the home page through to the backoffice reporting is us,”; De Angelis said, adding that two more globally-owned third party administration businesses were currently working to install Wealth.net. Skandia’s Black said that in the short term he would emphasise manual work-arounds to ensure that “;the planner’s experience with Skandia is where it needs to be”;. Over time, he said each of Skandia’s internal systems would be replaced on a “;more piecemeal, more manageable basis”;, but the solutions would need to be open-architecture so that connectivity could be built between them. Skandia’s existing registry system, known as Ulla, was “;designed for an industry and a company that’s since moved on,”; Black said. For instance, it cannot handle an investor moving from an accumulation to a pension phase. It was also designed to service Skandia as a start-up in Australia eight years ago, whereas the platform is now used by 2000 advisers on behalf of roughly 50,000 clients. Bluedoor’s De Angelis said the cancellation of the Skandia project had not damaged Bluedoor’s business, and that it was in fact hiring to add to its 30 existing staff.
Future Fund chief investment officer Ben Samild said that FY24 has been a great year for alpha creation, thanks to strong returns in equities and, unusually, across multiple hedge fund strategies all at the same time. He reflected the past few years have been “a difficult time to be an asset owner and to generate positive returns for risk assets” but the Future Fund is tracking well of its long-term mandate.
Simon Hoyle and Darcy SongSeptember 4, 2024
