Hi everyone, it’s Rich Mayor reporting for duty this week after fellow compatriot, Mike, did the honours last week. Next week will be Alison, or maybe Steve, which feels perilous for the English contingent of the lang cat. The rest of the office folks North of the Wall have been reeling from their fourth exit from the World Cup and a fifth might be the final straw for the Anyone But England camp.

I watched the Norway game at my local. They’ve got a big screen out for the tournament, but it’s on the harbour and had the added mild peril of an extra high tide, with a new moon the following night. Some people got damp feet, but everyone got damp hair as perhaps the most annoying, contrived, and downright daft new obligation of England football fans is to hurl pints in the air on every goal (including ones that end up being given offside).

This never used to be a Thing, and for my money one of the worst Things to come out of the age of social media is throwing beer at football games for internet points from strangers. I had also thought that this sentiment might be the biggest signal of my movement into middle age, but I felt more vindicated after seeing that men of more senior years were hurling £7 pints.

It wasn’t as if we were in the stadium in Miami, the pub didn’t send its own cameras to Florida. There was no Kiss Cam. No tee-shirt guns. It just stuck ITV’s stream up on a big screen and grown men and women launched their pints in the air.

In the same pub there’s a marquee bit, with tables inside providing a different experience and a different degree of care of plastic cup pints. Same football, same broadcast, but table service over picnic tables, high chairs instead of high tides, beers placed carefully on the table instead of hurtling to someone’s head. We can and must do better.

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed this is of course directly-and-not-even-that-clumsily linked to the thinking in the Article That Made Me Think this week, this piece by Mark Rendle on Model B and other arrangements in Professional Adviser. My shoehorned metaphor that LinkedIn AI-generated posts would be proud of.

The main thing that chimed with my thinking is how much the terms Model B, Adviser as Platform, white-labelling and any other you might’ve heard of are used interchangeably – for understandable reasons – but mean different things in practice.

Model B is perhaps the clearest of the non-traditional models. Provider does back office, advice firm does client experience, including branding and pricing. White-label could be just about the same as Model B, or could just be a version of the traditional model with a new advice firm badge on it.

When we’ve tested the appetite for advisers running their own platform – the full fat version – we find it’s typically the largest firms with the most resources that explore it.

But this is too simplistic now I reckon. A reason for the confusion and interchanging of names is because there’s much more flexibility in getting what you want now.

With an advice market that wants more autonomy from platforms, and one that’s also consolidating, it makes sense the platform market evolves alongside it. The interesting bit for those of us who monitor this stuff for a living is what these more bespoke arrangements do to the market itself. Is it still ‘platform business’ in the traditional sense? Probably not. Does it matter anymore whether you slap a Model B or Adviser as Platform label on the table?

I think maybe the labels matter less now. The distinction is what the advice firm takes on and what the platform does from the menu of negotiable services. A little from column A, a little from Model B if you will.

What is super important, is being absolutely clear on what each party is on the hook for, and that clients understand it too. Clarity on roles and responsibilities is essential in the post-Consumer Duty world, and even more important tonight, to make sure things don’t get too Messi. Ahem.

I’ve been informed that having Three Lions as music choice is a sackable offence, so have Atlas, by the Wood Brothers instead.