Hello again, welcome to the middle of your week and another Update. 2025 is proceeding at quite a pace, isn’t it? We’re right through the Easter lull now and Stuff is happening thick and fast and I must say I’m enjoying it more than I have for some time. Must be something in the water. I hope you are too. Enjoying it, I mean. Not in the water. Unless being in the water is what you enjoy, in which case I hope you’re in the water and enjoying it.  

Dangling modifiers dealt with, to business! Some of the Stuff that is Happening emanates from your favourite Leith-based cats, and it is with absolutely no shame whatsoever I’m going to tell you about a bit of it.   

Before I do though, now would be the Very Best Time to get your tickets for the AdviceTech Catwalk which is on 5 June in London. We’ve got an actual church, an organist, a crypt, 5 fintechs looking for your favour, br00tal High Inquisitors and very tasty food and drink. You should come, you’ll like it. The best way to spend an afternoon that ever there was. Well, one of them.  

Anyway, tickets are here and please don’t hang around. If you want a few – and you should – I’ll happily do a wee discount but I can’t work out how to do that on the ticketing site, so drop me a note on mark at thelangcat dot co dot uk and I’ll Sort You Out. Thanking you. Oh, and if you’re on our adviser research panel your tickets are FREE! You’ll have had a message about it from Steve.  

In other news, 13 years ago(!) I wrote the lang cat’s very first platform guide. It was really about platform pricing – which is why I called it “the lang cat’s guide to platform pricing”, being a literal-minded fellow – and it was one of the things that got this little shop going. Spool forward to 2025 and the Guide is bigger, better, properly researched and importantly not written by me any more, which is an improvement in all possible ways.  

It is, however, written by Rich Mayor and a team of cats, all of whom are Excellent, and the 2025 State of the Platform Nation (as it’s known now) is a stormer. Here are a couple of Bits from it. I’m not punting, this is just for free.  

• You lot are responsible for withdrawing over £65bn from platforms last year. Are you proud of yourselves? Eh? EH? That’s a record. Actually, you probably should be proud as it turns out clients are doing rational things like paying off mortgages and in some cases accelerating their financial plans, and that’s all down to you. So that’s nice, but not if you’re a platform, because of all the outflows. 

• Pensions, hmmm? All a bit tricky and of course a huge percentage of platform assets are in the blessed things. About three quarters of you plan to advise clients to do gifting from pensions more. And 2/3rds of you said you’d upped the number of your annuity recommendations last year, economics being what it is. All of which makes life harder still for the state of the platform nation, as assets leave for annuities rather than hang around in drawdown. 

• Platforms will also have to consider their onshore bond game; something which is (to put it nicely) not universally strong. A third of you are increasing allocations to these venerable products, and of course there’s a world of nuance inside them. I used to be really good at top slicing calcs.  

• In terms of winners in 2024, you have to hand it to Quilter who topped the gross and net sales charts, and did pretty damn well on adviser satisfaction too, across independent and integrated channels. This is still a market where the big are getting bigger… 

• And for factoid fans, the average book price (before special deals) for a £500k portfolio is now 0.26%. That’s down from 0.32% in 2015, which is only six basis points, but is also a 20% reduction.  

• Oh, and advised platforms now hold £655bn of your clients’ money.  

So there you are. If you want to read State of the Platform Nation 2025 and you’re an Analyser subscriber, it’s there for you to download COMPLETELY FREE. Everyone else – subscribe to Analyser and you get it COMPLETELY FREE. If you’re a provider or a Not Adviser, it’s NOT FREE but you can BUY IT and you SHOULD because it’s GREAT.  

OK, I lied about selling, but in my defence that was a really crap sales pitch. So that’s all good then, isn’t it?  

Your music choice this week is a classic banger from one of Finland’s finest. Am I including this because Finland is hosting Eurovision this weekend? Is it because it’s drawn from the Kalevala, the ancient Finnish saga? Is it because Sleep Is Important For Wellbeing? No-one knows and I’m not telling – but I can tell you it’s not because of Tomi’s dreadlocks. Anyway, enjoy House Of Sleep from Amorphis, partly responsible for one of the finest gigs I’ve ever been to.