Financial Services
Purpose-built CRM platforms for IFAs, wealth managers, M&A advisory boutiques, and financial advisory firms. FCA compliance, MiFID II record keeping, and SM&CR attestation designed into the system from day one, not bolted on afterwards.
Sector Challenges
Generic CRMs have no concept of FCA reporting requirements. Compliance teams end up maintaining spreadsheets alongside the CRM, duplicating effort and increasing the risk of an adverse finding at the next supervisory visit.
Financial advisory relationships span decades and involve suitability assessments, periodic reviews, vulnerable client flags, and regulatory correspondence that contact-centric CRMs simply cannot model properly.
When advisers and compliance officers use different views of the same data, inconsistencies creep in. Audit findings become difficult to trace back to source, and remediation eats into fee-earning time.
What Goes Wrong
Most off-the-shelf CRMs were designed for product sales teams, not for regulated advisory businesses. These are the six patterns UK financial services firms describe most often when they tell us why their previous CRM did not work.
Know-your-client forms, risk profiles, and fact-finds are captured in separate files, then manually re-typed into the CRM. Data drift is inevitable, and FCA supervisors spot it immediately.
Notes fields do not satisfy MiFID II record-keeping obligations. When you need to demonstrate five years of advice history to a client or the FCA, free-text notes cannot be queried or aggregated.
Generic CRMs let you add a tag, but do not change the user journey. Advisers miss the flag mid-conversation and fail to follow Consumer Duty guidance, creating a reportable harm exposure.
Annual or bi-annual review cycles fall behind because there is no automated regulatory calendar. When reviews lapse, firms miss ongoing suitability obligations under COBS 9.
Advisers use the CRM, compliance uses spreadsheets, T&C uses yet another tool. Reconciliation happens only at audit, by which point the discrepancies are historical facts.
GDPR requires defined retention periods for personal data. Off-the-shelf CRMs rarely enforce them, so firms either retain indefinitely (a breach) or purge manually (a reporting nightmare).
What We Build
Every client interaction, recommendation, and advice decision logged with timestamp, user attribution, and version history. Full traceability for FCA supervisory inspections and SAR responses.
Structured suitability assessments linked to client profiles, with automated reminders for periodic reviews, risk tolerance updates, and Consumer Duty cross-checks.
Generate FCA and MiFID II reports directly from your CRM data. No manual compilation, no spreadsheet exports, no reconciliation errors between systems.
Client documents stored securely with version control, access logging, and retention policies aligned to FCA and GDPR requirements.
Track opportunities from initial enquiry through fact-find to recommendation, with compliance gates at each stage of the advisory process so nothing ships without sign-off.
Compliance in Practice
UK financial services firms answer to the FCA, the PRA, the ICO, and in some cases the European regulators their cross-border activity touches. A bespoke CRM does not replace your compliance function, but it should make five specific obligations cheaper to meet on a daily basis.
The CRM embeds Consumer Duty outcome checks into the advice workflow. Before a recommendation can be issued, the adviser is prompted through the four outcomes (product, price, understanding, support) with evidence links back to the suitability assessment. Vulnerable client flags trigger additional validation steps rather than a passive tag.
Review dates are calculated per client based on service proposition (annual, bi-annual, ad-hoc) and visible on every adviser dashboard. Overdue reviews escalate to the compliance officer. Every review is timestamped with the adviser, the outcome, and the evidence pack that supported it.
Every client communication, recommendation, and transaction is recorded in a structured, queryable format for the full five-year retention period. Phone calls, emails, and meeting notes are linked to the advice they relate to, so you can produce a complete advice history for a single client in minutes rather than days.
Certified functions are mapped to CRM roles, so a senior manager can see what decisions were made in their area, by whom, and under what supervisory arrangement. Annual fitness and propriety attestations are built into the HR workflow and linked to conduct records.
Every personal data field is tagged with a lawful basis and a retention period. Subject access requests are fulfilled from a single dashboard that assembles all data for a named individual. Automated retention schedules purge or archive data on schedule, so the firm is not carrying an ICO liability indefinitely.
Regulatory Compliance
UK financial services firms operate under some of the strictest regulatory frameworks in the country. Your CRM must support compliance, not hinder it, and it should reduce the compliance overhead on fee earners rather than add to it.
FCA conduct of business rules embedded into client management workflows, ensuring suitability, disclosure, and Consumer Duty obligations are met at every stage of the advisory process.
UK GDPR data subject rights built in, including automated data retention schedules, consent tracking, lawful basis tagging, and subject access request handling from a single dashboard.
