Self-licensed in 2026: what to get right in the first 90 days

Getting your own AFSL is a milestone. It's also the moment the practice discovers how much its previous licensee was quietly doing for it: the XPLAN site, the templates, the strategy content, the data feeds, the compliance wording, the support desk. On day one of self-licensing, all of that becomes yours to run.

We've helped practices through this transition for years. The ones that settle fastest don't necessarily have the biggest budgets. They make four decisions early and make them deliberately.

Decide what you're building on before you build anything

The instinct is to start with a clean XPLAN site and configure it as you go. Six months later the practice has a site that reflects six months of decisions made under pressure, and nobody remembers why half of them were made.

The alternative is to start from a proven framework (templates, fact finders, reviews, reports and configurations that already work for self-licensed practices) and tailor it to your advice style. That's what our Blueprint advice suite is: the foundation, so your first 90 days are spent on what makes your practice yours, not on rebuilding what every practice needs.

If you'd rather not run an XPLAN site at all, a hosted option where the setup, configuration and administration are already done is worth a serious look. Log in and go is a legitimate strategy for a new licensee.

Own your data from the first day

Under your previous licensee, client data lived in their site, their structure, their feeds. Migration is the point where data quality either gets fixed or gets inherited. It's tempting to move everything and sort it out later. Later rarely comes.

Before migrating, decide what a complete, trusted client record looks like for your practice. Migrate to that standard. Set up data-feed health checks from the start rather than discovering in month four that platform balances haven't updated since month two. Clean data on day one is cheap. Cleaning it in year two is not.

Decide who supports the system, in writing

New licensees often run the first months on goodwill: an adviser who "knows XPLAN," a paraplanner who's good with templates. It works until it doesn't, usually the week a regulatory change lands and a template needs updating properly.

Decide now whether support is in-house, outsourced, or a mix, and what each party is responsible for. The question isn't whether you'll need specialist XPLAN help. It's whether you'll have it arranged before you need it.

Get your advice content under control

Strategy paragraphs, educational flyers, product wording: the content inside your advice documents carries compliance risk, and it changes with regulation. Under your old licensee, someone maintained that library. Now you do.

Decide where that content lives, who owns it and how it gets reviewed. Practices on our framework get a strategy and education library maintained and reviewed three times a year for regulatory currency. However you do it, the principle is the same: advice content is a maintained asset, not a folder of Word files.

What the first 90 days should feel like

If the four decisions above are made early, the first quarter of self-licensing is busy but calm: advisers are producing advice on a system that works, data is trusted, and someone answers when a template needs changing. If they're not, the first quarter is spent firefighting, and the firefighting becomes the process.

If you're newly self-licensed, or about to be, a free Advice Tech Health Check is a good way to pressure-test your plan. Thirty minutes, and we'll tell you plainly which of these four is most likely to bite.