So it turns out I should do entirely non-financial services related Updates more often, siblings. Never had a bigger postbag than after last week’s, which if you didn’t read it was pretty much a gig review with extra bits and to be honest I don’t think anyone read the extra bits. 

The temptation, then, is to give the people what they want and do another similarly aerated effort. But where’s the fun in giving the people what they want? In this game you must learn to crush the hopes and aspirations of all you meet without remorse. Only then can you ascend to the final level and defeat the Content Boss for unlimited aura and, I dunno, weapons or whatever. 

I don’t know why the video game stuff crept in. Sorry about that. And that’s a real sorry, not a Gregg Wallace “sorry if you were offended after I set fire to myself on Instagram yesterday” sorry.  

What about yon Greggles, eh? Imagine being his PR guy right now. I literally own a PR firm and I can’t imagine being his PR guy right now.  If anyone knows said hapless soul, let me know. I’m going to send him or her a big box full of gaffer tape with which to lash the Greggster, that scamp, to the old Herman Miller until the moment passes. Otherwise I fear it’s only a matter of hours till he starts bleating about ‘woke’ and how ‘no-one moaned when the Red Hot Chili Peppers started cutting about dressed in only a sock so how’s it different for me?’. And at that point we will need to send in a crack special forces team consisting entirely of middle-class women of a certain age armed with sharpened Kindles and the belts from Hobbs raincoats to finish the job.  

If we’re talking about sleb PR then we should drink from the fountain and the fountain is a bow-tie wearing fella by the name of Mark Borkowski who despite having revived Noel Edmonds’ career knows a thing or two. He highlights the by-the-numbers way to deal with controversy when having found to have been a wrong’un. There are four steps, and they are “acknowledge, apologise, reflect and reform”. So far Gregg has achieved…hang on, I’m just checking…nope, none of them. It’s not looking too good for him, and quite rightly. I wonder what his first, second, third and fourth wives make of it all?  

But let’s dwell on those four steps for a moment and apply them to our own industry (this is the bit where I crush the hopes of those who thought the first two paragraphs were a rope-a-dope and this whole Update was about wildly inappropriate behaviour from follically-challenged TV presenters).  

We put out a report last week with the lovely and always entirely appropriate folk from Parmenion on platform service. This is the second year we’ve done it, and it doesn’t make great reading. I mean, it’s a fantastic read, but it’s a bit glum. Sort of like Jude The Obscure except with more funnies, more graphs and slightly fewer failed marriages. I know, right? Sounds like a banger, and you can read it here.  

The stat from the report that hit the headlines (here and here and here and here) was that 95% of the respondents to our research said they’d had to apologise to clients on behalf of the industry for poor service. The actual malfeasance involved ranges from shonky income payments to dilatory transfer activity to simple getting-things-wrong, but all of it paints a picture which inevitably obscures the good stuff that also happens.  

That’s important, because the industry’s instinctive reaction to “difficult” feedback like this is to point out that things go right most of the time, which may be true but is of little interest to the client whose transfer is very much lost down the back of the filing cabinet along with half a pack of Mentos and four of those wee pin things you get with iPhones so you can open the SIM tray. 

So advisers apologise on behalf of an industry that they don’t control, and the industry doesn’t apologise at all. Acknowledge, apologise, reflect, reform…these are the steps I think advisers and much more importantly consumers, for whom we have a new Duty, would like to see from institutions who haven’t done well.  

I’m not sure the four steps can do much for Greggovich now. But for the institutions who are so crucial for making sure advisers and planners can deliver outcomes for clients, the story is different. There are prizes available for those who not only ‘fess up when they’ve made a mess (“acknowledge, apologise”), but who also work out why it happened (“reflect”) and fix the issue (“reform”). I’m afraid your experiences and this report both show all too many are strangers to all four steps.  

Your music choice this week: no-one says sorry like Nick Cave in Thirsty Dog, so here’s Nick Cave saying sorry in Thirsty Dog (even if this version does have one of the best lines removed for a BBC audience).