“Every struggling transformation I’ve seen started with the same mistake: treating the front office as recipients of the change rather than active participants in, or even drivers of, that change.”
Depesh Pankhania, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Evotra
Across UK wealth management, the pressures on firms have rarely been more complex. Regulatory expectations keep intensifying. Client expectations are shifting faster than most operating models can accommodate. Consolidators are acquiring boutiques, private equity is reshaping the mid-market, and larger institutions are absorbing established independents at a pace that shows no sign of slowing.
In this environment, the question worth asking isn’t simply whether your firm is acquisition-ready. It’s whether you’re technology-ready for sustainable growth. Can your operating model scale? Can it absorb an acquired business without losing coherence? Can it adapt to regulatory change without expensive rebuilds? Can your advisers grow their books without being slowed down by the very systems meant to support them?
The firms that can answer yes to those questions aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They’re the ones where transformation was done genuinely with the front office, not to it.
“The best-prepared firms we work with aren’t obsessing about being acquisition-ready. They’re building for sustainable growth, and the acquisition readiness falls out of that naturally. Technology is only part of the picture. What actually makes the difference is whether your advisers and operations teams genuinely own the operating model they’re working inside.”
Depesh Pankhania, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Evotra
Rethinking technology-led change
The traditional model of wealth management technology transformation follows a familiar sequence. The technology team defines requirements. The vendor configures the solution. Operations teams are consulted somewhere in the middle. And advisers, the people closest to clients and whose daily practice will be most affected by the change, are brought in at the end for training.
This is technology-led change. It’s been the default approach across the industry for years. But the evidence is increasingly pointing to its limitations.
Gartner’s 2025 global survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and 1,100 business leaders found that, on average, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. The firms that buck this trend achieve a success rate of 71%. What sets them apart isn’t better technology or bigger budgets. It’s that business leaders and technology teams co-own digital delivery end to end, with business areas dedicating their own people and time to the work. Bain’s 2024 research on business transformation reaches the same conclusion from a different angle: 88% of transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions, with talent and capability at the heart of why.
The pattern behind both findings is consistent: When delivery is owned by technology alone, with the business as sponsor rather than co-owner, outcomes fall short. When technology and business share accountability from the outset, outcomes improve dramatically.
In wealth management, where adviser relationships are the core asset and operational complexity runs deep, the cost of getting this wrong is particularly high. A transformation that doesn’t land with the front office isn’t just a wasted investment. It’s a drag on growth for years to come.
A different model: joint delivery
The answer isn’t simply more training, a better communications plan, or a more sympathetic change manager. It’s a fundamentally different approach to how transformation is structured from day one.
A joint delivery model brings technology teams, front office practitioners and the technology vendor together from the outset. Not in sequence, but in genuine collaboration. It recognises that advisers and operations teams hold institutional knowledge that no technology team or vendor can fully anticipate. The target operating model isn’t something defined in a boardroom and then handed down for execution. It’s discovered through real collaboration with the people who will live inside it every day.
This is something we’ve built into everything we do at Evotra. Our joint delivery model sits alongside our clients and their chosen technology vendors throughout the entire programme, combining delivery methods, tools and best practice to keep things on track and on budget. But what makes it work is having people in the room who’ve actually done this work before: consultants who’ve sat in adviser and operations roles, who can translate between the language of technology configuration and the reality of client-facing practice, and who can challenge vendor assumptions that don’t match how a wealth management business actually operates.
That combination of ex-practitioner experience and technical change expertise changes the quality of the conversation. It gives front office teams the confidence to engage genuinely with technical decisions, rather than deferring and regretting it later. And it means the solution that gets built actually reflects how the business works.
Critically, this approach also means business readiness isn’t something that happens at the end of the programme. As we explore in our Business Readiness guide, the bigger the role business readiness plays and the earlier it starts, the higher the long-term success rate of any technology programme. Our business readiness team is embedded from the solution design stage, wearing a “business hat” throughout, so that the decisions being made about configuration, workflow and data are grounded in how the business actually operates.
