How many systems does it take to give one piece of advice?
If the answer's more than one then it's costing more than you think.
The real cost of your disconnected stack
Count them. CRM. Financial planning tool. Client portal. Risk profiler. Document management. Fund data feed. Back-office platform. Maybe a couple of spreadsheets holding it all together.
Every time data moves between systems, someone rekeys it. Every time someone rekeys it, errors creep in. Every error is a compliance risk. Every compliance risk is a cost.
Your advisers are not slow because they lack skill. They are slow because they spend half their day copying data from one screen to another. Your paraplanners are not inefficient; they are trapped in a workflow that was never designed, just accumulated.
The typical advice firm loses 9 hours per case to administrative friction. Not because the work is complex, but because the tools do not talk to each other.
And here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: bolting on another integration layer to connect your existing tools is not a strategy. It is a sticking plaster on a structural problem. At some point you have to ask whether the architecture itself is the bottleneck.
IN BRIEF
Bolting another integration on top is not a strategy. The architecture is the bottleneck.
One platform. One data model. 23 API domains.
Focus replaces the Frankenstack with a single, integrated platform built from the ground up for advice delivery.
Instead of connecting disconnected tools with fragile middleware, Focus provides one data model where every piece of client information lives once and flows everywhere it needs to go. No rekeying. No reconciliation. No "which system is the source of truth?" conversations.
Our API-first architecture exposes 23 public API domains covering 352 routes and 633 endpoints. Everything is documented at docs.focusadvice.tech using the OpenAPI specification. If you need to integrate with an external system — your platform, your fund data provider, your document store — you can. But you are integrating with one system, not twelve.
The result? Skipton Building Society saved 600 hours per month after consolidating onto Focus. Not because we are magic, but because we eliminated the gaps between systems where time and accuracy disappear.
WHAT THE FRANKENSTACK COSTS
The Frankenstack costs you. The numbers say so.
207
Independent observations from advisers and paraplanners
40%
Of categorised feedback is stack pain, workflow, data, integration, sprawl
5–10
Disconnected systems in the typical advice stack
9 hrs
Lost per case to admin friction, rekeying, chasing, reconciling
60–70%
Of adviser time spent on admin instead of advice
£50–85k
Of every adviser's salary, per year, on work a tool should do
Tools that replace the Frankenstack
Focus is not a single product — it is a connected suite designed to cover the full advice lifecycle without gaps.
Focus Software Suite — The complete platform: CRM, advice engine, client engagement, document management and integrations in one place.
APIs and Integration — 23 API domains with OpenAPI documentation. Let Focus be your ecosystem — or connect it to whatever's left of the old one.
Whether you are replacing everything at once or migrating one capability at a time, the architecture supports both approaches. Most clients start with the area that hurts most — usually the advice process itself — and expand from there.
Ready to retire the Frankenstack?
Talk to us about how Focus replaces fragmented tools with a single, connected advice platform.