 With the acquisition of Now Infinity by Class Super announced today, here’s our thoughts on the topic, as they both feature on our recommended Cloud App Stack. A few weeks ago we were a bit stunned to see an article posted on the LinkedIn page of Matthew Burgess, founder of View Legal, stating that “View Legal and Now Infinity had ceased their strategic partnership as of immediately and that no further comment was being made by either party”.
We found this a bit strange as the strategic partnership in our eyes was fantastic for accountants who wanted a corporate secretarial application, along with the backing of a legal team for documents in a straight forward, easy to navigate system. As I was sipping my morning coffee and replying to some emails after the Australia Day long weekend, I saw a newsflash pop up in my browser. I had to look twice to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me, SMSF Adviser had just sent out a newsflash, “Now Infinity was purchased by Class Super", you can read the article here. My first reaction was, “wow what is BGL going to think about this”? My second reaction was, “awesome, seems like a logical acquisition to compete with BGL”! We believe this to be a good acquisition because we now have two very engrained SMSF providers in Australia, both now have corporate secretarial offerings that are/will be natively built into their platforms and offer their users no reason to move out of their software. The user will benefit by tighter integrations between the two platforms and more streamlined business processes. Point of Difference? Previously the point of difference between Now Infinity and BGL’s Cas360, was the legal documentation. Now Infinity had the backing of View Legal and BGL integrated with multiple providers, however this acquisition now aligns both of the providers with a “choice “strategy. Now, there’s an overlap of legal document providers between the two platforms as per their websites:
The ASX announcement has indicated “The NowInfinity business will continue as a standalone operation as the teams work together to integrate the two businesses. There will be no impact on it’s clients or sales process.” “As part of the Class business, both teams can leverage each other’s skills and capabilities to deliver services that are more integrated, and this acquisition will allow those services to reach more customers. It will also enable the creation of new services and strategies at a larger scale.” At the time of writing, Now Infinity’s website still showed that one of their core offerings is “Legally backed, high quality documentation”. Unless they forgot to update the website before such a big announcement goes public, I would think that they have already moved to an integration with legal vendor/s or a strategy that will continue the seamless experience for their users. What does this mean for smaller corporate affairs applications such as Waive and Prime? Should they be worried or does this give them more of a chance to focus on other areas that they do well? We will be following what happens with the integrations for Class quite closely to see if there is any fall out or shift now that Now Infinity has been purchased and what this means for user of Class. Workflows will need to be re written for users of both Class and Now Infinity as the integration builds out over time. Firms will now have to reimagine how a workflow for a SMSF setup is created or documents are created from within Class utilising Now Infinity. If you are needing any assistance with understanding how the above may impact you or if you want to understand how a streamlined cloud based practice can operate please get in contact with us. Comments are closed.
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AuthorClarity Street was conceived from years of engaging with Accounting firms on a daily basis and a constant desire to make Accounting firms & SME’s more efficient and profitable. Archives
November 2023
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