Rates. How low can you go?
Cash accounts on platforms interest (ha!) me. Whilst no one really should be using a platform to be fully invested in cash in the long term it’s clearly an important facility to have. Strategic asset allocations often require a small cash holding, and most clients like the comfort blanket of knowing they can flee to […]
A (slightly resentful) welcome to Scalable Capital
So you go off on holiday, all happy because your new guide to direct platforms and robo-advice has launched. You come back, and some rotten sod has gone and launched while you were away and spoiled all your tables and that. The rotten sod in this case is Scalable Capital. To be fair, we’ve known […]
A (slightly resentful) welcome to Scalable Capital
So you go off on holiday, all happy because your new guide to direct platforms and robo-advice has launched. You come back, and some rotten sod has gone and launched while you were away and spoiled all your tables and that. The rotten sod in this case is Scalable Capital. To be fair, we’ve known […]
A right old robo romp
The sun has finally made an appearance at lang cat HQ this week (with some thunder and lightning thrown in for dramatic effect) which means not just one, but TWO great things: summer has finally arrived here in Leith and our free annual guide to direct platform investing has been let loose on the world […]
10 years of treating customers fairly
July 2006 is not a month to stir the memories. England had just been knocked out of the world cup on pens, the best-selling album was the High School Musical soundtrack (fist pump of solidarity with all the parents who endured that one) and according to Dr Wikipedia one of the most significant news events […]
Learning the language of risk
I recently spent a couple of days with one of our PR clients, Paul Resnik from FinaMetrica. For those who don’t know FinaMetrica, they specialise in helping financial advisers and their clients understand investment risk tolerance through tools and educational material. One of the things we discussed was the language of risk and the fact […]
Weekend reading
Lots of interesting stuff over the weekend, so for those of you with a life who didn’t spend the weekend reviewing the personal finance press, here’s a quick round up. Friday evening started with a bang (#langcatlife) with the FT front cover on pension fund transparency. Much more to come on this, building on the […]
DataViz: A fresh look at financial services
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then financial services has gone well and truly mad. Having joined the industry around two months ago, this has been my overwhelming impression of the tired-old lines and scary figures that the industry constantly churns out […]
Don’t believe the hype
I’m pretty sure Chuck D and Flavor Flav had other things on their mind beyond platform due diligence when they penned their 1988 classic, but hey, it’s a great record, and its central hook is certainly worth remembering at the moment. The platform world is changing. The Axa Elevate move broke earlier this week, and […]
And so it begins – Standard Life scarfs AXA Elevate
(I made edits to this at 7.30pm on 4/5/16 to update on the Architas deal, pricing reviews and the purchase price). Well, I was never going to be able to let this go by. I was on a plane as I wrote most of this; the news of Standard Life buying AXA Portfolio Services, which […]
