You don’t know what you don’t know, and every time you run a process in the early months you hold your breath. But over time, you start to relax a little, and eventually things should run smoothly enough.
The big one
Let’s turn our attention to the big beast in the room – Aegon’s assimilation of Cofunds. As I write, its replatforming journey is exactly one week old. The good news is that the new baby appears to be feeding well, albeit keeping its poor parents awake a little at night.
The Aegon/Cofunds guys have been keen to point out that what they’re doing isn’t a replatforming as such, it’s a migration, or an ‘upgrade’ in corporate language. They’ll be upset that I’ve referred to it as a replatforming here, but I should imagine that’s something they’ll get over. But they have a point. Replatforming is when you take a book of business on Technology A, leave it in place and replace the system with Technology B. That’s what Ascentric has done, and it’s what Old Mutual Wealth is doing.
What Aegon is doing is bulk transferring 400,000 retail Cofunds clients (holding roughly £37bn of assets) on to an upgraded version of its existing Aegon Retirement Choices (ARC) platform, which is provided by GBST. It’s already moved 79,000 clients from its third-party business, IPS, on to another version of ARC, and a bunch of institutional money on to a separate technology arrangement with FNZ.
So this is a migration, rather than a replatforming as it’s currently understood. But that’s complicated by the fact that Aegon has also taken the chance to upgrade ARC with GBST, and add in a new front-end portal from Dunstan Thomas, which also handles illustrations.
What’s going on here is a migration on to a system which itself is undergoing a level of upgrading that could reasonably be described as a replatforming. There are a lot of moving parts going on here.
No one has tried something on this scale before. It’s not that long since the deal happened, and chief executive Adrian Grace has not been letting the grass grow. This is a quick exercise; the question is, is it safe?
Initial signs are mixed, but promising. Disclosure: I was involved, along with many others, in some of Aegon’s planning, particularly on what would happen if something really big and important broke early on. Aviva’s troubles provided a useful example of the sorts of unexpected things that can go wrong.
