What’s a wealth management platform? Ask the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.

One of the comments on the article we wrote, 2025 Wealth Management Predictions, raised a question about service failures impacting platforms. The responses opened up a rabbit hole about what a platform is. I remember Ian Taylor musing on this point, and his response was, “depends on whom you ask.” So I asked around.

Starting with Ray Tubman, the architect behind Composer from GBST, and, more recently, the founder of FinoComp and Morpheus Wealth, the provider of microservice-based components.

Ray’s opinion: “A platform" is an ecosystem of technology combined with services that allow retail investors (often advised but not always) to access financial markets through various product wrappers to enable transacting and to obtain an aggregated reporting facility for advisers and investors. Traditionally, this was provided through strict structural layers (Adviser / Platform / (possibly with separate Custodian) / Fund Managers / Markets), but those layers have become much more fluid in the modern era.

Using a pasta metaphor, the market has moved from Lasagna to Ravioli.” This design principle allows components to be swapable by replacing one series of API calls with another.

Darren Bayley, Sales Director at SS&C Technologies, reinforces this point. “The future for platforms is as a fully connected ecosystem accessed via extensive APIs to drive efficient advice and servicing processes to help reduce the cost of advice.” Darren's point is that platforms are part of an ecosystem and don’t need to provide all the “bells and whistles” as part of the core functionality.

Nick Raine, CEO of Soderberg Wealth Management in the UK, describes a platform as “A service that provides custody, investment & wrapper management, aggregation/disaggregation for trading and payments in and out. It provides administration efficiencies to advisers as a one-stop shop for all client investments.” Nick believes the essential attributes of a platform are ease of adoption, use, and service efficiencies provided at a compelling (but not necessarily the lowest) price point.

Ben Hammond, MD of Consulting and Insight at the LangCat believes that “Advisers ultimately want to see an industry where all technologies seamlessly interact. Some say that platforms, as we know them, are dead". Ben believes they will remain but change shape and subtly adjust what they are responsible for.

The common thread between all these viewpoints is that platforms are evolving to:

1. Support interoperability by providing flexible, API-based services, enabling widespread integration. “Platforms” will provide a reduced range of core functionality delivered as part of an ecosystem. This will allow access to a much greater range of services (cash sweeping is an example).

2. Be an ultra-reliable commoditized utility accessed via APIs through a CRM or a portal and not visible to advisers or investors. As consumers, we associate utility services with 100% reliability, value for money, and ease of change if better deals become available. This has dire implications for legacy providers offering monolithic platform architectures that are expensive to support and hard to change.

3. Minimise the need for (manual) service through digital-first architecture with automated workflows and AI-driven admin processes designed to eliminate manual interventions. Service will be a design feature, with support staff handling infrequent, complex exceptions.

The regulatory framework won't escape the need for change and will have to adapt from being primarily risk-based to growth-enabling. The most common adjective advisers use to describe regulation is “burden.” This is why the Advice Gap is widening, as many established firms are being far more selective about which client segments they can economically support.

Across the pond, Elon Musk's impact on US government efficiency and regulation will be profound given his new role as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He is set to pursue an aggressive agenda of streamlining departments, reducing bureaucracy, and cutting unnecessary spending. He has “redundant” growth-restricting regulations firmly in his cross-hairs. These policies will inevitability play out in the UK, and a risk-based regulation mindset will have to be reset as growth, not risk, will dominate the agenda.

Now, you may be wondering about the title of this post; it was from the nursery rhyme "Rub-a-dub-dub.”

Rub-a-dub-dub,

Three men in a tub,

And who do you think they be?

The butcher, the baker,

The candlestick maker,

and all of them out to sea.

The rhyme is a playful depiction of three distinct tradesmen enjoying an unexpected adventure together. It's a stretch, but applied to the platform industry, these distinct trades/boundaries will become blurred with innovation, interoperability, efficiency, reliability, and cost of ownership, driving ongoing evolution and fuelling the pace of change. It will be an exciting adventure for providers prepared to climb aboard and paddle energetically in the same direction.

Ian was right. There is no single definition of a "platform," a few years from now, the question will be historical, as wealth platforms as we know them won't exist. They will be replaced by "plumbing and services" driven by open architectures and APIs.