Another week come and gone, and that’s us very nearly a quarter through the year. 270 days left till Christmas…

It’s also our year end, which means I’ll have to keep this mercifully brief, but also means I can now say with certainty that the last year was the biggest in the lang cat’s history by some distance. A huge thanks to everyone who has helped to make it so, whether you were a client, or came to an event, or used Analyser or even just read some of our stuff. I’ve said it too often here, but I’m still perpetually amazed that what started out as me mucking around 13 years ago has turned into a business with 25 bods and all sorts of things going on. Thanks for letting me do that, and especially to the lang cat team: if we ever get anything right it’s down to them and if we don’t it’s down to me.

Right, enough self-indulgent waffle (actually, regular readers will know there is an inexhaustible supply of self-indulgent waffle in the Update; it’s like the eternal fountain of waffle or something).

A post from the redoubtable Helena Wardle caught my eye on LinkedIn yesterday, and I thought you might like it here. Helena is not my favourite person despite being wonderful in many ways, having referred to the Scotland rugby team as ‘the South African B-team’ a month or two ago. I’ll let you guess where she’s from. We do not forgive; we do not forget. (True tho)

For those who don’t want to make the jump, it turns out that quite a lot of asset managers are still using fax machines. 62% to be precise. Now, if you’re under 35, a fax machine was a thing that magically took words that were written on a thing called paper and sent them over a phone line to a sort of printer thing – like your parents have – linked to the other end of a phone line and then there was more paper and smudges and stuff but hopefully you could sort of read what was written on it and if you wanted a poo emoji then you had to draw it on yourself.

And the UK isn’t the worst – both the USA and Singapore are up at well over 70%.

It’s quite hard to know where to start with this. Entire thriller films have had key plot points driven by a fax not being clear, or falling out of the machine and down the back of the filing cabinet the fax was on (it was always on a filing cabinet). It’s a technology of the eighties and early nineties at best, and while I understand the cyclical nature of many things, I think we could all leave this particular throwback behind, no?

A hundred or so years ago I went and did a talk at a transfer agency conference in a small European principality which had, as I recall, very amusingly named beer. I was a cat out of water there, not really working in the transfer agency world, and even my best jokes about lifecos didn’t go down all that well, but I did learn quite a lot about the technology that sits behind the technology that sits behind the technology that sits behind platforms, and in particular I learned why T+3 and T+4 exists on fund trading. If you don’t know what I mean it’s why your clients have to wait days for their money when you sell a mutual fund unless the provider pre-funds the withdrawal. The reason isn’t faxes, though I imagine there are probably some involved somewhere, but it is because transactions don’t get processed in real time; they all get batched up and done overnight in the light of the silvery moon. By the time the relevant parties have each done that, you’re some days in, and that’s why everything’s so slow.

Why, I enquired, didn’t it all happen in real time given Moore’s Law and the fact that it’s not, you know, 1998 any more? The answer was: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. And that’s why the faxes are still there, and why no matter how slick the front ends of platforms and products and fintech gets, it can still only go at the pace of the slowest. Is it time for a change? I think it probably is.

I’ll leave you with this: if you’re ever frustrated with your platform, or your CRM, or your risk system or whatever – at least you’re not doing it by fax.

#LANGCATLINKS

• Two – two! – podcats for the price of one this week, and very fine they are too. Please immerse yourself in these Budget-related crackers. Tom Selby of AJ Bell does policy with Tom here, and Alice Guy of Interactive Investor does financial planning implications here. Both well worthy of your time. If you can’t listen let me know and I’ll fax over a transcript.
• A trifecta of Novia-related news – alumni Bill Vasilieff and Paul Boston are busy and Barry Neilson will be taking his outstanding facial hair strategies away from Novia to somewhere else soon. You wait for months for Novia news and then three buses come along at once, sort of thing. Good luck to all.
• Interesting piece from Chloe at NMA interviewing Rich Denning from M&G Wealth on the shenanigans at Bravura – all very inside baseball but still worth a read.
• And your music choice this week will likely split the crowd. I can never quite work out if I can be bothered with Lana Del Rey or not, but this tune is definitely worth the candle. Warning: contains language. Give Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd a try. If you don’t like it don’t worry; there’s more death metal coming next week.

Laters

Mark