What it's like to work with us
Software that fits, services that flex, and a team that turns up.
Most B2B software is one-size-fits-all. The size, of course, being someone else's.
Most vendors ship a product, hand over the credentials, and schedule a check-in for next quarter. Implementation is your problem. Configuration is your problem. Making it fit your firm's actual workflows? Definitely your problem.
We don't work like that.
Focus is a product company first, the Advice Engine, Cash Flow Modelling, the Wealth Management CRM, the lot. But the products only get the firm 70% of the way home. The other 30% is the bit nobody likes to talk about: configuring the rules to your firm's methodology, making the workflows match your operations, fitting the digital experience into the rest of your customer journey.
We do that bit too. With our team, sat next to yours.
Want a feel for how the work actually runs?
Five-minute call about how a Focus engagement starts.
Beyond the licence key
Product, plus the team that makes it fit
Four things that come with Focus and rarely come with anyone else.
Professional services who actually configure things
Not 'here's a CSV template, fill it in and we'll discuss.' A team that takes your advice methodology, your suitability rules, your investment philosophy, and turns them into how the engine runs. Bespoke modules where the standard doesn't fit. Done by people who built the engine.
Design experts who care how the tool feels next to the rest of your stack
Your client portal lives next to your existing marketing site, your CRM, your legacy investment platform. The Focus team works with your design system to make the new bit feel like part of the whole, not a third-party widget bolted on. Design thinking is the approach; the integration with your wider digital estate is what makes it stick.
User research and value-metric collaboration
We work with your user research and testing teams (or stand them up if you don't have them) to evidence what's working, adviser productivity, client engagement, conversion through the journey. Numbers that prove the change earned its place. Not a feature-shipped count.
A platform built for regulated firms — see Enterprise
Security posture, governance, scale, integration depth. The institutional bits don't slow us down because they're built into how we deliver, not bolted on for procurement. The detail lives on the [Enterprise page](/enterprise), every claim there, in writing.
Six commitments, every engagement
How we behave, on every programme. Ask any current customer; we will give you their number.
Collaborative partnership
Proactive, transparent, and happy to be checked. We can put you on the phone with current customers running similar programmes, you should hear it from them, not us.
Customer-centric, every person in the value chain
Our user-centred design practice works with real users, not just business analysts. Adviser, paraplanner, end client, ops, everyone in the journey gets a great experience, not just the end client.
Delivery risk managed honestly
Fifteen years of enterprise programmes shipped to plan. Where phasing would ease adoption, we recommend it. Too much change at once is risk theatre dressed up as ambition.
Governance that flexes to yours
30+ years running complex programmes for the UK's largest financial institutions. We know how to fit your governance model rather than impose ours.
Commercials with no surprises
Standard options that flex to your situation. Forecastable costs, no unexpected charges, no expansion scope creep dressed as "discovery".
Step-change outcomes from single components
One customer saw 9 hours saved per advice case, 90% automation, and 30% productivity gains from individual modules. The whole platform is bigger than the sum of those parts.
See how we'd run it on your stack.
30-minute conversation, your stack on the table, our team in the room.
Configure first. Custom when it counts.
Off the rack, Focus fits most firms reasonably well. With a few adjustments — your advice rules, your charging models, your suitability methodology — it fits like it was made for you. That's our configuration philosophy.
About 80% of what most firms need is configuration of an existing module: different rules, different copy, different routing. We do that fast.
The remaining 20% is genuinely bespoke: a calculation engine your firm has built up over decades, an integration with a legacy platform we don't ship out of the box, a custom MFE for a journey nobody else runs. We build that too, and the team that ships your custom module is the same team that maintains the core engine. Not a contractor handover.
You get the flexibility of made-for-you with the velocity of a product. Every improvement we make to the core, you get automatically, no custom upgrade path, no fork drift, no "we'll get to that next quarter".
In fifteen years, we have not had a customer ask for something we could not accommodate.
Why we test, and why you should care
UX is not UI, and the difference matters
User experience and user interface are not the same thing. UI is what it looks like — colours, fonts, button placement. UX is whether it works — can a user complete a task efficiently, confidently, and without unnecessary friction?
A beautiful interface with a confusing workflow is bad UX. A plain interface with a clear, logical flow is good UX. We care about both, but we always start with the experience before we worry about the aesthetics.
Service blueprints: seeing the whole picture
Before we design any screen, we map the entire service. A service blueprint shows every touchpoint a user has with your organisation, not just the digital ones. It includes the adviser conversation, the compliance review, the back-office processing, the client communication.
This matters because digital tools do not exist in isolation. An advice journey that works beautifully on screen but creates a manual bottleneck in your operations team is not a good experience — it just moves the problem somewhere less visible.
Our service blueprints map front-stage actions (what the user sees), back-stage actions (what your team does), and support processes (systems, data flows, compliance checks). This gives us — and you — a complete picture of where technology can genuinely improve things, and where it would just add complexity.
The result is design that accounts for your whole operation, not just the screen the user touches.
Proof, not beliefs
Why we put UX first
Two of the most-quoted research bodies on UX’s commercial impact, from McKinsey’s 5-year, 300-company Design Index and Forrester’s widely-cited ROI work.
