Everytime Jonathan Gunby steps into the office he has occupied for the past three and a half years, he gets a “weird” feeling.
That is because when Gunby first began to occupy the chief executive’s office at Transact, he was following in the footsteps of one of his closest friends, Ian Taylor, the original architect of the Transact business.
Taylor retired from his role at Transact in 2021, and died in 2022.
Gunby says he "hasn’t changed the office much. Ian and I were opposites in so many ways, but we were great friends. When he was looking at joining Transact, I was one of the people he spoke to about it, and I remember thinking what a big risk it was. But he made it work. I have so many memories of Ian and stories.
"We met when we first worked together, and I remember once Ian’s car broke down and he asked for a lift to work, so I said no problem, but I was playing squash that evening.
"Ian asked me if there was a bar at the squash club, and there was. So while playing squash, he sat at the bar having a drink and doing a crossword. And that became a bit of a routine for us for a while."
Gunby became chief executive of Transact, having previously been head of strategy, at a time when the platform industry was undergoing the first major wave of change since Taylor and others came to the market with platforms that were not part of bigger organisations.
That change encompasses the challenge of dealing with falling asset prices for the first time in decades, consolidation among advice firms, the rise in model portfolio services and the rapid adoption of new technology by competitors and customers alike.
Gunby’s view is that while all of these changes are happening, “the thing that isn’t changing is that service levels are the most important thing. Scale and technology mean we have been able to implement price cuts every year for the past 15 years, but service is the number one.”
Transact presently has 7,500 advisers on its platform and 228,000 customers.
Gunby says about a third of the new inflows each year are from existing clients doing more business on the platform.
Tomorrow's world
In terms of service levels, he says one of the innovations that began as a temporary measure during the pandemic but which is now a growing part of the business is the use of live chat and screen sharing to deal with adviser queries.
He says: “Of course we could do that before the working from home culture becoming part of the adviser's life, but actually it wasn’t that popular then. But now it is the primary way we communicate with advisers. They are much more confident communicating this way and find it more convenient.
