Most people with an ISA or pension spend little time wondering about the machinery beneath it. A financial adviser recommends investments, a client signs forms, money moves, statements appear and tax wrappers behave as promised. The machinery is noticed chiefly when it squeaks. IntegraFin Holdings has made a business from ensuring that, for its customers, it usually does not.
Its main operation is Transact, an investment platform sold through UK financial advisers. Think of it as the operating table on which an adviser assembles a client's financial life: funds, shares, pensions, ISAs and investment bonds can sit in one place, with reporting and administration attached. IntegraFin does not choose the investments or replace the adviser. It supplies the infrastructure that lets advisers implement, monitor and alter a plan without rebuilding the paperwork every time.
By 30 June 2026, Transact held £85.5 billion of funds under direction for 256,796 clients. It had just recorded its sixth consecutive quarter with more than £1 billion of net inflows. This is not the usual fintech tale of acquiring millions of lightly engaged app users. The average relationship is larger, mediated by a professional adviser and sticky for the prosaic reason that moving a complicated portfolio is work.
30 June 2026
clients
recurring sources, HY26
A wrap before wraps were fashionable
The origin has more personality than the balance sheet suggests. Michael Howard and Ian Taylor began the business in 1999 in a flat above the Firehouse restaurant on Tabernacle Street, Shoreditch. Howard had founded an Australian software developer, ObjectMastery, and brought experience from a market where investment “wraps” had developed earlier. Taylor brought asset-management marketing experience and a sharp instinct for what advisers actually needed.
Transact went live in 2000 and describes itself as Britain's first adviser wrap platform. The name is literal: instead of administering each product separately, the platform wraps investments and tax structures into a consolidated service. That made portfolio changes, valuation reports and record-keeping less of a clerical expedition. It also placed Transact in the flow of daily adviser work, a powerful position for any B2B software provider.
“We weren't a glam rock band trying to get into the punk rock scene - we were one of the original punk rock bands.”Ian Taylor, comparing Transact with traditional life companies entering platforms
The punk comparison was Taylor's, and it fits better than corporate jargon would. Transact entered before the large incumbents had decided exactly how a platform should look. It was prepared for pension tax simplification in 2006 on the first day the rules changed. In 2017, it was first to market with a Lifetime ISA wrapper on launch day. Regulation, typically treated as weather to endure, became a release schedule.
Twenty-one years of money gathering · funds under direction
The staircase includes market movements as well as client inflows. It shows the scale of the administrative base, not investment performance promised to any customer.
The advantage is control, not novelty
Transact competes in a busy field that includes Quilter, Aviva, AJ Bell Investcentre, Nucleus, Fidelity Adviser Solutions, Aberdeen, Hubwise and Parmenion. Many platforms can hold a pension or ISA. IntegraFin's distinction is architectural: it owns the core technology, develops it through teams in Britain and Australia, and operates its own life companies for pension and bond wrappers. It can decide the roadmap without negotiating every change with an outsourced platform engine.
That control matters when the request is unglamorous but consequential - a revised tax calculation, a new application path, an API that removes rekeying, an inheritance-planning wrapper. Regional service teams sit beside the technology proposition. The combination is deliberately less “download our app” and more “call someone who knows why this case is unusual.” In a regulated advice firm, exceptions consume the day.
The economics are as tidy as the proposition. Transact charges a tiered annual fee linked to funds on the platform, plus fixed fees for certain wrappers and smaller dealing or other income. As portfolios rise and new money arrives, recurring revenue follows. In the first half of the 2026 financial year, 99 per cent of platform revenue was recurring. Group revenue rose 11 per cent to £85.8 million and underlying pre-tax profit rose 16 per cent to £43.9 million. Transact accounted for 97 per cent of group revenue in the previous full year.
There is a built-in restraint: the effective fee rate tends to fall as larger portfolios enter lower charging bands, and IntegraFin has cut some wrapper charges. Scale must do the compensating. Strong retention, more clients and transfers from rival platforms become the flywheel. The platform claimed roughly a quarter of UK adviser-platform net flows in the first half of 2026.
