Hello siblings, been a while. I’m a bit crocked at the moment which is why I haven’t been in touch for a couple of weeks, but one can only occupy the sofa for so long. I’m writing this from the chair next to the sofa. Might go back to the sofa soon. I’ll let you know.
Anyway, I hope you are in the kind of fettle that you feel is appropriate for your general levels of wellbeing and that if you’re as exercised by the foopball as Nigel Molesworth is, that you are having a nice time of it. I stayed up for Scotland v Haiti (apart from the bits I slept through) and I think I’m still paying for it in tiredness.
We’ll get into our theme in a minute, but this is your ONE WEEK TO GO klaxon for the AdviceTech Catwalk in sunny London next week. Obviously next week. It wouldn’t be a week to go otherwise. Anyway, please take this as your sign that a sense of urgency needs to grip you if you would like to come along to see some cool new advisertech from companies you most likely don’t know, or don’t know well. Our Catwalkers will battle it out in front of the High Inquisitors and an audience with – ideally – you in it for the ultimate prize of a packet of Rolos. And bragging rights. But mainly Rolos. It’ll be good and you should come. Last tickets are here.
No shortage of things going on out there – it’s the pre-holiday rush – but I thought we might put our D2C pants on while still having a good think about how the lines are blurring in how platform propositions are made these days.
This is the story that caught my eye, and not just because (disclosure) Platform One is a lang cat client. If you missed it, Trading 212 has launched a SIPP which is underpinned for its infrastructure by Platform One, which many of you will know as an adviser-focused platform. If you don’t know Trading 212, it’s one of the newer world D2C shops, and has been doing some pretty serious numbers; the last AUA figure I can find is £25bn globally with most of it in the UK and that was from a wee while ago.
We all know the big D2C guys, but here’s a stat which might surprise you – the beta phase of T212’s Platform One-powered SIPP got over 70,000 signups. That’s the beta phase, invite-only type thing. 70,000. From a standing start. And the SIPP you’ll find isn’t a shackled, half-a-loaf thing, it’s a fully featured drawdown-ready SIPP of the kind that if you’re an adviser you would recognise very well. (Worth saying here that this isn’t Platform One’s first go-round; Freetrade also has something similar but it’s much smaller and also someone from Freetrade was once Very Rude to me so they don’t count).
I’ve written in Updates passim about advisers starting to tell us that D2C is if not eating their lunch, then certainly eyeing it up across the refectory. I’m just saying – these are some numbers…
But that’s not what’s interesting today. Here’s what is. You might have heard m’colleague Mr Steven Nelson (current location: Corsica; please feel free to send insults) on the staggering number of combinations advisers can create with the tech you select: 26-odd platforms, over half a dozen back-office systems, cashflow modellers, risk profilers, the rest: multiply all of those by all of the others and you arrive at millions of combinations any given client might be sitting inside without knowing. No wonder integrations are a problem.
Listen up at the back, now. That complexity is horizontal. Imagine a menu with each course listed next to each other, rather than below. The choice architecture spreads sideways across the menu, and somewhere an adviser chooses one from each column off of it (and sometimes two, but that’s for another day).
The D2C architecture works differently. The 212 pension just appeared inside the app next to the buy button. No customer chooses (remember of course that the first line client of an adviser platform is the adviser, not their client).
The app rides someone else’s infrastructure for the plumbing. Other bits ride different parts. It’s a panoply, a palimpsest, a fugazi, it’s a wazi, it’s a woozy…sorry, got carried away and that’s not actually true. But what is, is that this market now creates highly interconnected, close-to-invisible propositions which are abstracted away behind the cool UI. This is like a nested architecture, unlike the horizontal advised one. It’s fractal, baby. Like ferns and stuff.
That infrastructure sits on custody and trustee arrangements the customer has never wot of. Same combined scale as the advised world, but nested, pre-assembled, and the entire design goal was that you’d never think about it.
In advised land the movement right now is the other way. Various advised platforms are pulling things back in-house, and advisers generally like that, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology: one phone number, one neck to put the Hobnailed Advised Boot on.
So is life just different for D2C? Maybe. The customer never expected a neck to wring, so perhaps its absence costs nothing. Or perhaps D2C is just earlier in the same cycle — and the first time a layer fails badly, the accountability question lands all at once on someone who didn’t know there was anyone to ask.
Maybe advised world will always be different. But here we are, it’s 2026, and a part of the platform market is creating integrated, nested propositions that on the face of it look pretty persuasive – and are doing numbers, all at the same time. It’s all out there…you just have to want it.
Your music choice is a grand and beautiful thing from the reliably grand and beautiful Mono of Japan. If you like Mogwai, Sigur Ros, and so on, this is going to be for you. Don’t peak too soon; the best bit comes 6 minutes in. And you know, I’m not sure how they found a power source in that windy field. Please enjoy Gerbera.
