In January, advice tech consultancy Finura Group published its 2026 predictions and used four words that should have stopped every practice owner mid-coffee: platforms will “own the adviser desktop.”
Not compete for it. Not integrate with it. Own it.
The report noted that HUB24 and Netwealth now command around 80 per cent of platform net flows and each carries roughly nine times the market capitalisation of Iress — the company that owns Xplan, the CRM most of the industry still runs on. Finura’s framing was blunt: this stopped being a platform war some time ago. It’s ecosystem construction. Advisers, the report observed, love their platforms more than their advice tech providers, and a small practice doesn’t need a full CRM if its platform does most of the job.
One disclosure before we go further: HUB24 has announced a minority investment in Finura’s Advice Designer. So the consultancy predicting that platforms will own your desktop is partly aligned with a platform that intends to. That doesn’t make the prediction wrong. It arguably makes it better informed.
Also, I have no commercial relationship with Netwealth, HUB24, Iress or Finura.
They’ve said it in their own words
This is not speculation about hidden agendas. Both platforms have been telling you their intentions, on the record, for years. Most of the industry filed it under investor relations noise.
HUB24 bought Class in 2022 and myprosperity in 2023, the latter for $40 million. Announcing the myprosperity deal, Andrew Alcock described it as accelerating HUB24’s “platform of the future” strategy and painted the end state plainly: one login, one portal, client data and consents flowing between products without the adviser stitching anything together.
The strategy now has a name. At the 1H FY26 results in February, HUB24 confirmed it is building myhub — an ecosystem giving advisers a single point of access to the HUB24 platform, Class, myprosperity and third-party applications, with AI running through it. A pilot is slated for the first half of FY27.
Netwealth took a different route to the same destination. It bought 25 per cent of data platform Xeppo in 2020, then acquired the rest in 2024 and rebranded it Unify. Matt Heine has been consistent about why: data “at the heart of everything we do,” a single source of client information across the platform, the CRM, the planning software and the fact find. Netwealth’s own full-year report described the acquisition as reducing its reliance on third-party systems.
Heine’s language is worth close attention. He talks about the future-oriented advice practice — and, just as often, about the “licensee of the future,” running oversight and governance from a single data source. Netwealth’s research says the average advice firm runs more than 15 different technologies. The pitch is simple: let us collapse that.
Two listed companies, two multi-year acquisition programs, two chief executives saying the same thing in public. The desktop is the prize. The platform fee on your clients’ assets funds the campaign.
The case for handing it over
Let’s be honest about why this is winning, because it isn’t winning by stealth.
The 15-system problem is real. Every practice owner knows the daily tax of re-keying data between the platform, the CRM, the planning tool, the fact find and the portal. Every data mismatch is a compliance exposure. Every integration that half-works costs staff hours nobody bills for. A genuinely unified stack attacks the single largest efficiency drag in most practices. That’s not marketing. Most practices are losing hours a week to it.
The R&D maths favours them — for now. Against the incumbents, the spending gap is stark. HUB24 and Netwealth each carry around nine times Iress’s market capitalisation, and it shows in the pace of what’s shipping. If the choice is between the platforms’ development budgets and a legacy CRM vendor’s, the platforms look like the safer bet. Whether that’s the real choice is a question we’ll come back to.
The client experience argument is legitimate. Heine is right that clients compare their adviser’s digital experience to their bank and their streaming services, not to the practice down the road. A polished portal with real-time data beats a PDF emailed quarterly. If the platform delivers that and you can’t build it yourself, your clients benefit.
Advisers are already voting. Practices are increasingly monogamous with a primary platform. The flows tell you where the industry’s revealed preference sits, whatever people say at conferences.
The case for keeping your hands on the wheel
Now the other ledger, and it’s heavier than the industry wants to admit.
Free is a price, and it changes. Finura expects advice tech spend to rise 40 to 60 per cent over the next three years, and names the losers as anyone expecting tech to stay cheap. The platform desktop will feel free or near-free while it’s being seeded. It will not stay that way once your workflows, your data and your team’s habits live inside it. Ask anyone who built a business on a social media algorithm how the terms held up.
Switching costs become exit costs. Moving platforms is already painful. Moving platforms when the platform is also your CRM, your portal, your data layer and your workflow engine is a rebuild of the practice. Every month inside the ecosystem raises the toll on the way out. That toll doesn’t just bind you — it prices your optionality, and a practice with no optionality negotiates from weakness on fees, on service, on everything.
Conflict is structural, not hypothetical. A platform’s revenue grows with assets on the platform. Your advice is supposed to be indifferent to where assets sit. Those two facts can coexist under discipline, but the more of your practice the platform runs, the more expensive that discipline becomes. When the ecosystem nudges — a preferred product, a streamlined flow for on-platform assets, a little more friction for everything else — will you notice? Will your staff?
