The Australian investment platform landscape has reached a definitive turning point. After years of competition focused on features, pricing, and brand recognition, 2025 has revealed a fundamental shift in how financial advisers evaluate and select platforms. The era of passive platform relationships and 'good enough ' solutions is over, replaced by a performance-driven market where operational efficiency reigns supreme. This shift in market dynamics necessitates a swift adaptation to the new landscape.
From Features to Speed: The Great Rebalancing
As we finalise the 2025 Adviser Ratings Landscape Report for release, our latest research reveals that advisers have fundamentally reweighted what they value in a platform relationship. The battle for adviser loyalty is no longer being won in the showroom of expansive feature sets but in the engine room of operational efficiency.
"Speed to Execute Transactions" has emerged as the most critical driver of adviser satisfaction, fundamentally reshaping how platforms compete. Combined with "Speed to Process Requests," these operational efficiency metrics now determine more than a third of adviser satisfaction—a seismic shift reflecting modern advice practices' economic reality.
This transformation isn't merely a preference change; it's an economic imperative. With rising compliance burdens, fee compression, and the need to efficiently service clients to maintain profitability, an adviser's time has become their most critical and constrained resource. Every minute spent wrestling with a slow transaction or chasing an administrative request directly impacts their practice's profitability and scalability.
Performance Pays: The Turnaround Success Stories
The market's performance obsession has created remarkable transformation stories that validate the efficiency thesis. CFS FirstChoice exemplifies this dynamic, almost doubling its satisfaction scores in twelve months through focused operational investment. Similarly, Expand has engineered a dramatic turnaround, moving from negative sentiment to strongly positive adviser feedback following successful post-migration execution.
These aren't gradual improvements—they're market-shifting transformations demonstrating how quickly platforms can capture mindshare when delivering genuine operational value. The message is unequivocal: advisers will reward performance improvements with loyalty and fund flows, but they're equally quick to abandon platforms that fail to deliver.
The Incumbency Paradox: When Market Share Becomes Liability
The most striking example of the new market dynamics is what we're calling the 'Incumbency Paradox.' This paradox is evident in platforms like BT Panorama, which maintains one of the highest market penetration rates at 30% yet posts relatively modest satisfaction scores. This disconnect between usage and satisfaction reveals a critical vulnerability for established platforms with large passive user bases. It suggests that high market penetration is no longer necessarily a sign of loyalty-it's potentially a measure of at-risk assets. Large pools of dissatisfied advisers represent the market's most attractive and vulnerable targets for competitors. For platforms in this position, market share has become a liability requiring urgent attention rather than a competitive moat to defend.
The market is rapidly bifurcating into essential "core" platforms integral to advice practice operations and peripheral platforms used only for legacy products or niche purposes. To be designated as peripheral means to face an existential threat, as these platforms are most likely to be eliminated in the next efficiency drive.
The Commoditisation of Core Features
Perhaps most revealing is what advisers no longer prioritise. Traditional competitive battlegrounds like pricing and investment options now contribute minimally to platform satisfaction scores. This doesn't mean they're unimportant—instead, they've become commoditised "table stakes" where exceeding expectations yields little additional goodwill, but failing to meet minimum standards is disqualifying.
Years of intense competition have compressed pricing into a relatively narrow band, and most major platforms now offer investment menus broad enough to satisfy mainstream adviser needs. The market has become "good enough" on these core tenets for most advisers, forcing the competitive battleground "up the value stack."
The Consolidation Effect
This performance-driven mindset drives a dramatic change in adviser behaviour: active platform consolidation. Our data shows advisers are deliberately reducing the number of platforms they use, moving from an average of 2.31 platforms in 2023 to just 2.01 in 2025.
This consolidation creates a virtuous cycle for high-performing platforms and a potential death spiral for underperformers. As advisers direct all new business and increasingly back-book transfers to their preferred 'core' platforms, the flow of capital becomes highly concentrated. The market leadership is now shared among just three platforms, each holding approximately 30% market penetration—a sign that the rapid consolidation phase is maturing into a more stable competitive structure. This trend underscores the importance of operational efficiency and performance in platform selection, as it directly impacts market share and the concentration of capital flow.
