At breaking point: Admin was overwhelming advice
Matt, founder of Altor Wealth, had built something unique over a decade. As a B Corp charging flat monthly fees and with 10% of gross income going to charity, Altor was different. But despite their innovative approach, they faced a familiar problem.
Matt explains: “We had admin people pretty much full time just trying to deal with the nonsense, the stuff that wasn't happening automatically with our platform.
“I've got colleagues who are running financial services businesses. They tell me they've got a ratio of three support to one adviser and that blows my tiny mind.
“You dig into it and it's because they're having to spend a load of time covering up for or fixing platform issues.”
Finding a solution: How Fundment changed the narrative
After years of watching Fundment's development, Altor made the switch. The transformation was immediate and measurable.
“I had a really nice moment with one member of our team last week who was complaining about something that was happening with a platform, and I asked whether it was an issue across all the platforms [we use]? She said that Fundment wasn’t causing any issues – that she had no work in her Fundment bucket. It was all complete.”
Matt says the difference was stark. Where once simple client reviews required tedious platform navigation and manual report generation, he could now “go in on the UI, filter my clients, see them all in there and what they've got in each wrapper” instantly.
“It sounds like a simple thing, but it's so tedious when you haven't got that high level snapshot,” he explains. Previously, Matt could only run reports by visiting individual client records. And while that took only two or three minutes per client, for a business looking after more than 220 families, “that's huge in terms of time wasted,” he said.
The difference? Client relationships enhanced
The real victory came in client meetings. “I did a review the other day which was one of the first clients we switched over to Fundment,” Matt says. “It was just so nice because we didn't have a lot to do in terms of the bitty preparation part. Thanks to Fundment, we were just able to have a nice conversation about what was going on with them, what was going on with work, when retirement was coming, how the kids were doing. It was how it should be.”
This aligned perfectly with what Altor's clients actually wanted, Matt says: “Interaction with a human for those gnarly, personal questions” while knowing the rest was just being looked after by the platform “in the background, just ongoing.”
Altor today: Efficient business, happy clients
Today, Altor operates with remarkable efficiency. Their support-to-adviser ratio remains low while client satisfaction has increased. The platform that once consumed administrative resources now runs silently in the background.
For advisers considering the switch, Matt's advice is simple: “If you're looking for a platform that is going to be low cost for your client and easier for your team to deal with, then go for it. If you can save yourself money and you can save the client money and save you time and save the client time as well, for me it has to be a compelling argument back as to why you'd stick with someone else.”
For Altor, technology has returned to its proper place: enabling great advice rather than hindering it.
