We’ll get to business in a moment, siblings, but before we do I know you’ll indulge me when I say Very Good Things will be happing in 7 days’ time. You’re correct; it’s exactly one week until our Edinburgh ULTRACONFERENCE – HomeGame 3. Our theme this year is ‘Save Your Progress’ – about what change we want to keep from the last 10 years or so, what we’ll get rid of and what needs to happen now – and it’s going to be an 8-bit extravaganza. We’ve got 20 external speakers, a barnstorming agenda, absolutely no punting of our-new-multi-asset-fund-range, food and drink till it’s coming out your ears including one of our infamous afterparties, and a new mascot. 

The best thing about all this is that if you’re an advice professional – that’s an adviser, planner, paraplanner or support person from an advice firm – we have 11 free in-person tickets available thanks to lovely folk being supportive and letting us know they couldn’t come along. So if you’re up for a good time and you can be in Edinburgh next Wednesday, you can now book online at www.langcatfinancial.co.uk/langcatlive.  

If you’re not an advice professional or you can’t be in Edinburgh, you can also stream the event free – just grab a streaming ticket from the same link. You don’t have to watch the whole day! You can come and go as much as you please, but you do have to register in advance of the day itself.  

I hate having tickets left, so if you’re an Embra or nearby IFA reading this, come along and bring someone from the office who doesn’t normally get out. They’ll enjoy it and you will too, and it’ll cheer me up. 

I’ll stop punting now. 

So the big news this week – apart from upcoming conferences – has to be the completion of the Nucleus takeover of Curtis Banks (disclosure: Nucleus is one of our clients). I don’t think it was ever in doubt that the transaction would go ahead, but certainty is good and so I should think everyone involved will be happy. This bumps the Nucleus group up to about £80bn of assets across the Nucleus, James Hay and Curtis Banks books. Of course, not all of this is classic platformy asset; there’s plenty of commercial property in there and so on. But it’s still hooj. £80bn puts it in second place behind Aegon’s combined figure, and a bit of ahead of Quilter, abrdn and AJ Bell who all have about £70bn, give or take.  

The work starts now for those guys, but rather than thinking about that let’s ponder, and only for a moment, a landscape in which we have a new breed of consolidators or at least potential consolidators. Nucleus is one. 7IM has stated it’s up for being another. Novia/Wealthtime has done its bit. But I’ve got a feeling this isn’t done, and I’m not the only one. 

Over the last 17 years or so we’ve got used to the same platform names, even if some of them have changed ownership or dropped a vowel or two along the way. But just because it’s been that way for some time don’t mean it’s going to stay that way.  

There aren’t many mid-sized platforms left ripe for consolidation. The smaller, newer guys are having fun doing their thing and while I’m sure deals are there to be done if someone was to back the money truck up, now’s a tough time to maximise value with sentiment in retail financial services pretty low and lots of red on the charts. That red pretty much deepens the bigger you are and the older you are. 

And there are some biiiig shops who’ve been in a looooong time. They came from the ground up and as they’ve built scale they’ve dragged a huge legacy of challenges, workarounds, and all the detritus that just happens as you grow a business with them. Have they maximised value for their owners? Might someone else have a go with one of them? Might now be the time when that happens? 

Something something Buffett, swimming trunks, tides and all that. I don’t know anything – I’m aware that will come as a massive shock to you all – but I wonder if the next deal will be a behemoth: much bigger than Curtis Banks. 

#LIVECATLINKS 

Links below and your music choice? Well, it would have been easy to do One Week what with it being ONE WEEK TILL HOMEGAME 3 (I lied when I said I’d stop punting). But where’s the fun in that? Instead, let’s have no fun at all but something really beautiful instead. Please take a few minutes out to try Kathryn Joseph’s From When I Wake The Want Is, and then do it again. Your week will be better for it. 

Not sure what we’ll do for the Update next week; we’ll be in full event mode. For which you can register here. But there’ll be something, or it wouldn’t be a Wednesday. 

Mark