The Aberdeen UK Platform Awards dinner is the only event dedicated to excellence and achievement in the investment platform sector. All platform providers will be there, all hoping to win a prestigious award.
If you are an adviser and you use platforms, we want your opinion. After all, you have carried out due diligence, you have made your selection and you now have the most valuable commodity of all - user experience!
Firstly, the platform itself
There are two platform awards for which you can vote:
• Best Fund Platform This is for platforms that offer a range of funds, wrappers, aggregation, online access for trading and viewing and planning tools - those that are often called fund supermarkets.
• Best Open Architecture Platform This is for those platforms that do not rely on asset manager rebates for remuneration. Thus they can offer non-commission paying products such as equities, investment trusts, low-load passives and ETFs - those that are often called wrap platforms. We want you to vote for the platform that offers the best scope, functionality, excellent administration and support that meets your needs and those of your clients. You may use both types of platform, in which case, please cast your vote in both categories. There are two further awards where we want your input:
• Platform enabled SIPP proposition This award is for on-platform SIPPs that enable the customer to look across all investments wrappers together, to facilitate genuinely holistic investment planning, with a broad range of asset classes, as well as offering a competitively priced proposition. In short, it has to be a great SIPP in addition to being fully integrated with the platform.
• Leading platform users' planning tool The winner will be the product that advisers value above all others because of quality, reliability, ease of use and provider support (both initial and ongoing). Your choice of planning tool may cover stochastic modeling, asset allocation, fund analytics or be an end-to-end package.
Again, we are looking for a great planning tool that is also fully integrated with the platform.
Voting is easy - just go to:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/aberdeenukplatformawards
Clive Waller, MD, CWC Research
