How on earth did that happen?? Hope you’re all enjoying the longer days and marginally milder weather.
We got to enjoy some of the views from the Fidelity London offices this week where we held our first partner event, getting together to share insights and trends that we are all seeing across financial services. Some of the interesting bits of food for thought that came out of the day, that could probably each warrant an Eclipse themselves, were:
The importance of transparency from providers to advisers. Seems fairly obvious right? But there are a lot of acquisitions happening, that don’t always make the headlines, and advisers could be joining up with a provider (research tools, back office systems etc.) without realising the roadmap they’re truly on and, ultimately, what the impact could be on their firm in future. Tip: Do the same level of due diligence on any company that will be holding your client data that youwould do on a platform provider. What are their ownership plans? What would a change in that mean for your clients and your firm?
The re-emergence of smoothed funds. The King of Them All, PruFund never really went away to be fair, we’ve always seen regular flows into it. However, our data shows that investment into smoothed funds has been increasing over the last quarter and there are also now new ones being launched. I find smoothed funds to be very Marmite with advisers, they love them or hate them. Either way, there’s a chance clients will be hearing about them more and whether you recommend them or not, being confident in their mechanisms and potentials (good and bad) can only be a useful thing.
The real impact of Consumer Duty. Are we seeing any yet at a grassroots level (SJP headlines aside)? Or is it still just a big old stick that the FCA have in its armoury and they haven’t yet selected who will get the first beating with it? A mixed bag of views on this one.
How on earth can advisers know about every navigation option that’s available to their clients, be able to objectively assess them, articulate their selection and then stay on top of them?! It used to be mostly a choice between active funds. Then active vs passive. Maybe DFM if you were fancy. Smoothed if you were that way inclined. But now, even at an overarching level, there are dozens of options; MPS, MPS with overlay, actively managed index, strategic passive, passively active (active funds but selected by an algorithm, not a human) and so on and so on. Even if you know all the strategies, and can select the right one for your client bank, do you then know all the players in that particular area and how can you get all the necessary info from them? This one blows my mind a little bit and I definitely think there’s more to be done here to help firms through this ever more densely populated arena.
These are just some of the topics covered and at a very high level. I shall return with more depth of thinking soon, like a very underwhelming superhero.
In the meantime, Verve hasn’t really been out and about on the road for some time (busy with the restructure, brand, tech build etc etc.) so I’m going to just link below three events that we’ll be appearing at this year and I will be lurking at them all and would love to see some new faces, as well as familiar ones – do come say hi if you’re at any!
And this week’s fact is that I went to the hairdressers yesterday with nothing particularly interesting planned, and have instead wound up with a bright pink barnet. So that’s fun.
Have a wonderful weekend all,
May: we’ll be at the Timeline 3.0 conference.
June: we’ll be at the Intelliflo conference.
September: Evolution, durrr.
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