Origo CEO Anthony Rafferty is urging financial services companies, teams and individuals to celebrate their wins from 2024.
The Financial Services industry is used to dealing with change, but 2024 has been a particular year for it. This has included the abolition of the Lifetime Allowance, continuing adjustments to Consumer Duty and proposed changes to pensions and inheritance tax announced in the autumn Budget, amongst others.
When we are faced with a year of changes, combined with everything we need to do simply to run our businesses, it can lead us to concentrate on our outstanding tasks. After all, that is how we generally work, looking forward, what needs to be done and by when? What’s still on our ‘to do’ list rather than all the things we ticked off the list in the past year.
There is a constant treadmill moving forward, which we all need for our businesses, but sometimes we need also to step off and look back to where we’ve come from and what we’ve achieved.
When we celebrate our accomplishments we feel more valued and appreciated. How much better to work in a positive workplace culture, where what we achieve is recognised and not taken for granted.
Every team will have had its wins and celebrating our achievements can highlight how teamwork contributed to the success.
Recognising milestones also promotes a sense of shared purpose and pride in what we do as a company or firm. The shared sense of purpose that we have at Origo, for example, is that what we do helps deliver better experiences and outcomes across the industry, and especially for the end consumer.
And there’s no better time to pause, reflect, and acknowledge our progress than at the end of the calendar year. Not only does it confirm how much we’ve done in the past 12 months and how far we’ve come, but it sets us up for the challenges and opportunities in the year ahead. And, we can be sure, there will be plenty to contend with in 2025!
Since becoming a CEO, I’ve found it to be highly beneficial to mark our achievements at Origo. We celebrated our 35th anniversary this year – one of our wins – and some further comment and another nine can be found below.
Whether you are leading a business or a team within it, take a few minutes to jot down what has been achieved and let the people who achieved it know that they are recognised and valued. Set up you, your business and your teams for a great 2025.
10 things Origo has achieved in 2024
Here are 10 highlights from Origo’s 2024 that I hope may help inspire you to look at your own achievements and use them as a foundation for great things in 2025.
1. Celebrating 35 years serving the financial services industry.
The original Fintech, this year Origo celebrated providing practical, market-leading and market-changing technology solutions to the financial services industry for three and a half decades!
2. Another record breaking year for pension transfers
We started the year celebrating another record breaking year for the Origo Transfer Service, revealing that over 1.2 million defined contribution pensions transfers were completed through the service in 2023, up over 22% from just over 1 million in 2022. All the data points to 2024 exceeding those figures. Watch this space.
3. Highlighting improvements in pension transfers times
Origo’s quarterly Transfer Index tracks the transfer times of 30 leading providers in the market. The latest data shows that overall average pension transfer times have improved by 12.2% from January 23, reducing from 14 calendar days to 12.3 calendar days and by 16.7%, from 12 calendar days to 10 calendar days, for simple transfers, over the same period. In October 2024, we were able to announce that pension transfer times were at their lowest since the end of the pandemic in 2021, even as transfers volumes have continued to increase.
4. Origo Annuity Transfer Tracking – creating efficiencies for the market
In May we announced that Canada Life was the first provider to sign up to our newly launched Annuity Transfer Tracking service. This service tracks the progress of annuity purchases, keeping advisers and their clients informed of progress and saving provider time and resource in follow up calls from advice firms. By November, another nine key providers had signed to the service – the majority of the annuity market.
5. Unipass Letter of Authority – a pivotal year
We predicted that 2024 would be a pivotal year for digitising the Letter of Authority process. We were right.
In March we announced that 16 providers were backing the Unipass Letter of Authority, as we proved that switching to a digital Letter of Authority (LoA) process not only makes commercial sense for providers but delivers a considerably better service to financial advisers and their clients.
In November, we announced that from Q1 2025, Unipass Letter of Authority will be whole of market, giving advisers a simple means to send their LoAs to well over 100 providers.
6. Boosting Origo’s management line-up
Reflecting Origo’s increasing success in the market, in June, we were delighted to announce that Vivienne Sacco, ex group and UK CFO at FNZ, had joined Origo as Chief Finance Officer. Vivienne’s appointment is part of the expansion of Origo’s management team as we go from strength to strength.
7. 10 years of Unipass Identity
As well as marking Origo’s 35 year milestone, we also celebrated the 10th anniversary of Unipass Identity. Over the past decade, Unipass Identity has enabled 30.9million – and counting – successful authentications, enabling users to quickly and securely access every financial services website and platform they use, without the need to log in with user names and passwords every time. When considering the productivity gains and the efficiency savings this has delivered, we are looking at millions of industry hours saved. An achievement well worth marking in our minds.
8. Origo Integration Hub achieves 100+ connections
Alongside the Letter of Authority process, one of the biggest bugbears for financial advisers has been the lack of integration between systems, leading to re-keying and potential for mistakes, neither of which we should be experiencing in 2024. Origo Integration Hub enables product providers, platforms and adviser software companies to connect once with the Hub and then send data to their chosen business partners. In 2024, our users could access 150+ integrations. Over 6,000 advisers are now receiving their data via the Hub per day.
9. Pensions Dashboards
Origo has been committed to the Pension Dashboard initiative from the outset. In 2021, with Capgemini, we won the contract to build the central digital architecture for the Dashboard. In a separate, standalone project, our Origo Dashboard Connector (ODC) enables pension schemes and providers to securely connect to that architecture, saving them the time, resource and cost of developing an in-house connection. In September we enhanced our offering by making the ODC’s data Matching Toolkit as an independent tool for providers to test their ability to match Find requests received via pensions dashboards.
10. Foundations for 2025
Origo is dedicated to connecting the financial services marketplace for the benefit of everyone – boosting efficiencies, improving performance, and reducing integration costs, while significantly improving financial outcomes for consumers.
2024 saw Origo build on this solid foundation, which is enabling us to further grow and enhance our software and services throughout the market in 2025. A first sign of this was national advice firm Openwork announcing it is rolling out Unipass Letter of Authority to all its advisers, creating a much more streamlined and visible process and helping Openwork provide a faster and better service to clients.
In 2024, we have also been laying the groundwork for the launch of new services – more on those in 2025!
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