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Derek Smith

Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aberdeen Adviser, the UK financial advice technology and platform business.

Oct 15, 2026

4:31
What are you doing? What's your main focus yourself? And also, how are you interacting with those financial planning companies to understand how to improve their businesses?
4:38
So I joined 18 months ago.
4:41
The key purpose for me joining was to build digital product development as the DNA of how we run our company.
4:48
And we didn't have that before.
4:50
We had people who had knowledge of that, but we were mainly working with partners to build our software.
4:57
Now, one of the challenges with that, if you don't have digital as part of your DNA now, you cannot build those products and services that your customers need.
5:05
So we've hired about another 70 to 80 people into our product and technology company, and that is all digital.

14 MINS LATER

18:45
But why might that be? And also, what have you done in the last 18 months to make some really good improvements?

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