Following FundsNetwork being named Platform of the Year at the recent Schroders UK Platform Awards, next up to feature in our series of HomeGames interviews with platform bosses is Jackie Boylan, head of adviser platform at Fidelity International. Watch the full conversation between Mark and Jackie below.

I’ve headed up FundsNetwork for almost three years now. When I came into the role, I had a really clear vision around what I wanted the platform to be, and what I wanted our clients to think of us.

I was keen to drive a bit more ambition into the business, as well that sense of wanting to be really good at what we did. I’m not saying that wasn’t there, but I wanted it to be palpable – that you could feel it when you spoke to our people.

FundsNetwork reached its 20-year anniversary last year, though we didn’t celebrate too much for obvious reasons.

We’ve been bogged down a little bit by the fact that we have been around for a while, and with that comes the question of whether we are a bit cumbersome to deal with.

Some people love Fidelity because of its brand, and that we’re very committed to the market and have private ownership behind us. But there can also be that perception of: ‘Are you a bit old?’

So one part of what I wanted to do was around reinvention, and showing people what we can do. That meant a bit of a cultural tilt towards being curious, innovative and driving to be the best.

We have absolutely done some of that, which I think has resulted in some of the commercial success we’ve seen over the past 12 months or so. We definitely still have a way to go, and I’m not saying everything is fantastic.

But we spent a lot of time on our client reporting and redoing our website, because there was some clear feedback from advisers that it wasn't up to scratch, and that it wasn't intuitive enough.

We spent a lot of time on user research and design, working up prototypes, going back to firms to check whether what we’d done was right, and then delivering it. Those two pieces of work I’m particularly proud of because I think we have listened to advisers, and we have made it easier for them to do business with us and to service their clients.

‘Going silent’

If I was to offer some constructive feedback on how we’ve operated in the past, I would say that when we went through the replatforming, we went very silent.

On the one hand, that was probably the right strategy in that replatforming is such a complex thing to do.

Trying to use some kind of PR machine to say ‘we’re going to be wonderful and this is going to be fantastic’ – that’s probably slightly risky. And I appreciate it’s easy to say in hindsight that our approach was the correct one.

But the problem with that, and the flip side of that argument, is the danger of seeming too insular, and not really being out there. Tackling that has definitely been part of what we’ve been working on over the last year.

Some people still say: “We don’t see you enough.” Yet you also don’t want to be talking for the sake of it.

So I think that criticism is a fair one, and we want to make sure that if we’re going to speak, we’re saying something valuable, rather than being captured in headlines with something that isn’t exactly insightful.

Being different

Probably one of the more defining moments of my childhood, and in a way how I got into financial services, was my parents splitting up when I was nine.

Being from essentially a single parent family is pretty tough. There was something in me that thought: What could I do that’s going to make my life different from my mum’s?

My perception of how I could take my life in a different way was by becoming a businesswoman, even though I’m not actually sure I knew what that meant.

Once I graduated from wanting to be a trapeze artist, and a detective, I did business at university and looked at roles in financial services.

I started in client services, on the phones, which I would highly recommend to anyone. Not just because it helps with product and service knowledge, but because it gives you such a great understanding of clients - what it means to think about things from their perspective, and how you actually solve problems.

I moved into sales, and then investment management sales. Many of you know will know Verona Kenny [managing director of intermediary at Seven Investment Management], and we worked together in Sydney.

She was working on this weird idea of operational platform administration, and it was all very secret squirrel – they actually locked their floor so we couldn’t get in.

I worked in a lot of different areas before I came here, and that point of difference even came up when I pitched for this job.

In the final interview, I ended up saying to the man who was going to be my boss: “People like me tend not to get roles like this because I don’t look like the standard person that should be running an end-to-end business.”

And I didn’t mean physical looks, but more my sales and client background. Thankfully that hit the spot, because he didn’t want the platform to be as it had always been, and wanted change. So that did work for me. But I think there's something in thinking differently and not picking the same types of people for the same types of roles.

The new wave of investors

I've been following the personal investing platforms a bit more and noticing the average age, which is quite young.

We're seeing a new wave of investors, and we're digitally enabling them. We're making it a lot easier for them [to invest], and we’re providing a bit of guidance as well. And it's all pretty much free. So at what point do they think they need an adviser, when they've grown up through the digital age?

For some of us, we just went to an adviser when we had enough money. But is that going to change in future? And if so, what does that mean for advice?

Many people currently aren’t going to be happy just doing something online. But maybe this next generation will. Perhaps we're not thinking clearly enough about that because we can't quite relate to it.

We just don't know yet how things will turn out. We have a hypothesis that when someone gets a certain amount of money that's going to be a trigger for them to change how they do things. But I think we're making that assumption - many of us haven't come through that digital channel directly.

So I think we need to look at that a bit more, and understand how we might want to move someone out of that digital channel if they do need advice. What will it take to move them out of that?

Pick and mix platforms

Looking at the Australian platform market, one development that was quite successful there was platforms starting to ‘modular-ise’.

For example, you might have a client with 100,000 to invest. The recommendation might be for a multi-asset solution and very basic platform functionality, at a cost of 80 basis points.

But if that client wanted to invest in some direct equities, they might have paid another 10bps. And if they wanted a model portfolio, that would be another 10bps. So there was a bit of pick and mix.

It actually enabled advisers to stick with a primary platform provider probably more so than here in the UK, because you could use one platform for many different types of clients.

There were different pricing schedules as well depending on what that client needed. I haven’t seen as much of that here.

There’s also the ‘advisers as platforms’ debate which is live right now. Advisers absolutely have more control than we do, because they’re closer to the client and they own that relationship. We’re a provider of a service.

The changing nature of the market is raising some questions for firms, like whether they want to become a platform operator, and all that comes with that.

We are working with some firms to adapt some of the things we do, but we’re also looking more strategically at whether there are different models we should be considering. Or do firms want to focus on the service they’re providing and being really slick at that, while letting the investment manager on the platform do what they’re really good at?

There is also the question of whether advice firms want to take on the regulatory risk and obligation of being a platform, which as we know is not the simplest thing to navigate.

Getting to equality

Alongside my FundsNetwork role, I co-sponsor Fidelity’s gender balance work across the globe, and sit on the Global Diversity and Inclusion Council.

Change has to be leader-led, and Fidelity International chief executive Anne Richards is extremely impressive and focused on the issue of inclusion and diversity.

You can talk about all the commercial benefits of why having different people round the table matters, but we should also lean towards the human aspect as well. Isn’t that better for everyone, and isn’t it better that we enable people who are less represented in our industry to become a part of it?

There are a few things we’ve done that have been important in changing what we do at Fidelity.

We’ve put in place diversity targets that everyone has signed up for, and we’ve looked at the areas that have less gender balance in them and they are working to their own specific targets as well.

We’ve recently implemented a policy on supporting victims of domestic violence, and we’re putting our leaders through some training on that.

On recruitment, we’ve introduced what’s called ‘contextualised screening’, which looks at your background versus your results, and effectively equalises some of an individual’s history and background and the impact that might have had on their education.

On parental leave, we introduced a policy late last year where dads can take as much leave as females on the same pay. As of April, 70 men had taken part.

If inclusion and diversity is an area your firm is interested in, I’m more than happy to talk about some of the initiatives that really do make a difference.

The key thing, from a gender perspective anyway, is we will never have equality if men don't see it as their role to do some of those things that women have traditionally tended to do, such as caring for parents or for kids.

During the pandemic (and before that), a lot more men got more involved in that side of things. As we return to some form of normality, let’s hope that continues.