Data management service for advisers launches

The service allows advisers to send commission and fee statements to IFA Dataflow in electronic format and have files with thousands of individual transactions, from multiple providers and wraps, converted in a matter of seconds – making the data ready for immediate import into their back office solution.

The data can also be manipulated if required, and multiple transactions for the same client can be aggregated into one transaction.

Ian Lane, managing director of IFA Dataflow, said:

“The biggest problem for advisers is that the provider statements are not in the format required by their back office systems to import. These files have to be manipulated and most of this is done manually. Many of the provider formats require simple data manipulation, however Commission Express really becomes useful for more complex requirements.

“A good example of this is Transact.  An investor's portfolio may consist of several different investments, pensions, ISAs plus cash. Advisers need to record all income data for the same plan in the same month as one transaction. Plan and portfolio numbers need to be merged (it can be many lines per plan) and portfolio and wrapper reference numbers also need to be concatenated to match the data in the back office system.

“This task was taking some advisers many hours to complete, but with Commission Express the user simply logs into the Commission Express website and uploads their excel/CSV file from Transact: within a minute the reformatted spreadsheet is available to download and is ready to be imported into the back office system."