CRM for financial advisers: households, files, reviews

A CRM for a UK advice firm has to follow a household, its members and their products, and keep the trail of each regulated step. A married couple, their two children, a family trust and pensions with three providers make up one client, where a generic CRM sees five unrelated contacts. The advice journey has its own order too. Under the FCA Handbook, "A firm must provide a suitability report to a retail client if the firm makes a personal recommendation to the client", in the cases the rule lists (COBS 9.4.1R). That report must "explain why the firm has concluded that the recommended transaction is suitable for the client" (COBS 9.4.7R). Clients who pay for an ongoing service are owed the reviews their agreement promises, and in 2025 the FCA checked whether firms delivered them.

Between those steps, documents arrive by email, sit on a shared drive and come back signed through a provider's portal. The meeting notes get typed up in the evening, from memory.

Standards starts from your own objects instead of a generic template: households, people, policies, pensions, assets and companies, each with its own fields. The link between two records carries its own details. A person joins the household with a role, and an asset carries each owner's share and how they hold it, as joint tenants or tenants in common. You filter on those details like any other field, so a buy-to-let held by a couple in unequal shares reads on the record, with no spreadsheet beside it. Each household has its own drive, with folders, drag and drop and search by name, so the passport scan and the signed PDF sit with the family they belong to. When an adviser creates a household, Standards generates the standard folder tree of a client file, the same for every adviser in the firm. A colleague who takes over a client bank then finds each document in the same place.

Standards treats a supporting document as data on the client file, with its status and its expiry date. On a household or a person, you require specific documents, such as a passport, a proof of address or bank details, and each one shows where it stands. A page lists the upcoming deadlines, renewals and anniversaries of your records, each list read from a date field you put on it. Put the passport expiry on that page, and an expiry entered on the person's record shows up before the next meeting. The agents in Standards read the PDFs and scans you receive, check the document and carry its details into the record. On a passport, the agent reads the holder's name and the expiry date. Each value it writes goes into the record's history next to the one before, with the agent named as its author. The fact find itself stays in your back office or your own template.

Standards connects your Gmail inbox and files each thread on the records whose email addresses match its participants, where you read it as a conversation next to their documents and policies. Each email gets a category, direct, transactional, newsletter or one of your own, and each correction you make turns into a rule for the next ones. A provider's statements and a client's questions stop sharing one list. For meetings, Standards sends a bot to record your video calls on Zoom, Meet or Teams and returns the transcript and the minutes in the language of the meeting. Each meeting attaches to the records of its participants, and each person's record shows all of their meetings. Your Google Calendar stays in sync, so you can book or move a meeting from the workspace. One limit, in October 2026: on the Standards cloud, the connected inbox and calendar are Google's, and Outlook runs on a dedicated instance or on your own infrastructure.

Standards keeps the evidence of an ongoing review on the client's record: the review date, the meeting's transcript and minutes, and the emails that arranged it. That is the record-keeping the FCA looked for when it checked ongoing advice. In its multi-firm review of ongoing advice services, published on 24 February 2025, the FCA found reviews delivered in around 83% of cases, declined or unanswered in 15%, and not attempted in under 2%. Among good practice, it listed systems "to ensure suitability reviews were scheduled and offered as agreed." It also listed "Appropriate record-keeping to make sure firms can evidence delivery of their services where provided." (FCA, ongoing financial advice services). In Standards, the next review date is a date field of the household, and a list on the same page shows the households whose review falls due, next to the other deadlines.

A routine can run each Monday, find the households whose review falls due within the month and assign each one to its adviser, who gets a notification. On the day, the bot's transcript and minutes land on the participants' records.

How long you keep suitability records is set by the FCA Handbook: "A firm must retain its records relating to suitability for a minimum of the following periods" (COBS 9.5.2R).

Standards does not apply these periods for you. Your retention policy decides when a file goes, and an agent's deletion waits for a person's approval by default.

Standards records each change to a record and shows who made it, a colleague or an agent, when, and the value before. The pages of Wealthbox and Intelliflo, read on 26 October 2026, announce AI features without saying what the AI may change on its own. In Standards, a deletion or an outward send waits for a person's approval by default, with the number of records or recipients it touches. For edits, you pick the mode. In Manual mode, the agent asks for your approval before each change to your data. In Auto, the default, it changes your data without asking, and the history keeps each previous value. An agent never does more than the person it works for, and roles set who reads, creates, edits or deletes, object by object. When your compliance officer asks who entered a value on a client file, the record's history gives the name of the colleague or the agent.

An agent starts when a record is created, updated or deleted, when a form is submitted, when a webhook calls it or when its schedule comes round. An incoming email starts nothing by itself: you ask the agent, or a routine does.

Standards is not a back office system. It does not run a fact find, build documents from templates, pull valuations from providers or track fees and commission, and it has no e-signature. UK back office tools announce several of these on their own pages, read on 26 October 2026, and the table names which.

Your other tools reach Standards through its API, or call a routine's webhook URL to start an agent. Standards suits an advice firm that keeps its back office for fact finds, suitability reports and valuations, and wants each household with its documents, emails, meetings and change history on one record. It does not suit a firm looking for one tool that also does the regulated paperwork. For other trades, see the industries Standards serves.

To choose a CRM as a UK financial adviser, first settle which tool keeps your fact finds, suitability reports and valuations, as in the table above. Then ask three questions of the CRM itself: where client data lives, who sees which files and what the AI may change without asking.

To set those answers against other tools, see Standards compared with other tools.

A new client comes into Standards between the first email and the discovery meeting, and the adviser can check each value an agent writes in the record's history. The client agreement and the suitability report still come from your back office, and go on the household's record as signed PDFs.