In this exclusive interview, IFA Magazine’s Meg Bratley speaks to Adam Wyrill and Dan Gould, founders of Excede Solutions, about why the Letter of Authority (LOA) process may be one of the most overlooked, yet critical, parts of an advice firm’s workflow.
With a combined 36 years of experience in the regulated financial sector, Adam, a Chartered Fellow of the CISI, and Dan have spent decades advising clients, supervising teams, and building operational processes across both independent and restricted environments. Drawing on this hands-on experience, they developed Excede LOA to give firms greater visibility and control over the LOA process, helping to streamline workflows, manage workload, and support more consistent outcomes across advice businesses.
IFA: You both left the advice profession to build Excede. Was there a defining moment when the Letters of Authority process went from “annoying admin” to a genuine business problem you felt needed fixing within the industry?
Excede: “It wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was the gradual realisation that something fairly mundane in the Letter of Authority process was having an outsized impact on the business.
We asked a simple question: how many LOAs are currently outstanding, and what are they worth? We couldn’t answer it confidently, and we didn’t have a clear picture of volume, status or value across our LOA workflow.
When we later looked at completed cases, somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of new cashflow had started with an LOA. That is a huge proportion of revenue flowing through a process we couldn’t properly measure.
It stopped feeling like admin. It felt like infrastructure we didn’t have control over.”
IFA: LOAs sit at the start of so many advice cases. How does friction at that early stage affect things further down the line, commercially, operationally, and from a client experience perspective? And how does Excede help resolve this problem?
Excede: “The Letter of Authority process is effectively the front door of an advice case. If that door sticks, everything behind it slows down.
Commercially, if most of your new revenue depends on information gathered through LOAs, any delay in the LOA workflow pushes cash flow out. In our own firm, it was powering well over half of the new income once those cases transacted.
Operationally, without oversight of the LOA process, you end up allocating resources blindly. Admin A looks after Adviser B, and Admin C looks after Adviser D, regardless of what is actually sitting in the pipeline, and workload is not allocated based on volume, value or the technical nature of the work.
From a client perspective, friction in the Letter of Authority stage creates drift. “We’re waiting on the provider” becomes the holding message, and momentum is lost before advice has properly begun.
Excede LOA was built to address exactly that. It standardises the creation and management of Letters of Authority, ensures data is captured correctly first time, manages provider requirements and gives firms a live view of where every LOA sits within the wider advice workflow.”
IFA: The LOA process can power a significant proportion of a firm’s new revenue. Why do you think something so commercially important has remained so manual and fragmented for so long?
Excede: “The Letter of Authority process has traditionally sat in the background. The industry has invested heavily in client-facing technology, reporting tools and investment platforms, while LOA management has remained operational and provider-driven.
As a result, firms tend to build internal workarounds rather than rethink the structure of the process itself. There has also been a long-standing assumption that because providers all operate differently, inefficiency in the LOA workflow is inevitable.
Over time, those workarounds become embedded, and no one steps back to question whether the process should be redesigned. That gap is what Excede LOA is intended to close.”
IFA: A lot of firms talk about efficiency, but LOAs also carry regulatory and compliance risk. What are the common issues you see advisers wrestling with when managing LOAs at scale?
Excede: “The information gathered through a Letter of Authority is what suitable advice is ultimately built on. If it is not complete, accurate and properly understood, the advice itself is on weaker ground, and so is the evidence supporting it.
At scale, the challenge within the LOA process is not just volume but variation. Provider responses use different language, formats and ways of describing benefits, guarantees, penalties and charging structures, and important details are not always presented consistently. That is where risk creeps in.
You cannot remove people from the review stage of the LOA workflow. Someone with the right technical competence must interpret what has come back and decide how it feeds into the advice.
What you can do is the heavy lifting before it reaches them. Excede LOA provides a structured output against a checklist, identifies what is still outstanding, organises what comes back and presents it in a consistent format. That means the technically qualified person spends their time reviewing structured outputs, not repeatedly reading and re-keying information.
Under Consumer Duty, firms need to demonstrate that their processes support good client outcomes, and a controlled Letter of Authority process makes that much easier to evidence.”
IFA: Many advice firms are under pressure to grow without burning out staff. How does the way a firm handles LOAs impact paraplanner workload, admin capacity, and overall team morale?
Excede: “Paraplanners and admins do not burn out because the work is technical; they burn out because of avoidable friction in processes like LOA management.
When the workflow is not visible and structured properly, teams spend their time chasing, duplicating effort and firefighting. That is draining, and it also means skilled people are pulled into operational noise instead of analysis and advice.
Without clear oversight of LOA volume and status, hiring decisions are often made on instinct. The team feels busy and stretched, but there is no precise view of case load, task flow or pace of work.
With Excede LOA, activity is centralised and measurable. Firms can see what is sitting with each team member and how quickly it is progressing, allowing recruitment and resource allocation to become data-led rather than reactive. That changes how firms manage growth.”
IFA: There’s often hesitation around digitising long-established processes. From the feedback you’ve had, what holds firms back from changing how they handle LOAs, and how should advisers think about that resistance?
Excede: “The hesitation around digitising the Letter of Authority process is understandable. No one wants to disrupt a workflow that broadly functions.
There is concern about retraining staff or introducing another system, and there is also comfort in familiarity, even if something is inefficient, it is known.
The better question is this: if you were building your firm from scratch today, would you design your LOA process the way it operates now? If the answer is no, then exploring structured LOA software such as Excede LOA becomes a logical next step rather than a risk.”
IFA: If an adviser reads this and takes one thing away about how their firm handles Letters of Authority today, what should they be questioning or rethinking?
Excede: :They should ask a straightforward question: how much revenue is currently sitting in our pipeline waiting on information from the Letter of Authority process, and how much of that delay is genuinely unavoidable?
If that answer is unclear, there is probably an opportunity to improve how LOAs are being managed.
LOAs are not paperwork. They are the gateway to advice revenue.” And if that gateway is not visible and controlled, it will quietly dictate the pace of the firm.”
Background
Excede Solutions was founded by Adam Wyrill and Dan Gould.
Adam is a Chartered Fellow of the CISI and, between them, they have over 36 years of regulated industry experience. That experience spans advising, supervising and building teams and operational processes across both independent and restricted environments.
Excede LOA was built out of that experience. It wasn’t developed from the outside looking in. It came from years of running advice businesses and seeing first-hand how the Letter of Authority process was shaping pipeline, workload and revenue without firms having proper visibility over it.
