Well here we are again, and I guess all the people who wanted the madmen in charge because the technocrats were boring and, like, elite and stuff are happy now, because the madmen are definitely in charge. You can’t do what we do and not know some folk around the financial centres of Dubai and surrounds. I’ve done the research and apparently this isn’t a global politics newsletter, but we can reasonably wish the people we know there safety.
I’m writing this on the rattler to London, and I always like doing Updates when on the train. You’re sort of out of time; it’s nice. Also there has been train wine, but we won’t talk about that.
While I’m out of time, my thoughts turn to complexity. No sneak peeks, but me and the living Leg End that is TV’s Steve Nelson did a thing this morning with the bored, sorry, board of a platform and showed some New and Very Exciting Research, and to cut a long story short, everything is getting more complicated.
This is popping up particularly around retirement planning for obvious reasons, but the downstream impacts of it are interesting. Technical support – trusts and all that stuff I studied for G10, G20 and G60 in 1875 or whenever it was – is more highly valued than at any time in the last decade.
Propositional heft along the lines of being able to hold multiple portfolios seamlessly in one wrapper is hopping up the due diligence charts faster than a novelty single, and as I mentioned last week there’s an explosion in bond wrapper usage and now a bunch of advisers who have said an approximation of “nah mate, bonds are like soooooo 2005” are now all bent out of shape because the industry – that is to say the supply chain that planners rely on to make financial plans happen – isn’t set up properly.
Allied to that is what I think is quite a sharp upward trajectory in the size of a typical portfolio a financial planner is dealing with; I don’t know many firms who are struggling to find clients with at least several hundred thousand Imperial Credits of the Realm under their belt. Lots of wealthier clients who loved the investment-forward world when they were a bit younger are now locating the light switch in terms of needing financial planning, and all in all it’s a pretty great time to do what you do.
But complexity is part of this. I’m interested in that, because it flies in the face of systemisation, straight-through processing and even digitisation to an extent. We described it this morning as the need for the sector to do the big, hairy, macro processes slickly and brilliantly well, but to be able to accommodate the edge cases, the difficult stuff, with properly expert and trained professional human beings. Nothing revolutionary in that, but it’s oft talked about and little done, and I can’t help feeling that whatever else is going on in the sector, it’s businesses that can support advisers and planners in this way who will be doing a funny little dance on a podium at some point.
In this era, complexity and sophistication is a feature not a bug. That can exist alongside a planning-first approach. Discuss…
Your music choice this week? You have got off too lightly lately. I went to see German noisy straight-edge metallers Heaven Shall Burn last weekend in Glasgow, and it did me good. I think it will do you good too. Here’s My Revocation of Compliance, which is all about suitability reports, as you can see by the video. Enjoy. Oh, and the playlist is still here.
