Three situations. Which is yours?
The path forward depends on where you’re starting from. But the destination — a robust, compliant, investment platform — is the same for everyone.
You built your own platform
You invested significantly — perhaps years and hundreds of thousands of pounds — in a bespoke system. Switching feels like writing off everything you spent. But ask yourself: what does staying cost you over the next five years?
Every regulatory change, every new feature, every security patch is another development sprint. Your resources are maintaining technology rather than building your business.
Switching doesn’t mean losing your history. We handle the full migration — every investor, every deal, every historical update — so your platform moves with you.
You’re entering the market fresh
You have the commercial opportunities and the investor relationships. You can re-invent the wheel or you can focus on what you’re good at.
The FCA’s requirements are extraordinarily specific. You won’t find the gaps through testing — you’ll find them through enforcement.
You’ve been making do
Emails, spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, offline processes — it works until the day it doesn’t. Every new investor adds more operational risk to a system that was never designed to scale.
Your investors deserve better: one place to see every investment, every return, every document — accessible whenever they want, without hunting through old emails.
We migrate everything you’ve accumulated. Every investor record, every deal, every historical update — imported cleanly so your investors see their full history from day one.
More than code. Collective intelligence.
This is all we do. We operate in a single, highly regulated niche — and every piece of feedback from every platform we power flows back into the product.
When one client encounters a new FCA requirement, every other platform we operate benefits. When another discovers friction in investor onboarding, the improvement is shared. You don’t just buy a platform — you buy into a decade of lived regulatory experience that no new build can replicate.
What that means in practice
- Regulatory feedback from every deployment shapes every product update
- FCA rule changes monitored, interpreted and implemented without you missing them
- ISA transfer processes battle-tested across hundreds of real transfer scenarios
- Deep understanding of HMRC, FCA rules, payments and KYC providers already established
AI can write you a platform. It will look production-ready.
The gap between “looks right” and “is right” is exactly where regulatory risk lives. AI code generation tools are remarkably capable — but regulated investment platforms require domain knowledge that cannot be prompted into existence.
New entrants face invisible risk
A developer without FCA investment platform expertise will produce code that fails to meet the prescriptive requirements set out in the FCA Handbook — and you won’t find out until a review.
Experienced operators face a different trap
Industry expertise is not a substitute for engineering depth. Understanding what your platform should do doesn’t mean you can build and safely operate the regulated infrastructure behind it.
Rules are prescriptive, not approximate
The FCA have created positive friction by design to protect consumers – you don’t want AI improving the experience without knowledge of the relevant rules.
Compliance debt compounds
Every month your platform operates without built-in compliance creates liability. Retroactive fixes are more expensive and attract more regulatory scrutiny than getting it right from the start.
Compliance isn’t a feature. It’s prescriptive infrastructure.
The FCA’s requirements for high-risk investment platforms specify exact formatting, mandatory journey structures and precise wording at every stage of the investor experience.
Appropriateness assessments
Whether is suitability or appropriateness assessments, ShareIn’s implementation logic reflects the exact rules set out in the FCA handbook.
24-hour cooling-off
A mandatory 24-hour pause is required before a first-time investor can proceed to invest. The timing logic, return mechanism and journey design are specific regulatory requirements.
Underlined risk warnings
Certain risk warnings must be underlined. Not just present. Not just prominent. Underlined, as specified by the FCA. A platform that omits this is non-compliant regardless of how well-designed everything else appears.
Equal prominence rule
The proceed / don’t proceed friction must present both options with equal visual prominence. The proceed button cannot be larger, bolder or more visually weighted. This is tested by the FCA.
Multi-firm review findings
The FCA’s review of financial promotions for high-risk investments found widespread non-compliance — including at firms whose developers believed they’d got it right. ShareIn’s platform incorporates those specific findings.
Client money obligations
Segregated accounts, daily reconciliation and FSCS protection are regulatory obligations — not platform features. ShareIn’s CASS compliance has been built and operated under FCA supervision since 2014.
The FCA’s multi-firm review introduced mandatory requirements from 1 February 2023 covering appropriateness testing, cooling-off periods, risk warning formatting and financial promotion approval chains. ShareIn’s platform was updated to reflect those requirements — and continues to evolve as the FCA’s expectations develop. You don’t need to track this yourself.
Manual processes don’t scale gracefully
If you’ve been operating without a proper platform, operational costs compound with every investor you add. Asking an investor to hunt through 12 months of emails to track a return signals operational immaturity that serious investors notice.
Without a proper platform
- Investors receive cash returns manually and then you’re asking them to send cash for the next investment the following day
- Tracking investor positions in spreadsheets that break down past 50 investors
- Investors trawling through old emails to check all the details about an investment
- No proper audit trail — regulatory reports reconstructed manually when needed
- Key-person dependency — one person leaving takes the operational model with them
With ShareIn
- Investor wallets — funds deploy and return automatically through the investment lifecycle
- Investors log in when they want and see every investment, every return, every document in one place
- Portfolio dashboards that update in real time — no emails required
- Complete audit trails generated automatically — FCA reporting ready when needed
- Payment processing, reconciliation and payouts handled by the platform
- Scale from 50 to 50,000 investors without changing how your team operates
Build vs buy at a glance
| Build in-house | ShareIn | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | 12–24 months | 2–3 months |
| Investor wallets | Significant additional build | Included |
| CASS / client money | Requires separate FCA authorisation | Included — segregated, CASS compliant |
| ISA management | Requires separate HMRC authorisation | Included — authorised ISA manager |
| Regulatory updates | Monitor and implement yourself, indefinitely | Handled automatically |
| Collective platform intelligence | Only your own operational experience | Benefit from every platform we power |
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