The communications gap
The other day I came across a quotation by Steve Jobs which rang a chord with me. He said: Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. […]
Tiers for fears – Standard Life comes out of the shadows
Note:Hidden craftily throughout this blog are song titles by Tears for Fears. Anyone who gets them all wins a free copy of the lang cat Guide to Platform Pricing, along with regular updates for stuff like this. Enter via the comments form below. Standard Life is the last platform to reveal its post-RDR charging structure. […]
Mr Blonde and the art of platform pricing Cofunds wields the razor
As a business which analyses platform pricing, amongst other things, we do have a rich and varied life, we spend a fair bit of time pressuring platforms who have not adequately described what it is they do and why it’s worth what they charge. It’s those platforms which feel the greatest price pressure and which […]
Bangs and whimpers – the SUPERCLEAN starting gun is fired
Those who know me will be surprised by the following statement: I feel a bit sorry for Standard Life today. OK, as you were. This blog isn’t really about SL. It’s about SUPERCLEAN and it just so happens that SL is first to the party. The Edinburgh titan’s superclean announcement has generated a resounding ‘meh’ […]
In good hands
So it’s the 3rd birthday of the lang cat. Not doing the self-indulgent bit this time, but it’s been and continues to be a hell of a ride. Thanks to all who’ve helped us on the way, and thanks to those who’ve reminded us why we want to be on the ride too. Rather than […]
Trolling in the deep
So a funny thing happened to me today. Not funny ha ha, a funny peculiar sort of thing. You might find it funny ha ha, I don’t know. That’s the nature of perception, it’s individual. Anyway, Chris Gilchrist was writing a bit of an agent provocateur article about adviser charging in Money Marketing and used […]
A blog about retiring
Annuities are a hot topic at the moment. So I decided to step away from the recent industry noise and take a closer look at the market for myself. Here’s what I found. First, it’s crass to talk about the annuity market as a whole. Market rates vary so much from client to client that […]
The meek geek week shall inherit the earth. With advertising.
So that’s been quite a week in Platformland then. Most importantly, some bunch of Scots jokers published something and did a load of twitter awards nonsense. If you want to read about it go here and you should be able to sort of follow it. It was fun, and thanks to those of you who […]
TR13/5, with advertising
Last week, the FCA published TR13/5, positioning it as an early report card on how advisers are doing with their implementation of RDR. Accompanied by some challenging research from NMG on how consumers are responding so far to Adviser Charging and Scope of Service disclosure, TR13/5 particularly piqued ourÃÂ curiosity at lang cat HQ. Why? […]
The rich get richer, the poor get the picture – Nucleus does its bit
There have been few things I’ve enjoyed more since joining the lang cat than buffing up our patented Recursive Pricing Engine (with integrated Turing Guessing Module). But it’s been a little quiet on the pricing front, so when I heard that Nucleus had trimmed its charges, I positively sprinted into work[1] to get my claws […]
