Happy Wednesday everyone and I hope you are feeling suitably Allegiant. Is that a word? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because there was a bank holiday, and bread, and circuses and that’s the main thing. This week’s headline is inspired by the inspirational Private Eye front cover, and I don’t think you can do much better than that. 

Whatever your stance on the jollities – I, for example, was buying festive coronation shelving brackets for the greenhouse – I think we can all agree it was worth it for seeing Nick Cave wandering in with Justin Welby. I’d have paid good money to see it if he’d been flanked by Al Jourgensen and Rob Zombie, but he wasn’t so I didn’t. 

The Soros-approved Gates-manufactured tracking devices I install in the nape of everyone’s neck that works at the lang cat were inexplicably malfunctioning on Monday, so I don’t know what all of them were up to, but I do know at least some were doing something worthwhile, and that’s putting the finishing touches to our new report, The Advice Gap 2023, which launches tomorrow. 

The problem with launching a report on a Thursday is that you can’t really do much with it the day before in the Update, and so as I recline decadently in my superluxe Premier Inn room writing this, I’m acutely conscious that if I give too much away, m’colleague Mike Barrett – available in fabulously uncomfortable promo videos near you – and the rest of the team that worked on the report may come for me with pitchforks and no-one needs that. 

But I can tell you that when it launches tomorrow, if you’re interested in the provision of advice, it’s worth a read. We’ve produced this report for a few years now, with a bit of a break for the pandemic, and as usual we’ve partnered with YouGov for consumer research (our sample size this time was just over 2,000 UK adults), and have done our own adviser research with 210 firms. It’s not about products, or platforms, or portfolios; it is about what gets in the way of more people experiencing what advice can do for them.  

You’ll have to actually read the thing for the figures, but I can tell you that there’s a prop-on-winger mismatch between what your sector thinks people think about financial planning and what they really think about it. Actually, they don’t think anything about it because they don’t know what it is, but if we replace ‘planning’ with ‘advice’, unless they’ve experienced high quality advice they simply don’t trust it or the people providing it. Shifting that Fader Of Trust higher on the Mixing Board Of…nope, haven’t got any figurative language for that one. Repentance? Despair? Gin? It’s hard to know. But shifting it even a little would massively increase demand for advice and by that we mean the kind you pay for, not the kind that Dave from IT tells you in the pub. 

There’s a huge gap (hey, good name for a report) between what people who’ve had real advice and planning think about it and what those who haven’t think about it. There are many issues your sector can’t fix – the cost of living crisis amongst others, though I note we can find £100m for someone to sit in a hat on a chair – but this perception gap does feel like something we could just do better.  

Anyway, the report is free and it’s a departure from our usual fare of things that matter very much indeed to us in the sector and very much not to real people. I think it’s a properly important read and it’ll be available for download tomorrow on our site. Please do.   

#LANGCATLINKS 

• We’re always watching for new GYMBOA (Get Your Money Back Out Again) portfolios and products – you call it decumula***n but that’s definitely not a real word. Anyway, Copia has just launched the first retirement income portfolios to use guaranteed income as an asset class. If you want to hear more about how it works, there’s a webinar with Just Group on 24 May. 
• This feels like a good thing. Amazingly, the Money Marketing reply guys still find something to moan about below the line. It’s reassuring, really. 
• You want SM&CR? We got SM&CR for you. New podcast is now live.  

• Trebles all round at the Beast from Bristol – but will those high margins on cash be sustainable? 
• And your music choice – well, I asked a dinner companion what song I should pick for this week the other day, and they said “it doesn’t matter what I pick because it’ll just be 15 minutes of death metal anyway.” I think that’s rather rude. So to prove them wrong, here’s the tremendous Ne Obliviscaris with Graal, which is only EIGHT AND A HALF minutes of death metal. So nyah to you, dinner companion.  

See you next week. Mind and download The Advice Gap 2023 tomorrow. 

Mark