The good news is that none of the work we put in has been needed so far. That isn’t to say everything has been completely smooth, and if you work in Aegon you’re probably pretty upset right now that the past couple of weeks have been sunny, because you won’t have seen very much natural daylight. But that’s the gig with any of these massive projects, and the feeling of relief and elation when things go well usually make up for it. And money. Money helps.
Question marks
Aegon’s issues so far have been:
- The new platform requires users to reset security. Sadly, Cofunds had many advisers who didn’t necessarily log in all the time, but who all fancied seeing what had changed. Hence, password resets, niggles, forgotten usernames and so on went through the roof.
- In general, the demand for the online service was huge in the first days. You can plan for that to an extent, but only to an extent. Some users couldn’t get in, performance was slow, and so on. This will not come as a shock to anyone who’s tried to buy tickets for a big band the minute they go on sale. Things appear to be settling down now.
- According to one report, up to 400 firms are locked out of the web service and having to deal by phone.
- There’s a lot of paper in key processes. Quotes are phone-only as I write, and new business is paper apps. This is obviously not ideal, but as long as Aegon hunts and kills the paper toot sweet, we should view it as a practical way of throttling demand and making sure everything’s running absolutely tickety-boo before opening everything to the world.
- We’ve heard of a few smaller issues, such as some model portfolios not showing up. This is a bit of a pain, but workarounds are in place.
We’d all have loved to see a completely clean launch, but at this speed and at this scale there were inevitably going to be compromises. My earlier point about replatforming being a journey rather than a destination is even more relevant in this case.
Aegon has three tests to pass. The first is getting live in the first place – that’s done. The second is chasing down the launch problems, and I happen to know a great deal of energy is being expended in Edinburgh to achieve just that. But there is still work to do before it can claim it’s passed that second test.
The third test is smooth, silent running. We won’t know about that for a while. The work starts now in making sure that all those first-time runs of the big processes go smoothly.
Aviva’s woes in terms of income (for advisers and clients) took a while to appear; this is why. We don’t know, what we don’t know, but the data in the back looks to be solid and that’s a good beginning.
If what is now clearly the UK’s largest platform business can get through the next eight weeks or so with no major issues, then it will be, for my money, the first platform to deliver a replatforming that is both safe and quick.
As we look forward, the landscape looks very different. We’ve come a long, long way together, through the hard times and the good.
Mark Polson is principal of platform and specialist consultancy the Lang Cat
