Nick Booth, Commercial Director, Graphene
Ask a wealth manager who controls their business and most will say they do. Then ask who sets their platform fees, who owns the screen their clients log into, who decides when a new feature ships and when it doesn’t. The answers point somewhere else entirely: the platform provider. A lot of firms are waking up to the gap between feeling in control and actually being in control, and it’s the reason Model B keeps coming up.
If the term’s new to you, Model B is the adviser-as-platform arrangement. Instead of renting space on a third party’s platform and living by its rules, the advice firm runs its own white-labelled infrastructure alongside a specialist custodian. You don’t build the technology from scratch, and you don’t hand over the keys either. You own the relationship and the economics, and you let a specialist partner handle the parts that genuinely need a specialist.
You’re renting, and the landlord sets the rules
Here’s the position most firms are in without quite naming it. You’re on someone else’s platform. They set the custodian. They set the fee structure. Their branding sits between you and your client, and their interface is the experience your client actually has of your firm. When you want something changed, you join a queue behind every other firm on that platform, and you wait.
That’s not a partnership. That’s a tenancy. And like any tenant, you’re paying rent on something you’ll never own, while the landlord captures a slice of every pound that flows through. Over a few years that slice is not small.
Model B flips the arrangement. You set your own custodian and your own platform fees, which means you capture more of the economic value your business creates and you lower your long-term operating costs at the same time. The money that used to leak out to a provider stays in the business. For a growing firm, that compounds.
Own the brand, own the relationship
There’s a subtler cost to the rented model, and it shows up in who your client thinks they’re dealing with. Every time they log in to a third party’s interface, with a third party’s branding, the platform provider is quietly inserting itself into your relationship. It’s a middleman you didn’t ask for, sitting in the middle of the one thing your business actually runs on: client trust.
A white-labelled environment closes that gap. The interface, the onboarding, the whole experience carries your brand and nobody else’s. The client deals with you, start to finish. You also get to shape that experience instead of accepting whatever the standard platform decided everyone should have. Standardised platforms are rigid by design, because they’re built for the average of every firm using them. Run your own and you can plug in the specialised data feeds and planning tools that fit your specific clients, not the generic ones that fit nobody in particular.
Separation that the regulator likes
This is the part that surprises people, because it sounds like more responsibility and it’s actually less. With Consumer Duty raising the scrutiny on fees and value for money, the FCA wants to see clean lines of responsibility. Model B draws them clearly. Your firm handles advice, safeguarding, and the client relationship. The technology and custody partner handles client money rules, reporting, and the constant drip of legislative updates.
You’re not carrying the back-office regulatory machinery in-house, and you’re not pretending a generic platform’s compliance is the same as your own. The responsibilities sit where they should, with the party equipped to carry each one. That’s easier to defend to a regulator, and it’s easier to sleep on.
The operational dividend
The unglamorous benefit is the one I’d weigh most heavily. Running clearing, settlement, and custody in-house is expensive and it’s a reliable source of bottlenecks, the kind of hidden administrative drag that slows everything down and shows up nowhere on a brochure. Hand those to a specialist and they stop being your problem. Your people go back to the work that actually justifies your fees: planning, strategy, the client in front of them.
The firms doing this aren’t building technology empires. They’re refusing to choose between renting someone else’s platform and constructing their own from nothing. Model B is the third option, an API-first setup you can shape to fit, without a legacy back office hanging round your neck. You get the control of owning the platform and the focus of outsourcing the plumbing.
The wealth managers moving to Model B have worked out something simple. Being at the mercy of a platform provider is a choice, not a fact of life. You can keep paying rent and accepting the house rules, or you can own the building and write your own. More and more firms are deciding they’d rather be the master of their own fate than wait in a queue for permission.
I’d welcome a conversation
If you’re weighing up your platform strategy, I’d welcome a conversation. The right answer depends on where you’re headed: your target assets, your client base, and whether owning your platform infrastructure beats renting someone else’s. I work with wealth managers thinking exactly this through, with no pitch and no assumption about where you’ll land, just a straight conversation about what fits your firm.
