Technology promised acceleration; instead, it delivered an obstacle course. We were told APIs and ‘native integrations’ would make systems play nicely, yet here we are decades later and most teams still face the same long onboarding cycles, brittle connectors, and opaque security reviews. Things haven’t gotten easier—the work has simply been redistributed into endless one‑offs: schema puzzles, edge‑case error handling, and duct‑taped authentication flows that quietly expand the backlog and then alarmingly appear in higher cost and lower margins.
One big reason for this is that the economics of software has fundamentally changed. SaaS and microservice architecture resulted in organisations assembling tech stacks measured not in handfuls but in hundreds of services. Sure, that democratised capability—but it also scattered data. Every new product arrives with a new definition of basic things like customer, invoice, ticket, lead, or event. ‘Native’ integration is sales-speak for custom, proprietary, and fragile. Multiply that across dozens of tools and you don’t get leverage; you get fragmentation disguised as progress.
The costs are high — research suggests it’s somewhere around 20 percent of your tech budget. Worse, they have been normalised. Consider the costs of just the basics: Coordinating security reviews, managing rotating secrets, updates and remapping, root cause investigations, etc. These don't appear on an invoice or budget line item, but instead on roadmaps that grow, incident postmortems, and an engineering culture that normalises heroics over hygiene.
The way out isn’t another proprietary connector marketplace. The way out is standardisation: the unglamorous, reliable substrate that lets creativity concentrate where it actually matters. We’ve all seen this movie before. USB didn’t kill innovation in peripherals: it created a predictable power/data layer and then got out of the way. PDF didn’t stifle documents: it gave them a durable, portable form that outlive devices, apps, and vendors.
Standards made the right things invisible and integrations deserve the same treatment.
Ready to dive into the report and discover more about Precept’s showcase? You can read and download the report online here.
If APIs are millions of doorways, what we’re missing is a shared floor plan. A canonical contract for pieces of common business data — customers, products, invoices, tickets, messages, and files — plus an explicit approach for anything idiosyncratic. In this world, vendors would keep their trade secrets internally but expose shapes and behaviours as a predictable model. Translate once at the boundary; reuse everywhere inside the enterprise. The payoff is compounding: every future connection costs less, every migration hurts less, and every audit takes less time.
This isn’t just a technical idea; it’s a risk and cost management strategy. Predictable interfaces improve security because policies bind to stable layers rather than bespoke scripts. Reliability improves, because fewer unique parts means fewer surprises. Observability improves, because telemetry can be compared across systems that speak the same language. And crucially, teams recover the one resource SaaS never bundled: attention. Engineers can stop babysitting leaky pipes and start shipping value.
Integration of data — not more tools — drives satisfaction. Take Amazon’s one-click invention — all the tech and standardisation across dozens of systems achieves a level of simplicity and elegance that’s catapulted them to the very top of retail. Across industries, organisation-supporting applications, and specialised functions in the dozens or even hundreds, it’s integration that will win long-term.
This doesn’t necessarily mean spending the most, nor buying the biggest ‘all‑in‑one’. The winning teams are the ones that make data flow cleanly across their core systems, reduce swivel‑chair moments, and treat integration quality as a first‑class product. In other words: it’s not the vendor, or even the vendor assessment, as much as how it all comes together.
When the seams don’t fit or the ecosystems are guarded by tolls or gates, you’re mortgaging the future for what looks like short term gain. In these strategies, data access becomes a privilege, portability becomes a negotiation, and integration logic lives in places you can’t see, inspect or test. When providers monetise connectivity itself, customers pay twice — once for the product and again for the right to use their own data.
A healthier market treats connectivity as a right, not a premium. Vendors can still compete fiercely on outcomes — intelligence, UX, performance, domain expertise — while embracing open, portable contracts at the edge. Concretely, that means shipping schemas and mappings that are stabilised by standards. It means plain-speak documentation and decoupling data access from license upsells. When these exist, the integration can be reviewed, tested, and easily automated. That’s also where AI becomes actually useful: not by ‘writing your integration’, but by proposing mappings, generating tests, validating contracts, and spotting drift — all possible because the structures are predictable enough to reason about.
This won’t be easy. The cultural shift is as, or more, important than the technical shift. For years, teams have measured integration success as ‘we made it work’. The new bar is repeatability: can the next team reuse this without reverse‑engineering it? Can we swap engines without replacing the car? Can a security reviewer answer ‘what data goes where, when, and why?’ from a single view? Standards turn those from hero projects into hygiene.
So, what does a practical path look like? In short, it’s Precept, the platform my team has been building for years. We’ve taken this futuristic but straightforward approach and created a product you can adopt with just a few clicks. No more long lines or deep technical conversations. In short, no more work to integrate your data.
The most valuable work your company does isn’t another data mapping or one‑off authentication dance. We know how to solve those together in real time. Standardise the boundary, let the inside of each system stay creative, and make integrations become the utility you can count on for scale. That’s how we trade complexity for real speed — and finally get the future we were promised.
Interested in reading the Future View Toolkit 2025? You can read and download the report online here.
About the Future View Toolkit 2025
The Future View Toolkit 2025 focuses on the ways in which the wealth management industry across the world is future-proofing itself amid technological change, increasing compliance demands, advanced client expectations, and new operational models.
It features contributions from a total of nine industry participants, all bringing different perspectives to the challenges and opportunities that come with the future-proofing of this sector. Among these are six contributors from technology vendors, who have each contributed a topic-focused Showcase profiling an individal solution.
Our broader Toolkit Report Series covers thematic, geography and wealth manager segment-focused reports, each tasked with delving into the topics and supporting technologies of relevance to help wealth managers of all types better understand how they should bring technology into their business and in which areas.
Next in the series, we are looking at the US Registered Investment Advisor market in our US RIA Toolkit – discover more here
About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.
For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
For more information, visit: www.thewealthmosaic.com
Discover our latest reports!
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