Well, siblings, we start this week’s Update with a heavy heart. The Grim Reaper has come visiting and he has been spreading his favours both inside and outside our sector. So before we plough on, let’s take a moment to remember not just those who are internationally famous and no longer with us, but those who are closer and just well-known inside our own sector.  

We send our most luminous psychic butterflies, then, to alight on the shoulder of the immortal shade of Colin Lawson of Equilibrium, who has died aged just 56. No version of a world exists which is better off without such a decent guy in it. Proof that in no way do you need to be a self-aggrandising dick to run a brilliant business. 

And we – along with much of the world – send further butterflies, adorned with colours not typically found in nature, to alight on the padded shoulder of the immortal shade of Dolly Parton, who wrote some songs and sang them, but much more importantly set up Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library which at the last count has distributed over 330 million books to over 3 million children in five different countries including the UK. If a measure of our lives is whether we leave the world a better place than we found it even in very small ways then I think Dolly gets a very big tick.  

Here’s one of the things she said about the Library: 

“It’s the fact they get recognised…They get this little book with their little name on it in the mail, and they feel special. They start taking pride in themselves, and they know that somebody out there is thinking of [them].” 

And here’s my favourite Dolly quote:  

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb. And I also know that I’m not blonde.” 

Exactly no prizes for guessing the music choice today. 

Butterflies dispatched, let’s just spend a moment considering something in the ether. For a long time, and as I’ve said here before, the D2C and advised markets have pretty much grown by the same rate; on tram tracks if you will. But not the kind of tram tracks that stop at Princes Street all the way through the Festival and decimate visitor numbers to Leith in what’s inevitably become known as “the silence of the trams”.  

It’s been 2/3 advised, 1/3 D2C since Dolly was a lass, and that’s just the way the UK market is. But something’s up. Last quarter – as our Platform Market Scorecard, issued last week, subscribe now etc shows – the advised market went up by 9% or so; the D2C market did 12%. It’s now – and there are lots of ways of counting this, but this is ours – at £586bn D2C and £792bn advised. That’s 74%, not 66%.  

At the same time FCA’s Mills Review has found that 11% of adults are already using AI to help with financial Stuff. We know from our own Advice Gap reports – not long to wait till 2026’s starts dropping, sports fans – that only around 9% of adults can access advice. And services like PensionBee and now Aegon’s Mylo consolidation tool are starting to do numbers. 

I remember dimly in the past working in workplace pensions, and the golden ticket was always about engagement: not just getting people to pay attention but also to take action. It was brutally, brutally difficult and expensive, and for a looooong time really the only way to do it reliably was to go to the workplace and book in individual consultations, and then of course there was the is-it-advice stuff to deal with. Those who were motivated did stuff anyway. Those who weren’t were tough to reach; you had to go in with a pair of tweezers. 

Anyway, in this last week or so of the silly season, have this to ponder: many propositions were built over the years to catch the wave of public engagement and/or employee engagement when eventually it broke on the shore. Are we there yet? I’m starting to think we might be. Polson’s Eighth Indispensable Law states “it is very hard to get people with no money to save it” and that is of course still the case, but I dunno, something feels different this time… 

Your music choice today is of course from Dolly. I nearly went for her metal collaboration with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, but if we’re honest it’s not her finest work. Wise heads tell me that’s 9 to 5, so here’s her doing it at the Grand Ole Opry in 2019. Absolute quality. 

See you next week 

Mark