+32 pts
Faster revenue growth
Top-quartile design-led firms vs industry counterparts over a 5-year period, McKinsey Design Index, 2018.
$100
Return on every $1 invested in UX
Forrester research, widely cited across the UX practice when sizing the business case.
Content before screens
Most teams start with wireframes. We start with words.
The content of an interface — the questions it asks, the labels it uses, the guidance it provides — determines whether users succeed or fail. A fact-find form that asks "What is your attitude to investment risk?" will get a different response to one that asks "How would you feel if your investments dropped 20% in value?" Both are about risk tolerance. One gives you useful data. The other gives you a compliance checkbox.
Our content designers work with subject matter experts and real users to get the language right before a single screen is designed. They test whether users understand the questions being asked, whether the guidance is helpful, and whether the terminology matches what people actually say, not just what the industry calls things.
Why this matters commercially
Content changes late in a project are expensive. If a compliance team reviews a finished screen and changes the wording of three questions, that triggers a design change, a development change, and a testing cycle. If those same wording decisions are made and validated during content design — before any screen exists — the cost is two days of research instead of three weeks of rework.
For regulated financial services, where every word carries compliance weight, getting content right early is not a luxury. It is risk management.
A typical engagement
Every programme is different, but the shape is usually similar. We recommend phasing when it helps.
Discovery
We learn your business: advice processes, product choices, integration landscape, and team structure. We map your requirements to our platform capabilities and identify where configuration is needed.
Configuration
Your advice rules, charging models, and business processes are configured into the platform. We migrate your data, integrate with your existing systems, and build any custom MFE dashboards you need.
Pilot and rollout
We start with a controlled pilot group, measure outcomes, and refine. When you are confident, we roll out progressively, reducing delivery risk and giving your teams time to adopt the new workflow.
Continuous improvement
Post go-live, you get every product improvement automatically. Our customer success team works with you to optimise usage, measure outcomes, and plan the next phase of your transformation.
DELIVERY OUTCOMES
Delivery outcomes
Up to 50%
Reduction in adviser journey times
14 / 9 / 7 yrs
NFU Mutual / Santander / Skipton, and counting
600 hrs
Saved per month at Skipton Building Society
3,500
Business users on the platform
15 yrs
Zero unplanned downtime since 2010
30+ yrs
Delivering enterprise programmes
90%
Advice case automation achieved
60%
Reduction in time to prepare advice
Agile, but not reckless
We work in agile sprints, but we do not treat agile as an excuse to skip planning. Every piece of work starts with clear objectives, a defined scope, and agreed success criteria. We know that in regulated financial services, "move fast and break things" is not an option.
Our four development squads each focus on a specific domain, Digital Client Engagement, Advice Delivery, Enterprise Advice, and Platform Services. This structure means the people building your features have deep domain expertise, not just technical skill.
We also maintain a professional services capability for customers who need implementation support beyond standard configuration. Whether you need help with data migration, custom integrations, or bespoke reporting, our team has done it before at enterprise scale.
On the record
Agile delivery in regulated financial services, let's talk through it.
No glossy PDF (yet). What we have: ten years of agile inside FCA-regulated firms, and an hour for an honest conversation.
After go-live: ongoing partnership
Delivery does not end at go-live. When your platform is live, you step into a structured support model designed to keep things running smoothly and improve continuously.
99.5% service availability SLA, backed by priority-based response times from P1 critical through to P4 low. Our three-tier support model means your team handles 1st line user response, our Service and Technical Analysts manage end-to-end incident and change management at 2nd line, and our Product Owners and Architects are on hand for complex issues at 3rd line.
Weekly BAU meetings between your team and our support contacts keep incidents, service requests, and change requests on track, with minutes captured every time. Monthly Service Reviews between our Customer Support Manager and your Service Owner cover SLA performance, incident trends, root cause analysis for any P1/P2 incidents, and the product roadmap ahead.
Behind the scenes, our 24/7/365 Security Operations Centre monitors threats around the clock, Azure Application Insights runs automated health checks across every service, and we proactively manage keys, secrets, and certificates before they expire.
This is what a genuine technology partnership looks like after the project is delivered.
Where the work lands
The way we work shows up across the rest of the site. If any of these make sense for your firm, that is the conversation to have first.
The product:
- Advice Engine — deterministic, evidenced suitability assessments. The core of every advice journey.
- Cash Flow Modelling — modelling that runs as part of the advice, not on the side.
- Wealth Management CRM — built for advice, not adapted from sales.
- Digital Client Engagement — the client-facing side of every journey.
- APIs & Integration — for firms with their own front end.
The proof:
- Customer Results — outcomes from real firms, named.
- Enterprise, security, governance, scale, integration depth. The institutional detail.
If our software were clothing, it'd fit you exactly.
And get you compliments. Plenty of them.
Trusted by leading advice businesses
The numbers we keep on the same slide
Because they keep being true.
Up to 50%
Reduction in adviser journey times
14 yrs
Partnership with NFU Mutual
9 yrs
Partnership with Santander
7 yrs
Partnership with Skipton Building Society
ISO 27001
Certified information security management
10M+
Calculations powered every month