The second act met the migration problem
Owning one critical system encouraged IntegraFin to reach for another. In January 2021 it acquired Time4Advice, maker of the CURO CRM and back-office software. CURO is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. It records client relationships, advice workflows, documents and business processes - the messy work that happens before and around a transaction on an investment platform.
The logic was attractive. Connect the adviser’s system of record to Transact and data could travel rather than be retyped. A remuneration API now lets CURO reconcile adviser fees automatically across thousands of clients. IntegraFin also promised that Transact integrations would remain open to other software providers. That detail matters: advisers do not want their operational stack turned into a hostage negotiation.
IntegraFin paid £8.6m upfront for Time4Advice, with another £8.6m deferred and up to £8.6m contingent on performance. In FY2025 it impaired all £5.3m of acquisition goodwill and £2.2m of acquired intangibles. The weak point was not the Transact platform. It was the pace and economics of moving firms to the next-generation CURO product and widening its user market.
The acquisition announcement spoke of more functionality, sooner. The accounts supplied the colder sequel. CURO licence revenue grew only 2 per cent to £5 million in FY2025, while the group recognised a £7.5 million non-cash impairment. Licence users were still growing - up 10 per cent to 3,395 at year-end - but expected user growth and profitability had not justified the original carrying value.
What changed management's mind was evidence, not a sudden abandonment of the strategy. Forecasts were reset, goodwill was written off, development continued and the emphasis shifted to migrating existing customers, broadening CURO's addressable market and proving integrations. At March 2026, CURO had 3,393 paying licence users, 10 per cent more than a year earlier, and half-year licence revenue was up 4 per cent. Progress, yes; vindication, not yet.
A playbook built for slow compounding
IntegraFin's useful lessons are operational rather than inspirational. Its success came from choosing a knotty workflow, staying close to expert users and treating new regulations as moments to earn trust. The platform's technical ownership shortens the distance between adviser complaint and software change. Human service catches what automation cannot. Recurring charges align revenue with the size of the installed base.
- Own the bottleneck. Proprietary technology is valuable when it controls a process customers cannot casually skip, and when the owner can maintain it for decades.
- Launch against real deadlines. Pension reform and the Lifetime ISA gave Transact specific dates on which readiness became visible.
- Keep the ecosystem open. APIs create leverage only if customers can connect the tools they already use; CURO cannot be the compulsory answer to every adviser.
- Pair automation with named help. Wealth administration contains unusual cases, vulnerable clients and irreversible tax consequences. Software needs an escalation path.
- Write down the story before the product. The CURO impairment acknowledged that an integration thesis and customer migration are not the same achievement.
This model is not universal. It works best where assets stay for years, regulation creates administrative depth, customers value service over the cheapest headline price and the provider can fund a large permanent operations team. It travels poorly into markets where users switch weekly, fees collapse to zero, products are simple, or an outsourced engine can change just as quickly. Owning the plumbing is a moat only when the plumbing is difficult.
“The human relationship element of financial advice will remain critical, with AI augmenting but not replacing the trust and accountability elements of regulated personal financial advice.”Alex Scott, group chief executive
That view also frames IntegraFin's latest technology programme. The group has begun applying AI and automation to software development, support functions and the Transact proposition. The aim is productivity, not an adviser-shaped chatbot. In July 2026 it also launched a Flexible Reversionary Trust for intergenerational planning and expanded online bond setup, withdrawals and tax reporting. The inheritance-tax treatment of pensions is due to change in April 2027, making the company's in-house bond wrappers newly relevant. Again, regulation becomes the product clock.
The risks remain visible. Revenue moves with average funds under direction, so falling markets can tug on earnings even when clients stay. Competitors can cut prices. Advice firms consolidate and demand more integration. Cybersecurity and regulatory failures would strike directly at the trust the business sells. CURO still has to demonstrate that its economics can match its strategic role.
Yet the first 25 years offer a sober explanation for IntegraFin's endurance. It chose an essential, complicated job; it built the system itself; and it kept improving around the edges where advisers feel friction. From £1.7 billion of funds under direction in 2005 to £85.5 billion in 2026, the compounding has been anything but punk-rock fast. It has been patient, technical and repetitive - which, in financial infrastructure, may be the more rebellious choice.