BT Financial Group provided a "strategic overview" of its Panorama project to the market yesterday, in which it revealed a reduction of its investment products from more than 50 down to three.
The company's Panorama platform, which has been in development since 2012, has a "total expected cost" of $630 million with $390 million spent to date (as at 30 September 2016), said BT.
As part of the project, BT will move from four trustees to one, 12 superannuation funds to one, and seven registry systems to one.
Commenting on the changes, BT general manager for platforms and investments John Shuttleworth said BT is an "incredibly complex business" due to its organic growth and, as a result, there is "incredible product duplication" within the business.
"We’ve got all this product and complexity through the acquisitions that have happened over the years so we’ve got eight platforms, 12 retirement products, 15 personal super, eight investment constructs and five corporate super [funds]," Mr Shuttleworth said.
"Going forward we reckon we need three products. We need an investment product we need a super product and we need SMSFs.
"So what we're trying to do is this radical simplification of a quite complex business to set us up for the future."
Mr Shuttleworth said the duplication within BT is "very common" in most wealth management businesses.
"Over the last five years we've been really trying to tackle this because we can see where the market is going and the fact that we need to be the most efficient at the lowest cost of producing," he said.
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