InvestmentLink buys into practice management tool

Hub service provider InvestmentLink has acquired a 50 per cent stake of Dealer Management System (DMS) that will allow it to develop systems to enable financial advisers to gain a complete overview of their business operations from one service.

“The partnership is going to enable us to develop new services that will service both the product providers and the advisers,” InvestmentLink chief executive Peter Philip said.

“Currently there’s no standardisation in the industry when it comes to commission and income data for planners, so what we are doing is engaging with all of the product providers to build a system that will aggregate all of that information into one consolidated database of commission and payments information. That’s going to enable any dealer group or any practice to get a comprehensive consolidated view of where their business is,” he explained.

He said any resulting data would be available to any dealer group regardless of whether they were a client of DMS.

But Philip was quick to point out there would be no pressure for existing clients of either organisation to use the other’s services.

“One of the things we are very clear on is that DMS users may not want to connect up to InvestmentLink. We think that there are going to be synergies and as the services become more and more integrated there’ll be benefits to utilising both services together, but it never will be a requirement that DMS users use InvestmentLink or InvestmentLink users use DMS,” he said.

The purchase is in line with InvestmentLink’s aim to selectively increase the number of strategic alliances it has in the market in order to boost the “value proposition” of what the service provider is able to offer dealer groups.

Included in the acquisition agreement is an option in 2008 for InvestmentLink to buy the remaining 50 per cent of DMS.