Our Technical team have been doing some LTAF research recently, hence the blog inspiration. One thing that struck me coming at it from the angle of innovation (the angle I come at everything from!) is what a vicious circle it can be to get any real innovation going in finance, products in particular. Looking at LTAFs for example, as Ali mentions in the blog, there are a tiny number of them and even the 'oldest' one only has a track record of a few months. For many advisers, they'll be wanting to see more choice, performance and the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff which is difficult in these early days. But then without more advisers putting more funds into them, how will that level of optionality and detail ever accrue?
Similarly I was chatting with a company earlier this week who are in the process of building and launching a new MPS range to the market. They're doing some interesting things with their approach, trying to not just be yet another MPS range in an already crowded market. However, one of the topics we chatted about was how you get that innovation out there, without falling back on either price or performance as the leading factors; and if you haven't got performance at the outset, it puts extra pressure on price, which might take away from the actual intention with the new product.
I guess it's why it's often the large companies with the deep pockets that even have the option of innovation; as they can cover the costs needed for x amount of time until markets catch up and the new shiny thing can take off. However, given that smaller, nimbler companies are stereotypically better at innovation, it is in itself a bit of a paradox. But - we play with the tools we have, as Anthony Villis alluded to in this post yesterday which I really enjoyed.
Anyway, some links for this week include the ability to watch back our webinar covering a market update (and why Active is outperforming Passive in some asset classes 👀 ) along with a technical look behind the actual make up of LTAFs.
Plus - this week Kim Binks hit her 10 year milestone with Verve! And is the fifth person to do so, so we created a gorgeous little celebratory blog mooching down memory lane below 😍
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