The Human Element Still Matters
While technology dominates satisfaction metrics, the human element—embodied by Business Development Managers (BDMs)—remains a significant competitive lever. However, advisers' expectations of BDMs have evolved dramatically. They're no longer seeking relationship managers; they're demanding practice development consultants who provide tangible value in running their businesses more effectively.
The most requested improvement from BDMs is to "share knowledge of industry best practices"—a fundamental shift from transactional support to strategic partnership. This reflects advisers' growing sophistication and their need for platforms to contribute to their practice development beyond just processing transactions.
Interestingly, BDM performance varies significantly by state, creating pockets of excellence and opportunity that successful platforms leverage while others struggle with consistency across their national teams.
The In-House Revolution: A Quantifiable Threat
An emerging and significant threat to traditional platforms comes from sophisticated in-house solutions developed by large advice firms. The threat is quantifiable and dramatic: proprietary platforms are achieving satisfaction scores of 65+ and even 85+, roughly double the performance of leading commercial providers.
This isn't just a proof of concept; it demonstrates that deeply customised solutions can dramatically outperform even the best third-party offerings. While currently internal, these systems are setting new benchmarks for user experience and functionality that will inevitably influence adviser expectations across the market.
Advisers experiencing seamless, intuitive in-house systems become increasingly intolerant of clunky commercial alternatives, forcing third-party providers to aggressively prove that their value extends beyond what a single firm can build. The success of these proprietary solutions also creates 'commercialisation temptation'—large licensees that have invested millions in superior platforms may look to offer them to the broader market, creating a new breed of competitor born from within the advice industry itself. This trend highlights the need for third-party providers to continuously innovate and demonstrate their unique value proposition to remain competitive.
The Winners and Losers Emerge
The data reveals three distinct strategic archetypes emerging in the platform market:
The All-Rounders relentlessly pursue broad-based excellence, ranking consistently high across multiple performance categories. Their dominance isn't built on a single killer feature but a holistic value proposition that leaves few weaknesses for competitors to exploit.
The Operational Specialists have focused intensely on efficiency and value, ranking number one in critical operational categories while perhaps sacrificing in areas like investment transparency. This represents a highly focused strategic position targeting efficiency-conscious advisers.
The Failing Incumbents show systemic failure across virtually every metric, with uniformly poor performance explaining their profoundly negative satisfaction scores and indicating that incremental approaches are futile.
Following the Money
The correlation between performance and fund flows is unmistakable. The platforms achieving the highest satisfaction scores are capturing the lion's share of new money, with the top two performers alone capturing approximately 74% of all positive adviser-driven net flows in 2024.
This "winner-takes-most" dynamic is creating unprecedented concentration in the market, driven by advisers making conscious, deliberate choices to eliminate underperforming providers and consolidate their business with preferred platforms.
The Path Forward
For advisers, the message is clear: platform selection should prioritise operational efficiency over traditional factors like pricing or feature breadth. A platform's most valuable commodity is time—specifically, time saved through faster processing and fewer administrative burdens.
For platforms, the research provides a definitive blueprint for resource allocation. Investment in operational speed delivers demonstrably higher returns than price cuts or feature additions. The correlation between transaction processing speed and asset growth is exceptionally strong, while the relationship between pricing perception and fund flows is negligible.
Implications for the Profession
This efficiency revolution represents more than a market shift—it's enabling advisers to serve more clients effectively while maintaining quality standards. As only 10.4% of Australians currently receive financial advice, platforms that can deliver genuine operational leverage to practices are positioning themselves as essential infrastructure for addressing Australia's advice accessibility challenge.
The platforms that understand this new reality and invest accordingly will survive and thrive in an increasingly performance-driven market. Those who continue to compete on yesterday's metrics risk being relegated to peripheral status in a market that no longer tolerates inefficiency.
The transformation stories emerging from 2025 prove that dramatic improvement is possible for those willing to focus on what advisers value. The question for every platform provider is simple: will you drive the efficiency revolution, or will it disrupt you?
The 2025 Adviser Ratings Landscape, Platform and Superannuation Category Reports, featuring detailed performance rankings and strategic analysis, will be released in the coming weeks, providing comprehensive insights into how Australia's leading platforms adapt to this new competitive landscape.
Article by:
Comments0