Hello, hello, so the dust has settled from HogaMeme 5 last week and if you couldn’t be there then you can see some foties and stories and stuff on our Linkedin page here. One of the nicest things is that we’re already seeing some connecting of potential employees and employers going on; this is a great sector to be part of sometimes. 

With that in mind, thoughts turn to the London leg of New Blood in February at King’s Place. Same sort of deal, but a new agenda (which me and Steve have Actually Written), new speakers, new planners for Financial Planning Live, new entertainment and more. We also have two halls to use, so we can split the young’uns and the old lags out for a while too. It’ll be lush. Book on here. And after that our third AdviceTech Catwalk event will be in the City of London in late June. Not booking yet, but keep your eyes peeled. 

Right, with all that done let’s have a think about something for this week’s mid-week rumination and that thing, I think, should be This Thing, which sees Standard Life – the new, ex-Phoenix version – launching a tied advice proposition for £1k fixed fee, aimed at existing customers who’re thinking of nibbling at their pension pot. 

As part of thinking about all the new blood / new folk into the industry things, I’m not the only one to remember back to the days of direct sales forces. That’s where I started out, in the Mighty Cohort of 1996 under the watchful eye of Duncan McKechnie in the Scottish Widows advice grad scheme. I got trained to within an inch of my life, manned the phone lines through to midnight when late night pensions were going to be a thing, whipped through my FPC and AFPC exams, gave advice when I got qualified and then went out into the field, looking after some of the edgier postcodes in the North West of England. It was quite an experience spread over five years, and at least after it I knew that if the whole marketing and product stuff didn’t work out I always had a fallback as a…front desk phone person on the late shift. 

I mention this partly from nostalgia, but also because my number one, two and three sources of business were retiring policyholders or those with maturing endowments (to be fair, there were fewer of those in the later years). And that’s pretty much what this new fixed fee thing from SL is all about. 

Given that we’ve produced the industry reference Advice Gap research for more years than I care to count, you would expect me to be interested in anything which tries to open up advice to folk who aren’t getting it, and I am. I’m also interested in this because it deliberately doesn’t try to cut the grass of IFAs; most of these pension-holders wouldn’t pass your minimum asset criteria. 

But I’m also interested with one eye on the new blood thing. One of the inhibitors of getting advice to more people is the income expectations of those who are involved in giving it. They may well be righteous, and regulatory and compliance and technology costs may well be too high, but in any service business the main cost is always people, and you can’t square a circle of needing to charge modest amounts with paying folk a wheen o’cash very easily. Interestingly you can’t circle a square of that either, not that I’ve tried. 

At the same time, we know from our session last week that when you show young folk what is involved in being a planner or adviser, they like the look of it. And they’re open to being trained, and they’re cheap.  

So if we can get organisations – like SL – to try and join these dots, we might get somewhere. Low cost advice. Delivered to a largely unadvised audience. By good people, well trained, but not at the peak of their earnings powers. Sound sensible? It does to me. 

I’m nothing to do with SL, and I have no idea at all whether this particular iteration of back-to-the-future advice will be the one to unlock the advice gap issue. It might do; it might just spur others to have a go. The market will sort that out. For now, though, fair play to SL and my one hope is that no-one tries to get the advisers to sell with-profit annuities, because we had Quite Enough of That last time round.  

Your music choice this week is a fine thing from Greek full-stop enthusiasts and post-rock fellows we.own.the.sky (yes, I know). To be honest this isn’t my favourite track from their new record In Your Absence; that’s a song called Fragile.Alive but there isn’t a proper video for it. Mind you, this video is just a bunch of blokes standing around looking serious playing quite intense music, so maybe that doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s great. Not to be confused with the M83 song. Here’s Eclipse.