You know that feeling when the day flies by — not to anything productive, but jumping between 13 open tabs to finish one task?

You’re not alone, so in this blog we cover;

• Why (and how) fragmented tech stacks slow down advice firms.

• The real impact of context switching on admin teams and how it adds costs.

• Why wealth management workflows are uniquely vulnerable to tool overload.

• BONUS: The new 4admin x Selectapension integration, eliminating duplication and speeding up replacement workflows.

Fragmentation = Friction

Let’s paint a familiar picture:

• Tab 1: CRM open

• Tab 2: sending emails

• Tab 3: viewing a PDF

• Tab 4: filing an Excel

• Tab 5: dialling the phone

This is daily life in a financial advice firm’s back-office. Stitching together a tech stack made up of multiple 3rd party solutions. None of it connects properly. It was never designed to.

You know the feeling when the day vanishes — not into anything high-value — but into click-hopping between five different systems, just to move a task from 60% - 80% complete?

It’s not just frustrating. It’s expensive.

The industry doesn’t need more standalone tools. It needs connectivity — a way to turn historically fragmented systems into smoother workflows.

Context Switching: The Silent Killer

Thing is, we’re not just talking about productivity here.

We’re talking neuroscience, Harvard and MIT suggest it takes 23 minutes to regain full focus after switching tasks.

So if your team is bouncing between tabs, tools, and tasks all day, they’re not multitasking — they’re bleeding capacity.

And the worst part? It feels like work is getting done. But really, most of the day is spent preparing to do the work: finding the document, checking the last email thread, remembering which spreadsheet has the fee breakdown, realising the CRM entry is out of date, opening Teams to ask a question…

It adds up. And it adds cost.

This is the kind of inefficiency that never shows up on the P&L — but kills margins all the same.

Why the Industry Is Uniquely at Risk

Now here’s where it gets specific.

Wealth management firms don’t run simple businesses. They operate in a uniquely complex, highly regulated, multi-stakeholder environment:

• You’ve got clients.

• You’ve got platforms and providers.

• You’ve got internal staff spread across advice, admin, and paraplanning.

• You’ve got compliance teams.

• You’ve got tech vendors, the regulator and now consolidators sniffing around.

And what tools are firms relying on to handle all this?

A mix of modern and legacy CRMs, each with their own quirks. Some offer slick APIs, others are slower to evolve — but none are perfect.

Integrations are too shallow, pulling in surface-level data without syncing key details, and document storage is often disconnected.

Even the best tools struggle to connect the full journey. Some are too narrow — solving one slice of a process. Others go broad but lose depth where it matters most. All whilst Excel is still doing more work than it should.

It’s no wonder the back office is always at capacity.

Which is why we’re working on deeper integrations with tools like Selectapension, to bridge those gaps without adding to admin workload.

How 4admin Approaches the Problem

What we do at 4admin is connect the dots.

Here’s how:

A. Internal Operations

Let’s be clear, we drink our own kool-aid. We run our own business using API and webhook-driven integrations. All our internal tools talk to each other. So when data is uploaded, insights are extracted, flagged, and synced to the right place automatically.

That means:

• No rekeying

• Minimal clicks

• Clear audit trails

• Nothing falls through the cracks

It’s how ops should work. Quietly. Reliably. Intelligently.

B. For Our Clients

For our customers, we take the same approach.

You don’t have to rip out your existing systems. We sit on top of them — integrating via API where possible, or smart automations where not (like our latest link with Selectapension).

We ingest provider information, extract plan data, check for missing fields, update the CRM, sync attachments, and generate summaries — without needing your admin to spend hours tying it all together.

Email, phone calls, documents, and CRM updates all handled in one smooth flow. Not five systems and a coffee-fuelled afternoon 

We’re not another system to learn. We’re the glue layer that makes your existing stack finally behave like one.

The Payoff: Fewer Clicks, Faster Transfers, Happier Teams

What happens when you stitch your systems together properly?

• Admins stop wasting time getting ready to do tasks

• Paraplanners work with clean, complete, structured data.

• CRM hygiene goes up, which means better compliance and higher valuations.

• Turnaround times drop, client experience improves, and capacity too.

That’s not hypothetical. That’s just what happens when you stop making your team operate like a human API.

Firms using 4admin have cut their LoA-related admin time by 46%, with less manual rework and better data integrity across the board.

The Fix Doesn’t Require a Rebuild

Here’s the good news:

❌ You don’t need to burn your stack to the ground.

❌ You don’t need to pioneer “digital transformation” with a 12-month implementation project.

✅ What you do need is tools that talk to each other. And AI-automation that augments, not overwhelms.

More tech shouldn’t mean more tabs. It should mean fewer.

That’s the future of advice ops — and it’s already here.

BONUS: New Integration with Selectapension 

As part of our mission to reduce rekeying and glue fragmented tools together, we’re excited to announce our latest integration — 4admin now connects directly with Selectapension, one of the most established pension switching tools in the industry. This means your team can now push plan data extracted by 4admin straight into Selectapension for switching analysis — no manual re-entry, no copy-paste errors, no duplicated effort.

It’s a small step that solves a big problem. Instead of replacing the systems you already trust, we’re helping them talk to each other. This is exactly the kind of collaboration the industry needs more of: AI-powered speed meets established tool reliability — all stitched together to reduce friction, increase accuracy, and improve client service.

Want early access? Register your interest here.