How Lucent saved 15 hours a week by ‘letting go’
When Steve founded Lucent Financial in 2009, he had a clear vision: do things better than the firms he'd worked for. What he didn't anticipate was how much time his team would spend battling platform bureaucracy instead of helping clients live better lives.
The problem: Death by a thousand admin tasks
“I used to worry about rebalancing portfolios, about getting it wrong, about forgetting to buy stuff when transfers have finished,” Steve explains. “We don't even look at those things now. We just tick them off as done.”
By 2020, Lucent had built a solid business around technical expertise, particularly in pension transfers. But when regulatory changes forced a pivot, Steve noticed something that had been quietly draining his team: they were drowning in platform administration.
One platform’s drawdown processes were taking four months. Simple tasks required multiple phone calls, forms, and follow-ups. The team spent hours on hold, chasing transfers, and creating reminder tasks to check whether actions had been completed.
“You're spending time making notes and reminders to go back and check next week,” Steve recalls. The mental load was significant, and it was preventing the firm from focusing on what mattered: client experience.
The solution: Automation that actually works
When Lucent moved to Fundment four years ago, the change wasn't immediately comfortable. After years of manual processes, the automation felt almost too easy.
“We had to let go because it's so automated, which is great, but when you're not used to that you feel uneasy. You feel you should be doing something when you don't need to," Steve says. The team found themselves checking and double-checking, unable to believe that tasks were genuinely complete without their intervention.
Steve says there was something revealing about this adjustment period: the team had become so accustomed to friction that its absence felt suspicious.
But within a couple of weeks, the difference became clear. Auto-trading meant portfolios rebalanced themselves. Drawdown requests that once required multiple steps and follow-ups now happened with a single action. "Can I have £20,000? Yeah. That’s it. And then it just happens. That’s not always the case elsewhere.”
Fundment’s order execution feature gave the team flexibility for tax planning without triggering unnecessary capital gains. Its capital gains tax tool simplified year-end planning. Most importantly, the team stopped worrying about whether things would get done.
The result: Time redirected where it matters
The impact on Lucent's operations has been substantial. The firm now has three administrators who, as Steve puts it, “don't really have to do much of the admin type things anymore.”
Instead, one team member built an in-house system to consolidate MI reporting. The team was able to focus on initiatives that move the business forward rather than chasing platforms to complete basic tasks.
“I don't think we would have grown as much as we have in the last three years without you [Fundment] taking on some of the load that we used to have, which is just wasted time chasing people up and dealing with their systems,” Steve says. “All that time we've just put into our clients and it makes everything better.”
The firm's approach to client experience has evolved significantly. Rather than talking about pension technicalities, Lucent now focuses on helping clients reconnect with what they actually want from life. “I'm trying to say, no, let's get that little boy or little girl back that you once were and, you know, what did you really want?”
This shift, Steve says, may not have been possible without freeing the team from unnecessary platform administration.
What changed
Steve is characteristically blunt about what made the difference: “I feel like I have a partner and I feel like you're on my side trying to help us get somewhere. I don't get that anywhere else.”
The contrast with other platforms is stark, Steve says. Where service level agreements can feel like ultimatums rather than genuine commitments, Fundment's approach is collaborative. “An agreement is two parties agreeing. I didn't agree that you could take 15 working days to reply. That's an ultimatum, a declaration, not an agreement.”
For advisers considering a platform change, Steve's advice is straightforward: “Stop thinking, start doing. There are no drawbacks to this. Once you feel the difference in processing times and how easy it is to get things done, once you feel that, you won't go back.”
Lucent hasn't looked back. As Steve puts it: “It is night and day difference. It's so easy dealing with you!”
