Your data is in there. Getting it out is the hard part.
Legacy and incumbent advice platforms weren't built to let your data leave. We were built to get it out — and make it usable.
Why your data won't come out
Firms keep asking us the same thing: how do we actually get our data out of the systems we already pay for? The honest answer is that many incumbents make it hard on purpose.
Rate-limited APIs. Where an API exists at all, calls are throttled so hard that a full extract takes days — or simply times out.
APIs that aren't up to the job. Partial fields, missing history, no bulk access. Fine for a demo, useless for a migration.
No API at all. And a "request an export" process measured in weeks.
The walled-garden playbook. Some incumbents are following Apple's model: lock the data in, make leaving expensive and painful.
Layer that across the Frankenstack — a dozen cobbled-together systems — and nobody can get a single, shared view of their own data.
Migrating off our old back-office system was awful — lots of spreadsheets, and we still can't see the old documents.
— a paraplanner, on a public adviser forum
THE EVIDENCE
This isn't a niche gripe
£517m
Lost by UK advice firms each year to platform-switching inefficiency (the lang cat)
Lowest
"Integration with other technologies" is the attribute advisers rate platforms worst on (NextWealth)
~3.1/5
Typical integration score incumbent back-office systems earn in adviser reviews (NextWealth)
~1 in 5
Of 207 adviser observations cluster around data quality, integration, migration and sprawl (Focus Insights)
A data lake is only half the solution
A data lake is a popular reflex right now. It's also only half the answer.
A lake gives you somewhere to put data — not a way to get it out of the systems that are throttling you in the first place. It holds data; it doesn't make it usable, because no advice tooling sits on top of it. And you've now built a second data problem next to your first one.
Three questions to ask before you dig one. Do you want to see all your data? Do you want to use it, fast? Do you want advice tools that read it too?
A data lake answers the first. Focus answers all three. The industry's own language is converging here — the 2026 outlook from Oliver Wyman calls the goal a "unified client brain": a single intelligence layer over the data, not just a reservoir of it.
How Focus solves it
In. Out. Usable. Shared.
Data in
Bulk import and integration that actually moves your history — not a trickle through a throttled API.
Data out
You're never locked in. Export is a feature, not a fight — your data stays yours.
Data usable
Advice engines that read your data and act on it, the moment it lands.
One shared view
End the Frankenstack — one data model, one source of truth across every connected system.
THE INTEGRATION HUB
Focus sits in the middle, connecting everything
23
Live connections to platforms and custodians, valued daily — with more landing through 2026
Origo
Connected for end-to-end straight-through processing across providers
1
One connected view — legacy systems, platforms, Origo and AI, joined up
Stop fighting your own data.
Be your own data source in an uncertain world. And migrating off your current platform costs you nothing — 30 days free, we match your six-month buy-out, free migration.