There is a moment that happens in nearly every tech strategy meeting, right after someone identifies a system gap or friction point that is slowing down advisors or frustrating clients. Everyone nods in agreement, scribbles ideas on the whiteboard, and then someone says it.

“What if we just build it?”

It sounds harmless. Even ambitious. How hard could it really be to design a better onboarding workflow or create a single dashboard that finally connects the dots between compliance and operations?

From there, the executive pitch deck writes itself. “Full control.” “Tailored to our process.” “Strategic investment.”

But here is the part that usually does not make it into the deck: building software is a trap.

You tell them Admiral Ackbar.

Not always. But often enough that we should stop pretending otherwise.

The seductive illusion of control

Building tech in-house gives a firm flexibility and ownership… in theory. In practice, it often gives them something else: a ballooning project with no clear finish line, half a dozen competing internal priorities, and a creeping sense that what they are building already exists somewhere else, better, and faster.

And the numbers back it up:

• 70% of software projects go over budget, according to the Standish Group’s CHAOS Report, and (AND!) by an average of 27%.
• Even more alarming, the “go-live” dates firms set for internal projects are almost never hit. Time becomes elastic. ROI becomes theoretical.

Meanwhile, competing firms have already bought something off the shelf, configured it to their needs, trained their team and started onboarding advisors and clients faster.

Why are we like this?

I come to this topic with the sincerest empathy. There is something uniquely tempting about the idea of building. It feels strategic. It sounds bold. And in an industry that often prides itself on customisation, building your own tech can feel like an extension of the same ethos: we do it our way.

But here is the truth we do not talk about enough: building something that is not core to your value proposition is a distraction, not a differentiator.

Client experience? Differentiator. Your regtech platform? Probably not.

Build what is unique. Buy what has been solved.

The best firms, the ones growing the fastest and attracting the best talent, are not reinventing the back office. They are buying systems that solve commoditised problems, integrating what is available, and focusing their energy where it matters: on the parts of their business clients actually feel.

While some advisory firms are busy building a custom advisor dashboards, the competition is launching an AI-powered retirement tool, cutting onboarding time in half, or rolling out a seamless mobile client portal that already exists on the vendor market.

Buying gives you speed. It gives you a roadmap. And more often than not, it gives you a 12% revenue bump by 2028, according to PwC projections for firms adopting tech-as-a-service models.

Speed-to-value is a strategy.

The human bottleneck

Even if your project starts strong, it eventually runs into the most predictable variable of all: people.

According to PwC, 64% of IT leaders in financial services admit they lack internal expertise in areas like cybersecurity, API development and regtech. You can not build the future with a team that is struggling to manage the present.

Talent turnover, resource constraints, shifting priorities — they all take a toll. Especially when you realise your build is only as good as the next available sprint. It is death by a thousand “two-week” cuts.

The case for buying has never been stronger

Consider what buying actually gives you:

• Compliance baked into updates (firms using vendor tech report 60% fewer audit exceptions).
• Faster launches (buying accelerates time to market by 4x, per Forrester).
• Lower long-term costs, because maintenance, security, and feature development are already someone else’s job.

Buying is no longer the conservative option. It is the efficient one. The strategic one. The one that acknowledges the complexity of modern tech ecosystems and trusts that not every problem needs a proprietary solution.

A parting shot

Firms do not lose ground because they did not build enough. They lose ground because they waited too long to implement what already works.

So before you start drafting that “build vs. buy” deck, ask a different question: Is what we are building truly unique to us — or just uniquely time-consuming?

Sometimes the smartest move is not building something better. It is buying something proven, then getting back to growing the business.

Read the original article here.