Conversations with FSPHub in 2025

Digital transformation has become one of the most overused phrases in financial services. Everyone claims to be “going digital”, yet many brokerages and advisory firms still operate with the same daily pain points: scattered client information, email-driven task chasing, inconsistent processes, and compliance that lives in a separate universe to the actual work.

My conversations with the team at FSPHub during 2025, including engagements with Craig Grasko, Michelle Swart and Sean Barrett, kept returning to a more grounded definition of digitisation: it’s not about adding more tools. It’s about removing fragmentation.

The real problem is not technology, it’s workflow - Most FSPs already use “digital” channels, email, WhatsApp, insurer portals, spreadsheets, and a CRM of some kind. But Craig’s point was simple and uncomfortable: these tools do not automatically create a digital business. In fact, they often create a digital mess.

True transformation, as FSPHub frames it, begins when an FSP stops treating client data, communication, documents, and tasks as separate objects scattered across platforms. Instead, everything is consolidated into a single operational view where work can be tracked, assigned, automated, audited, and reported on.

That’s where the platform’s “hub” idea lands. It is not trying to replace every admin system in the market. It aims to become the central place where the business runs, with integrations feeding information in, and workflow pushing action out.

And once that happens, something important changes: visibility replaces guesswork. You no longer wonder if someone read an email, whether a task was done, or who is sitting on a document. You see the status of the work, in real time.

Digitisation becomes a culture shift, not an IT project - Michelle’s contribution to these discussions was consistently practical. Digitisation is not a strategy deck. It’s a daily experience.

When client files, communication, documents and process steps sit in one place, productivity improves almost immediately. The most obvious gain is time: fewer phone calls to “check what’s happening”, fewer internal follow-ups, fewer errors from duplicated data capture, and fewer delays caused by missing documents.

The second gain is flexibility. Cloud access means staff can work anywhere without complex software installs or office-bound servers. That matters in a hybrid world, but it matters even more in a modern brokerage where responsiveness is part of the value proposition.

The third gain is consistency. When workflows are systemised, service becomes less dependent on individual memory and more dependent on the business’s operating model. That’s the difference between “we try our best” and “this is how we do it every time”.

The Olea story proves a point: Start small, then scale - The implementation journey at OLEA South Africa offered a useful reality check for the industry. Most large brokerages have tried digitisation projects that promised everything and delivered frustration.

What worked here was the opposite: start with a single pain point and build confidence. In OLEA’s case, document management became the entry point, a “digital filing cabinet” that matched how people already worked but removed the human error of inconsistent naming conventions and messy folders.

That approach helped solve the real problem behind adoption: change fatigue. People don’t resist technology because they hate technology. They resist disruption, uncertainty, and systems that feel imposed rather than helpful. A phased rollout, supported by internal champions, created momentum that grew organically.

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