An official welcome to 2023, siblings. I hope you enjoyed whatever break you managed to have and that whatever festivities you celebrated were full of good things and devoid of bad things. It is better to be full of good things than bad things, and you can quote me on that.

So what do we know now that we didn’t know before? What have we learned from the hot mess with occasional flashes of intense excellence that was 2022? How will we ascend, overcome and quite literally carpe the diem out of 2023? How will we set the tone for the year to come?

We will set it, it turns out, by having an internecine ruck in the sector’s largest professional body. I don’t really understand what’s going on and I’m not sure anyone else does either, but anything that has as part of its saga accusations about “inappropriate sub-committees” sounds like something from which one should run, not walk, as if from an explosion of some sort. I was on a sub-committee once (not a PFS one). Never again.

The whole thing sounds frightful, particularly if you’re part of PFS.  And if, as many are suggesting, it’s a cash grab then we’re at sub-Freedom Caucus levels of nonsense and those involved need to stop and take a good look at themselves in the mirror. Would your granny be proud of what you’re up to?

This unpleasant situation highlights a broader issue – the lack of coherent, effective professional representation for advisers and planners as a sector. The splintering of the sector – not least across advisers and planners – isn’t helping at all and I can’t help thinking the current turf war is an inevitable consequence of where things have been heading for a long time. I’m a huge fan and defender of financial planning, but the sheer contempt with which too many planners talk about those advisers who don’t share their methods and do concentrate on tax, investment and so on is also part of the issue here.

If the planning and advisory sector is to achieve some kind of unity and effective representation on a professional level – as a sector with over 27,000 participants certainly should – then a more grown-up admission that there are different specialisms and all have their place under the same umbrella is crucial. Otherwise we have a bunch of small, noisy groups of zealots who are easy to ignore as they take lumps out of each other.

This has all sorts of deleterious real-world implications. An example. In our A Fragmented World report last year (opens online flipbook, check p.40) we identified one of the major fragmenting forces in the industry as that there is ‘no shared view of the desired end state’ for something as fundamental as how technology for the sector should enable better client outcomes. This is a natural thing for a trade body to lead on – not by reflecting existing practice, but by setting out clearly where things need to go. Without it, factionalisation gives those providers keen to be more integrative a thumping headache and thwarts progress; it also gives those providers keen to avoid spending time and money on integration which may not benefit them a cracking excuse not to bother.

Once again, this ain’t my fight and I don’t really understand all the dynamics. But this sector does so much good for so many people that it’s criminal to see it at war with itself like this. I can’t imagine it gives clients – who are perfectly capable of operating search engines and reading trade press articles about advisers – any confidence either. Maybe 2023 can be a year of growing up. Maybe not.

#langcatlive

It’s just under a month till we take to the stage in London for our first event of 2023. You can find all the details – including the agenda – here, and you can also book tickets. We are within 10 tickets of being completely full up, and so if you do want to come, whether you’re entitled to a free ticket or not, please don’t hang about. Once we’re full, which I expect will happen today or tomorrow, then we’ll start a waitlist. We’ll be assiduous in getting those who have a ticket but now can’t come to release their spot, so hopefully a good few on the waitlist will have success.

We’re proud that – apart from lang cats – well over 90% of the voices you hear on the day will be from advisers and planners; many of whom are doing different and exciting things. We plan to challenge existing practices and attitudes – but also look to the future and consider what a leading firm in 2030 or 2040 might look like. And we’ll do it together, with differing points of view very welcome.

While in-person places are limited, streaming places aren’t, and they’re free for everyone. You do need to register in advance so we can send you joining details, so please get on it and mark 9 February as a day for cups of coffee and watching something remarkable unfold. It’s fine to pop in and out of streaming the sessions during the day, and we’ll send those who have booked streaming tickets little calendar entries over the next couple of weeks for the individual sessions.

#langcatlinks

• Big news over the break – Nucleus takes Curtis Banks. Tonnes of interesting stuff in this, not least that the combined group assuming it all goes ahead as planned will be £80bn or so, with a very high proportion of those assets eventually sitting on one platform (obviously the commercial property side of SIPPs and SSAS’s is a bit different). That’s a level of rationalisation that no-one else has managed from acquisitions yet. Obviously it’s all still to do, but this is major stuff.
• And sad news to start the year: we mark the loss of David Tiller and Paul Etheridge and send our best to their colleagues, families and friends.
• Please bathe your ears in Tom McPhail’s waters – he has the legend that is John Greenwood on his podcat this week, and it’s a belter. Even Henry Tapper says so and you know what he’s like.
• No-one has had nearly enough fun with this story
• And your music choice this week is a soothing and very beautiful thing from the lang cat’s namefather James Yorkston, this time working with Nina Persson from the Cardigans and The Second Hand Orchestra. Here’s The Harmony, and if this doesn’t make you feel better in a cold January then nothing will.

See you next week

Mark