Fin365 announce strategic mergers with Optimised Financial Planning Solutions and SMSF Paraplanners

Fin365, a software provider for the financial services industry, has announced strategic mergers with Optimised Financial Planning Solutions (OFPS) & SMSF Paraplanners (SMSFPP), with the goal of growing its burgeoning technology services division.

Fin365 is primarily known for its software, a practice management platform built on top of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Along with its CRM, Fin365 provides client facing applications as well as a comprehensive set of data feeds and integrations with other financial services technologies.

According to Fin365’s CEO, Stephen Handley, this latest initiative is in keeping with its founding mission.

“From inception, Fin365’s mission has been to help financial services businesses deliver high quality financial services to a greater number of customers, by better leveraging technology. Historically our primary focus has been on developing our software platform but, as our customer base grows, we’re increasingly being asked if we can provide additional services such as data cleansing, revenue management, process automation and general technology consulting.”

Handley indicated that the mergers are a formalisation of existing relationships that have evolved organically.

“SMSF Paraplanners and OFPS each have areas of expertise that complement Fin365. As requests from our customers have become broader, we’ve partnered with both businesses and delivered some great outcomes for our customers. Bringing the combined skills/resources together will allow us to accelerate growth of both capacity and capabilities, meaning we’ll be better positioned to respond to increasing demand.”

SMSF Paraplanners provides outsourcing services such as client services and paraplanning. Managing director, Jo Hall, said the formation and growth of their software services team was also a result of requests from their existing customer base.

“In speaking with our Financial Planning practices, whilst they understood the importance of having great data to improve business management and improved productivity, the challenge was getting the data clean to start with. SMSF Paraplanners’ love to help, so we built a team to assist practices with technology-based revenue management, workflow management, document coding, bulk and granular data cleansing. The transparency and efficiency that our practices have gained has been immense, so we are excited to be able to continue to grow the services we can offer our practices, by merging our Software Services team into the Fin365 team.”

OFPS Founder, Tim Reid, who will join Fin365 as Head of Technology Services, said the combined team will be uniquely positioned to fill a gap that has long existed in financial services.

“In order to thrive, every services business needs to be optimising its use of technology and leveraging data to deliver an exceptional customer experience with optimal business efficiency. In an ideal world, every business should have dedicated staff who perform CTO/Business Analyst type functions. Unfortunately, this is often not financially practical for even a mid-size financial services firm. But accessing this expertise via a flexible outsourcing model is something that even the smallest firm can afford. I’m really excited to be joining forces with the Fin365 and SMSFPP teams, to build such a unique and compelling service offering.”

Services initially offered by the new division will include data services, revenue management, software customisation, dedicated technology support & technology consulting for a broad array of technologies including the full suite of Microsoft technologies, Xplan and a number of other financial planning systems.