Hi everyone, a very tired Steve here subbing for Mark. It’s just gone midnight and I’m only in the door from watching Scotland absolutely hammer Portugal nil nil. I took my daughter to her first big Scotland match and she’s now sitting on a football record of three wins and a draw. Given we support Scotland and Dunfermline she’s surely only a couple of results away from a Netflix documentary.
There’s nothing quite like a buzzing Hampden under the lights and last night was no exception. Plus, we were able to watch one of the greatest to ever play the game. Enough about Scott McTominay though, time to get some rest and write the serious bit in the morning.
THE SELFISH, SELFISH, STEVE BIT
Whooooooosssshhhhhh. A quick bit of time travel there, it’s now Wednesday morning and time to tell you why this is such a big day for the lang cat. Today marks the official launch of State of the Advice Nation (SOTAN): wave 7, our big kahuna omnibus study on the advice profession. And if Police Academy Mission to Moscow has taught us anything, and it has, the seventh edition is where a franchise really begins to hit its stride.
Actually, that’s not quite true. We soft-launched it yesterday with some of our advice panel. Soft-launch is such an interesting, late-stage capitalism phrase isn’t it? Pure marketing-speak for “we’re not absolutely confident in this so best just do a wee release to people who will be nicer to us if we have a catastrophic screw-up in there somewhere”. Turns out I’m one of them now, life comes at you fast folks. One ridiculous typo aside, I think we’re in the clear so today is like totally the definite launch.
Each year when we start to design this thing I take a wee moment to think about the headspace we were in all those years ago. The origin story of SOTAN is pretty simple really. Back in the SOTAN #1 days, there was tonnes of good research out there. Still is. But none that really spoke to the advice profession in the way we experienced when meeting and working with them. Nothing that got behind the X% of firms pick this platform or Y% of firms run this CIP or, hilariously, “DFM MPS provider predicts that DFM MPS usage will grow this year.”
It seems so self-evident when you write this bit out but if you design a study that doesn’t lazily label an entire, vibrant profession with the word “advisers” and instead attempts at its core to acknowledge that business owners face a different set of challenges to planners (whilst recognising a huge sub-section of those business owners are also planners) who face a different set of challenges to those working in Ops, who have different things on their mind to paraplanners (noting that many are outsourced paraplanners) etcetera then what comes out the other side is something more meaningful that resonates better with the sector as a whole.
That’s my Ted talk anyway. Link to take part in the links bit.
THE OMG, THE WORLD DOESN’T REVOLVE AROUND ME BITS
A quick whistle through of other non-SOTAN stuff that’s broken through my survey-addled brain this week.
The first sets of quarter three numbers in the platform sector are out and initial signs are good. Transact posted its highest gross flows in a while and Quilter, fresh from its platform of the year win at the Schroders shindig the other week, is absolutely flying at the moment, posting hooj gross numbers too. Professor Richard Mayor of Portsmouth will Update you properly as time goes on. I notice inflation is down to a 3-year low as well, which will mean something. Or something else.
It’s only two weeks till the budget! I don’t know about you but once it’s finally over I’m going to head outside and celebrate in the rain like Andy Dufresne at the end of Shawshank. A quick note on panic. If you’re a mainstream newspaper and you write headlines with the word panic in them, is it perhaps you that’s causing some of the panic? It’s a bit like that “don’t think of a big elephant” thing.
Huge kudos to all the planners and experts acting as the grown-ups in the room navigating their way through all of this. I was chatting to Ian and Pam in the lang cat office the other day and collectively we came to a conclusion that sooner or later, someone is going to have to grasp the intergenerational pension nettle and that what we could really do with is like a Westminster cross-party truce and politicking embargo, where we collectively try and take some time to sort things out and do what’s best for the country.
Then we all collapsed laughing.
Your music today is my earworm from last night. I prefer the Scott McTominay cover version but for now, we’ll have to make do with the original.