MiFID II transaction reporting and five-year record-keeping requirements integrated into the CRM data model, reducing manual compliance overhead and supervisor response time.
Investment Guidance
Every firm is different, but there are clear market bands for what a purpose-built CRM costs UK advisory businesses. The ranges below reflect typical investment for a UK-led build with FCA and UK GDPR compliance baked in, and integration with the data sources you already rely on. For firms with 1 to 5 users and standard workflows, off-the-shelf platforms like Intelliflo, Plannr, or 360 Lifecycle are usually the better commercial answer, and we will tell you so during discovery.
Small firms, single workflow
A single focused workflow or standalone compliance portal: structured fact-find and suitability tracker, conduct-of-business log, or vulnerable-client register. One to two integrations and FCA-aligned audit trail. For firms replacing a specific spreadsheet process rather than a whole CRM.
Established advisory firms, 10-40 users
Full advisory CRM with Consumer Duty workflows, vulnerable client journeys, MiFID II record keeping, three to five integrations (platform, back office, portfolio, email, document management), and role-based permissions for compliance and T&C.
Wealth managers and M&A advisory, 40+ users
Full compliance platform: SM&CR mapping, automated regulatory reporting, multi-entity controls, deal pipeline workflows for corporate finance teams, and custom integrations with market data, KYC, and transaction systems.
Fixed-price build, with ongoing support and enhancement delivered on a monthly retainer. Indicative ranges for a UK-led build with typical regulated-sector requirements. Actual cost depends on integrations, data complexity, and the scope of your existing compliance framework. Enterprise and multi-phase engagements can scale beyond the Advanced range. See full pricing detail.
Questions Answered
The questions UK advisory firms ask us most often during discovery. If yours is not here, book a discovery call and we will answer it directly.
Off-the-shelf platforms like Intelliflo, Plannr, and 360 Lifecycle are well suited to generalist IFA work. A bespoke CRM makes sense when your advice proposition, investment process, or client-service model is the core of your differentiation, or when you have compliance obligations (SM&CR mapping, multi-entity structures, M&A deal pipelines, discretionary mandates) that generic platforms do not model natively. Most firms under 10 advisers with a standard advice proposition should stay on off-the-shelf. Most firms above 20 advisers with a distinctive proposition outgrow it.
A Focused Build typically takes 10 to 14 weeks from discovery to go-live. A Standard Build takes 14 to 22 weeks. An Advanced Build for a wealth manager or M&A advisory firm takes 20 to 32 weeks. The largest variable is data migration from legacy systems, which often accounts for 30 to 40 per cent of project time.
Compliance is treated as a functional requirement, not a documentation exercise. Discovery includes a compliance workshop with your compliance officer or SM&CR senior manager, where we map your conduct of business obligations, Consumer Duty outcomes, and SM&CR responsibilities into specific CRM workflows. Every compliance obligation has a corresponding test in the acceptance plan.
Yes. We have migrated from Intelliflo Office, Curo, Adviser Office, Plannr, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, HubSpot, and bespoke legacy systems. Migration includes field mapping, data cleansing, suitability document preservation, and a parallel-running period so your advisers do not lose continuity.
You do. The code is delivered to your GitHub or GitLab organisation under a permissive licence, the database runs in your cloud account (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and there is no vendor lock-in. We offer ongoing support contracts, but you are free to engage any competent development team to maintain the platform after handover.
Every personal data field is tagged with a lawful basis (contract, legitimate interest, consent, legal obligation) and a retention period. Automated retention schedules purge or archive data on schedule. Subject access requests are fulfilled from a single dashboard that assembles all data for a named individual. Record of processing activities is generated from the data model rather than maintained manually.
Yes. Typical integrations include investment platforms (Transact, Abrdn Wrap, Aviva, Nucleus, Quilter, 7IM), back-office systems (Intelliflo Office, Curo, Adviser Office), cashflow tools (Voyant, CashCalc, Truth), and KYC providers (Smartsearch, LexisNexis). Integration complexity is the single largest cost driver, which is why discovery covers integrations in detail before we commit to a build price.
Regulatory change is continuous, so the architecture is designed to make rule changes cheap to implement. Workflows, attestation flows, and reporting templates are configuration rather than hard-coded logic. Most firms retain us on an ongoing support and enhancement contract precisely so regulatory change can be handled in days rather than waiting for a full release cycle.
Services
Bespoke CRM Development
CRM Consultancy
CRM Data Migration
CRM Integration
CRM Support & Maintenance
CRM Training
Financial Services CRM
Book a free discovery call. We will discuss your FCA obligations, your current pain points, and whether a bespoke CRM is the right investment for your firm.
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