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 […]
PS16/12 and the mystery of the cover photos
Another week, another chunky missive from the FCA. Although happily, PS16/12: Pensions reforms, feedback on CP15/30 and final rules and guidance didn’t make me feel like turning green and smashing stuff. So that’s a good start. PS16/12 follows on from CP15/30: Pensions reform, proposed changes to our rules and guidance. It looked at whether consumers […]
Aviva and FNZ up a tree, R-E-PLAT-FORM-I-N-G
Just a quick few thoughts on the news from Aviva today that it plans to migrate its platform from Bravura to FNZ. For those not intimately involved, Bravura and FNZ, along with GBST (disclosure: GBST is a client of ours) are the three big beasts of outsourced platform technology in the advised space. IFDS is […]
Booting ISAs in the baws – tax year end 2015/16
Well now, the IA has just put out its stats for tax year end (TYE) 2015/16 and it’s not nice reading. The full release is here but this table which I nabbed from the release tells quite a story. 2014/15 was generally reckoned to be a relatively sucky year for the ISA season, which has […]
