It’s 10pm as I write this, having just sunk fifteen quid watching Dunfermline Athletic lose to Ayr United on PPV. Two reasons for mentioning this. One, if you think the life of an Update writer is all glamour then think again sonny Jim. Two, the only redeeming part of the experience was top-notch uninterrupted streaming. Although one might argue that a spot of buffering might have improved the viewing. More on that in a bit.  

In non-Scottish Championship news, I’m running a study at the moment on platform service experience, part of an annual thing we do with the ladies and gents at Parmenion. The main gig right now is holding lots of interviews with the advice profession, getting their perspectives on the good, bad and ugly of what’s going on in their worlds.  

No prizes for guessing the themes of some of the ugly stuff. No Keyser Soze plot twist here, the Usual Suspects still dominate with letter of authority pain, transfer standards and onboarding the chief antagonists causing the advice profession pain. We continue to hear horror stories of total elapsed time between that initial client meeting and full activation.  

My favourite chat so far was with an adviser who for the purposes of this Update, let’s just call him John, mainly as his name is John. John, in a very polite and disarming kind of way talked about how it’s only once you forensically go through servicing data, do you start to see what’s going on. I’m paraphrasing here but I particularly enjoyed his perspective on… “We need to look away from pure averages. There’s no such thing as negative turnaround times or negative transfer times so the best you’re gonna get is close to instant or close to zero. Instead of pure averages, tell me what the median time is alongside it, tell me about what’s going on at that bottom 5% of cases where the real mucky stuff goes on”. 

Probably obvious to most but sometimes in life you need to hear simple things expressed slightly differently. Thanks John. 

There’s a danger with these kind of projects, especially with something as emotive as service, that if the questions are asked in a certain way, the conversations can easily turn into therapy sessions on everything that’s wrong with the sector rather than getting a balanced perspective. Fortunately, the project is in the hands of an expert (Kate, not me!) and we’re capturing enough of the good stuff too.  

And there is a lot of good out there.  

• A director of a business who spoke to me at length about how good their business development contact is but to “please not tell him in case his head gets too big and he ever leaves”. 

• I heard from a planner who uses a platform that, candidly, wouldn’t be topping any reputation tables but who is baffled by this platform’s standing as he’s never had anything other than an excellent experience with them.  

• A business owner who knows their key contacts within the servicing team of their primary platform so well that they “feel part of their team”. 

I should stress that I’m only about a third of the way through the interview phase of this project so this Update might not be indicative of some of the final conclusions but it’s heartening nonetheless to counterbalance some of the horrors by making sure we acknowledge and champion the good too.   

It’s impossible to conduct these chats without drawing parallels with your own life. I moved broadband last week. I got into a dispute with Provider A (it seems like contacting both their support and their retentions team at the same time caused a rift in the space time continuum) and ultimately left. I signed up to Provider B at 8pm on a Saturday and by 9am on Thursday we had a new router, and the service was up and running. A total elapsed time of around 3 working days during which the comms and updates I received about the process were first class. Although given the quality of the match last night I wish it had taken another week.  

I had a similar experience borrowing money recently for house renovations. Total elapsed time from application to releasing money in our account? A matter of days.  

I get that these are inadequate comparisons for lots of reasons but there has to be a happy medium (Or median, John?) between other consumer transactions and what clients of advice firms experience at onboarding stage. I once visited a very smart firm in Glasgow who are about to do equally smart things with us on stage at our big conference next week. They get the last word on this: “Listen Steve, we can have the best client experience in the world, the best material, the best initial meeting, the best comms style, but sooner or later they’re gonna have to experience the industry”. 

We’re in Glasgow next week and with the theme in mind, it’s a little known fact that Jim Kerr wrote this song based on his experience of transferring assets out of a closed LifeCo.