What it actually costs
you in hours.

Every platform quotes a timeline in weeks of their effort. Almost none quote the only number that affects your calendar.

The number nobody gives you

Every platform quotes a timeline in weeks of their effort. Almost none quote the only number that affects your calendar: how many hours of yours it takes.

For most firms the honest figure is around six hours, concentrated in the first week, and it should be booked around client meetings rather than on top of them. If a prospective partner cannot answer that question with a number, they have not done enough transitions to know.

What actually makes a transition run long

Not the software. Three things, in order of how often they bite:

• Held-away assets. Anything outside the custodian relationship has to be handled by hand.
• A performance history that never reconciled. This is the big one. Custodians commonly retain three years. If your composites reach back further, the gap has to be reconstructed from records that may not agree with each other.
• Fee schedules that live in one person's head. Exceptions, splits and grandfathered arrangements that were never written down anywhere but a spreadsheet.

The longest transition we have run took months for exactly the second reason: a billion-dollar book whose custodian held three years of history when more than ten were needed. Reconstructing it took hundreds of hours. The firm did not know the gap existed until we went looking.

What your clients should experience

Almost nothing, if it is done properly. Accounts stay at the same custodian under the same account numbers. No repapering. The visible change should be that reporting arrives on time and reads better.

The clause to insist on

Run billing and reporting in parallel against the old system before anything is cancelled, and make the parallel run an abort point that you control. If the two do not agree line for line, nothing moves, nothing is cancelled, no client is notified, and you owe nothing.