Ola Abdul: A thousand firms on Fundment – here’s what that means...
The next phase of advice won’t be defined by who gathers the most assets, but by who can deliver advice repeatedly without friction, writes Ola Abdul…
In most industries, customer growth is largely a function of sales effort or pricing.
In financial planning infrastructure, it’s different. Firms don’t casually change the operational backbone that sits behind client outcomes. The cost isn’t just commercial, it’s emotional, reputational and regulatory. Changing platform affects how advice lands in a client’s life.
Which is why platform adoption tends to move slowly for long periods and then shift deliberately rather than gradually.
Today, more than 1,000 firms operate on Fundment. But milestones like this aren’t really about growth.
So, when a firm moves, it usually isn’t because of a feature or headline saving (though we believe we compete well on both). It’s because a deeper tension has built up over time between what advice firms want to deliver and what their tools allow them to deliver reliably.
A gradual intolerance for complexity
Many firms have lived for years with workarounds nobody sees.
Explaining delays that weren’t their decision, rechecking outputs they didn’t fully trust, or accepting processes that work most of the time but matter most when they don’t.
Clients rarely notice the specific cause. They experience only the outcome: confidence or uncertainty. Advisers carry that weight quietly because operational friction shows up as personal responsibility.
What we’ve seen across those 1,000 firms is not a rush toward novelty. It’s a gradual intolerance for hidden complexity.
Platform switching in financial advice rarely starts with price. It starts with accumulated friction.
The industry is moving from viewing platforms as administration toward viewing them as execution infrastructure. A platform is no longer just where assets sit. It’s where promises are either fulfilled cleanly or slowly eroded by small inconsistencies.
Advice without friction
As advice becomes more continuous and real time, including tax management, retirement income and ongoing adjustment rather than periodic recommendation, execution quality matters more than presentation.
The milestone matters less as a growth marker and more as a signal of changing priorities.
In a market of roughly 6,000 advice firms, around a fifth now operate on Fundment.
These firms range from small practices to national firms, consolidators and networks, reinforcing that this shift is less about segment and more about a shared operational expectation.
According to The Lang Cat’s State of the Platform Nation 2026 report, Fundment shows the highest proportion of firms declaring it as their primary platform rather than a secondary relationship.
The next phase of advice won’t be defined by who gathers the most assets, but by who can deliver advice repeatedly without friction, especially when markets are volatile, lives are changing and confidence is fragile.
A thousand firms doesn’t prove we’ve solved that.
But it suggests the industry increasingly agrees that this is the problem worth solving.
Ola Abdul is Founder & CEO at Fundment