Gooood lunchtime all and welcome to your Update; a small package of whimsy to distract you from whatever may be keeping you busy today for just a few minutes. 

The business we don’t call show appears to be stuttering back to life now after the summer, which means there’s less silly season stuff to deal with, and that is always pleasing for your Updaters. You can’t just pull this stuff out of clean air, you know. If you can find any.  

Before we get to business, though, may I gently point those of you in Scotland or who can get here on 7 October in the direction of our HomeGame 6 conference at the wonderful Leith Theatre? Only a month to go, and tickets are shifting which is a good sign this far out. 

I choose to believe that now we’ve announced our guest speaker they’ll shift even faster. We’re childishly happy to be welcoming Hollie Davidson to the stage. Hollie will be known to rugby fans among you as a mould-breaker and trailblazer and we know she will be someone you will want to hear from.  

For the uninitiated, she’s the first female referee to take charge of a men’s Six Nations game. She’s the first woman to referee an All Blacks test match. And she’s the first woman to referee a Springboks match. All of which makes her entirely comfortable dealing with large groups of blokes with massive egos, so we’re betting a theatre full of IFAs won’t freak her out much. 

If you’ve read previous Updates you’ll know we’re using this HomeGame as a bit of an experiment to look at the intersection of AI and “advice”. Has a trailblazing female rugby referee got anything to do with that? No, she doesn’t. But what she is, is awesome, and we are fully on board with hearing from people who do things in unconventional ways. She’s a great speaker too.  

So if you fancy it, please don’t hang around as I think we will be operating the much-hated waitlists before too long. Free for advice professionals, £100 for everyone else. Full details and tickets here – don’t wait to be invited, just get on it.  

Right. Let’s do some industry stuff. Talking of new ways of doing stuff, I was taken by this piece by another package of whimsy, Alistair Cunningham, who is surely the most energetic person I’ve ever been to a gig with.  

You should read it, but the theme is about ‘elegant disengagement’ which is exactly the opposite sort of thing to what an early girlfriend of mine visited on me at Murrayfield Ice Rink in 1989. I have never enjoyed ice skating since; also I do tend to fall over a lot. That’s not important right now.  

What is important, or at least a little important, or at least interesting, at least to me, is this bit of Mr C’s column: 

“Self-service platforms and AI are making parts of financial advice cheaper and easier to obtain, and AI will increasingly do more than calculations. It can help uncover objectives, challenge assumptions and identify questions neither adviser nor client initially thought to ask. I see that less as replacing the planner and more as working alongside one.” 

I’m staring at the stats right now for this year’s Advice Gap paper, and I’m not going to give the game away but my goodness a lot of people are using AI to at least get them started. Many are checking their adviser’s recommendations; we hear about clients walking in with 10 pages of gumph from ChatGPT and saying “what do you think of THAT, eh?”.  

I just want to put a wee thought in your head – it is easy for us to forget that clients have agency and with just a little bit of help they can be encouraged to use it. Look at the explosion in D2C lately and you’ll see that loooooads of people have no problem at all making their way to long-term tax-advantaged savings and investments and no, not all of them make a mess of it. Planning is a different thing, of course – and there are times when complexity really means that a planner will be completely indispensable. 

But when I think of what a future of ‘elegant disengagement’ might look like, I think of a world in which a ‘no change’ report is issued in 15 minutes or less thanks to AI, and where investment is outsourced to an MPS, and really all that happens is the maintenance of a PI liability and some care and oversight at a client book level, and of course the ‘right’ to have access to the planner.  

Does that warrant a full-fat ongoing advice charge? The client can – maybe even with the blessing of the adviser / planner (they might be separate roles) – play around with AI and get answers to reasonable questions. Might we see, then, a world where clients constantly look to disengage and re-engage as more and more information and know-how is (to use the tech bro phrase) ‘democratised’? And how do you charge for that?  

We’re going to see a huge spike in engagement in the next 6-9 months as the IHT / pension reforms enter the chat in earnest. New relationships with clients will not be hard to come by. But I wonder if some of them won’t start to need a very different shape from the way the industry has set itself up over the last decade and a half or so.  

It all makes trying to explain to Eben Etzebeth the nature of his particular transgressions sound easy… 

your music choice this week is a lovely, lovely thing from Sigur Ros, who I saw last week with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and chorus as part of their regional orchestra tour. It wasn’t a flawless gig, and really drove home how a good leader / conductor can get more out of an orchestra; if only we’d had one. Nonetheless, Ara Batur – the best Sigur Ros song, fight me – always makes the room dusty, and so it proved again even with the floppy-armed dude wasting his efforts. Here’s the proper version from Abbey Road, where we will do our London conference in February. A better 10 minutes you will not spend, and this one has a translation too. I think it will do you good.  

See you next week 

Mark