Only a few days to go, siblings, and excitement is rising, supplies are being laid in, and pre-emptive napping is happening. But that’s enough about my impending holiday; lots of people are quite excited about Election Night ’24 too.
That’s known as a bait-and-switch, friends, and it’s only to be attempted by Professionals. It is my gift to you as I head off for a few weeks of scarcely deserved leisure, and I wish you joy with it. For those of you who placed a small flutter with your turf accountant of choice on the date of my holidays – always an error of judgement – the answer is 29th June.
Irritatingly, there’s lots to write about this week, so I can’t even slink out with a 300-word special. I could write about the stooshie brewing over the renewed Hargreaves Lansdown bid – check out the bit about conflicts of interest – or about True Potential making big changes to its famous 8% offer, or about Alliance Trust and Witan merging (a £5bn investment trust anyone?). But I won’t do any of those because I’m going to allow myself yet another bit of self-indulgence and talk a little about the Catwalk from last week.
I’ll be brief – it was a brilliant day and had an energy about it that still has me smiling. We packed nearly 200 folk in (including the odd scamp who snuck in with his pals, yeah we saw you) and heard really high-end keynotes from Ruth Handcock of Octopus and Adrian Durham of FNZ.
The five advicetech businesses who made it through to the (frankly brutal) pitch stage were:
- Avenir (AI suitability reporting)
- Estgro (intergenerational wealth)
- Firenze (Lombard lending)
- Saturn (AI data and suitability)
- Zerokey (integrations)
All of them are well worth a visit. Zerokey won the audience vote and the prize of a pack of Rolos despite being probably the earliest stage business demonstrating. I don’t think this was because they started their presentation by referring to A Fragmented World by, er, us but you never know.
The thing that I thought set Zerokey apart – and which Firenze also did really successfully – was to articulate really cleanly how advisers would use their kit. The other three had really interesting propositions – and will all, I think, go on to be really successful – but they found it harder to articulate to the audience how they’d use their AI-powered kit. I don’t know if it was because of the AI element – maybe the buzz around AI causes its own confusion.
Whatever the case, there is a great lesson for anyone building anything – from new tech through to advice propositions and beyond – and that is to give people something to hang on to. We create these ecosystems of big, hairy bits of technology around platforms, practice management, cashflow, investment analytics and so on – and we lose the detail along the way. We all need something to hang on to; life’s just too complicated to take in the totality of what everything can do.
Another observation, this time nicked from Helena Wardle, one of our High Inquisitors, and also articulated brilliantly by someone wise at the afterparty. All our demonstrators did a great job in articulating the benefits of what they do to advice firms. But not many spent much time on how that benefits the end client. And that’s something we all need to get better at too. So yes, radically improving the time it takes to do a suitability letter is desirable in that an efficient adviser is one who can spend more time on planning and the stuff that matters. But if all we do with the technology is to create the same sort of reports rather than creating something revolutionary and engaging then we haven’t moved forward in a way that truly makes a difference to the people who pay all our wages.
Anyway, we had a good time and I think the audience did too and we’ll do another Catwalk next year. Maybe you might end up on stage.
And your music choice – well, I need to send you on your way with something good as you’ll have to endure at least 3 weeks of dreck while I’m away. It should also be French. So please accept Flamme Jumelle from Alcest’s new record – if I tell you Alcest is known as the leader of the burgeoning French post-black metal scene then you might not listen to this. But if I tell you it’s just gorgeous with a hint of darkness in it – much like my good self – then maybe you will and if you do I think you’ll fall in love with it.