The moat may be shallower than the market cap suggests. Here’s the complication the oligopoly thesis skates over: AI has collapsed the cost of building software. The advice tech stack the platforms are spending years assembling through acquisition — portals, data layers, workflow, document automation — is exactly the kind of product a small, fast team can now build in months rather than years, and price at a fraction of an ecosystem toll. The platforms’ real moats are custody, regulation and the assets themselves; those are durable. But the desktop layer they’re reaching for is the most disruptable part of their ambition, and they’re reaching for it at precisely the moment building it got cheap. It’s entirely possible the winners of the desktop aren’t listed yet. Which cuts both ways: it’s a reason to doubt the platforms can hold the space, and a reason to think hard before locking your practice into anyone’s ecosystem the year before the alternatives arrive.
Concentration is the CSLR lesson wearing a new coat. I wrote recently that the catastrophic failures in this industry come from concentration and related-party gravity, not from advisers being stupid. An 80-per-cent-of-flows duopoly that also owns the desktop is a concentration of a different kind, but it’s still concentration. Duopolies are wonderful for the duopoly.
“But my dealer group handles the tech”
Here’s the group nobody’s making eye contact with: licensees.
Strip a traditional dealer group to its parts. Licensing and compliance oversight. A tech stack, usually resold with a margin. An approved product list. Some professional development. PI arrangements.
Now run the list against what the platforms have said. Oversight and governance from a single data source — Heine has named the licensee of the future as a Unify customer. The tech stack — that’s the whole point of myhub and the reason Finura calls software-resale margins a casualty of the next three years. The APL — increasingly the platform menu in practice.
If the platform does the technology and supplies the oversight data, the licensee’s remaining value is the licence itself and genuine compliance judgement. Some service-based licensees are honest about that and price accordingly. The ones still clipping tickets on software they didn’t build are holding a melting asset. If your dealer group’s proposition leans on its tech stack, you’re paying a margin on something the platforms are about to give you as a loyalty device.
I’ve said before that I’m pro-self-licensing for disciplined firms. This shifts the calculus again — in both directions. Self-licensing gets easier when the platform hands you institutional-grade infrastructure. It gets more dangerous when that infrastructure quietly becomes the thing you can’t leave.
Who really owns the end client?
This is the question underneath all of it, and it’s older than any of these acquisitions.
The industry’s polite answer has always been “the adviser owns the relationship.” And relationships are real. But look at what’s actually being assembled. The platform holds the assets. The platform holds the data — increasingly all of it, across every system you run. The platform owns the portal your client logs into, the app icon on their phone, the interface where they check their wealth at 9pm on a Tuesday. Your brand is a logo slot in someone else’s ecosystem.
When you sell your practice — and every practice sells eventually, well or badly — the buyer isn’t paying for your ownership of the client. They’re paying for the durability and portability of the client’s economics. Buyers price client-by-client. A client who is genuinely loyal to you, whose data you control, who would follow the practice anywhere, is worth a multiple. A client whose real daily relationship is with a platform portal, whose records live in an ecosystem with a toll gate on the exit, is worth less than you think — and the buyer’s due diligence team knows it even if you don’t.
I’ve argued before that sticky is not loyal. Inertia has held this industry’s client books together for decades, and technology is dissolving inertia as a moat. The platforms understand this perfectly. That’s why they’re not buying fund managers. They’re buying the portal, the data layer and the login. They are building loyalty infrastructure — theirs.
None of this means refuse the tools. The efficiency is real, the client experience gains are real, and pretending 2019 was fine is not a strategy. It means going in with your eyes open and your exits mapped. Use the ecosystem; don’t become an organ of it. Keep an independent record of your client data. Know, in writing, what it costs to leave. Make sure the relationship your client values is with your firm, demonstrably, in ways a portal can’t replicate — because that difference is most of what a buyer will one day pay you for.
The platforms have told you what they want. The only question left is what you’re prepared to give them — and whether you’ll still own anything worth selling when the ecosystem is finished being built.
So, a genuine question for the comments, from people living this: has your primary platform made your practice more valuable, or just more efficient? And if those aren’t the same thing — who captured the difference?
Sources: Finura Group, Australian Wealth Tech Predictions 2026 (as reported by Professional Planner and Investment Magazine, January 2026); HUB24 ASX announcements and 1H FY26 results commentary (February 2026); HUB24 December 2025 quarterly update (as reported by Money Management, January 2026); Netwealth FY24 annual report and ASX announcements; Matt Heine comments as reported by ifa and Financial Newswire (2024). HUB24 holds a minority investment in Finura’s Advice Designer, announced in its December 2025 quarterly update. The author has no commercial relationship with any platform, software provider or consultancy named in this piece.