Why involving the front office earlier accelerates delivery
One of the less obvious benefits of bringing advisers and operations teams in from the start is that it speeds programmes up rather than slowing them down.
In technology-led programmes, the disconnect between what’s being built and what users actually need only becomes visible later on, usually during testing, training or go-live. At that point, changes are expensive, timelines are committed, and the pressure to just go live anyway creates adoption problems that persist long after the programme closes.
In a joint delivery model, that disconnect is surfaced continuously and resolved in real time. Business users flag issues when they’re still design decisions rather than change requests. The vendor can adapt before configurations are locked. And the programme team builds a shared understanding of the target operating model, so that go-live isn’t a leap of faith. It’s a confirmation of something everyone has already bought into.
The people who’ve been part of the journey also become genuine business champions at go-live. Not power users who attended a few extra training sessions (we’ve discussed the risk of that approach in our Superuser Paradox article), but co-authors of the change who can support their colleagues through the transition with real authority and credibility.
From go-live to sustainable growth
What happens after go-live is where joint delivery really proves its value.
In too many transformations, firms emerge still dependent on external consultants for every decision, every configuration change, every process question. That’s not transformation. It’s an extended service contract dressed up as change. And that’s why we set out to do things differently when we founded Evotra.
The firms that come out of transformation strongest are those where internal capability has been built alongside the delivery. Where business champions are embedded across the organisation. Where the target operating model is understood, owned and actively evolved by the people who live inside it. That’s what makes the foundation sustainable, and what allows a firm to keep growing without the next phase of evolution requiring another significant programme.
Argentis Group (formally Hurst Point Group)’s experience illustrates this. Following a three-year programme to consolidate multiple acquired firms, including Argentis, onto a single technology platform, the group emerged with something more valuable than new systems. They emerged with an operating model their people own and can evolve, which is precisely the foundation that enables continued acquisition and integration.
“Consolidating multiple legal entities and over 400 front office and operations staff onto a single technology platform, with significant data migration at every stage, is genuinely complex work, and we knew from the start that the hardest part wouldn’t be the technology. It would be making sure the change landed properly across the business. Bringing our front office, operations, technology and delivery teams together from day one, in a genuine joint delivery model, meant our people were shaping decisions throughout, alongside our technology vendors and Evotra. We own the operating model now, and we have the capability to keep evolving it ourselves.”
Susan Swan, Head of Group Operations, Argentis Wealth Management
It’s also what gives acquirers confidence. When a potential acquirer looks under the bonnet, they’re not just assessing the technology. They’re assessing the operating model, the people, and the firm’s ability to integrate. A front office that understands its own systems, an operations team that can articulate its processes, a technology platform with clear governance and a coherent roadmap: these are the things that signal a well-run business.
Those same foundations also enable you to integrate an acquired firm quickly, to absorb regulatory change without panic, and to scale advice capacity without breaking the model. M&A readiness isn’t a separate capability to be built. It’s a natural byproduct of having built the right foundations for growth.
What this means for your firm
If you’re planning a technology transformation, whether driven by system end-of-life, an acquisition, a strategic reset or simply the need to scale, the question worth asking is: who is in the room when you’re defining your target operating model?
If the honest answer is mostly technology people and vendors, with advisers and operations teams to follow, you’re building in risk. Not just adoption risk, but strategic risk. The risk that when the programme ends, your people don’t fully own the outcome, and every future evolution becomes a new consulting engagement.
The firms that emerge from transformation ready for sustainable growth are those that put the front office at the centre of the process from the start. Not as users to be managed, but as co-authors of the change. That’s what genuine joint delivery looks like.
If you’d like to talk through what this could mean for your business, please do reach out for a fully confidential, no-obligation chat. Get in touch at hello@evotra.co.uk or call us on 020 3410 1966.
Sources
Gartner (October 2024), “Gartner Survey Reveals That Only 48% of Digital Initiatives Meet or Exceed Their Business Outcome Targets.” 2025 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey of 3,186 respondents across 88 countries.
Bain & Company (April 2024), “88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions.” Bain Transformation & Change Survey of over 400 executives and senior leaders.