Platform Analyser contains a huge amount of data – from platform features and pricing to market insight and exclusive articles.

So we thought we’d spend a bit of time on the platform data piece specifically, explaining how this data gets plugged in, and how we make sure it stays robust, accurate and up-to-date.

Up until recently, we’ve collected data from platforms through big, ad-hoc exercises where we send each platform lots of questions in bulk. Then, when we get their answers, this data is added in one go into Platform Analyser.

This has worked well for us in that we’ve been able to deploy and update big chunks of data in one hit. For example, last time round we carried our biggest data upgrade to date – you can see the kind of information we added here.

However, for all the benefits of this approach, we’ve decided to work in a different way from this point on. We’re going to ask platforms more targeted questions, on a more regular basis.

The consensus among platforms is this is their preferred way of working, as it’s easier to provide information on one or two data points rather than 10 or more.

This makes sense to us – the more readily platforms answer our questions, the more valuable the data becomes to advisers and paraplanners as part of your ongoing due diligence.

The feedback we get on Analyser is that our data is more concise and trusted than other databases elsewhere. We want to make sure this continues to be the case.

For advice professionals, there’s a couple of important ways we think all this data can benefit you:

1) While platforms give us a lot of information to work with (and now will do so more regularly) this isn’t simply a case of accepting this data ‘no questions asked’. In fact, the opposite is true – we’re very happy to interrogate platforms’ claims, and filter those that don’t pass muster.

2) If you’re looking for specific data, whether across the platform market or for a handful of platforms in contention, this is something we can help with. We can contact all the platforms for what you’re after, and report back. This not only saves you time, but adds to the sum total of knowledge for other advisers and planners interested in the same information.

So that’s it. If you have platform questions you’d like help with getting answered, just let us know via the ‘get in touch’ button within Analyser, or by emailing [email protected]

Thanks as always to the Analyser users who use the system day in and day out, and encourage us to develop it further through your feedback.

Thank you too to the platforms we work with, for responding to our requests and for being transparent with your data. We appreciate the support.