Me again, sorry about that. Thanks to Sean for a quite extraordinary debut Update last week. That guy can write, can’t he? Believe it or not, he does an industry news summary every week for us and it is equally extraordinary. We publish a shortened version called Sean McKinven’s Newsround on our site and you can find that here.  

Sean was looking after you because I was off in That London doing our latest event, and you can read all about that here. It went off pretty well I think, and I can only think of three things that made me cross which for me isn’t very many at all. So we’ll take that as a win.  

The rest of our 2026 events are now booking. That’s the Advicetech Catwalk 3 on 24 June in London, and HomeGame 6 in Leith (not Edinburgh) on 7 October. Both will sell out OF COURSE so get in early. Not on sale yet is our London 2027 conference, which is going to be somewhere very special indeed, and if you were there last week you’ll know where you’ll be spending a day in the life. You’ll also get priority booking if you showed up (not if you didn’t) and if you’re on our panel too.  

That’s enough of all that. Let’s talk about banks, baby. Let’s talk about you and me. I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what happened there. 

So NatWest has bought Evelyn, and all sorts of people are a bit breathless about it, having moved on from being breathless about HL’s price jiggery-pokery a couple of weeks ago. I guess some people just like being breathless. It is a mark of my Getting Old that I’m not going to make the obvious gag about that (ha, gag, geddit?) and you should all observe how much I’m growing as a person.   

Restraint jokes aside (and while we’re here, see how I doubled down the joke with a double meaning for restraint? That’s a joke cubed right there, sports fans, a joke inside a joke inside a joke, Russian doll style, and that’s the kind of humour you have to go on very expensive courses to learn, but you get it for free here and I don’t think I get enough credit for that).  

Oh, lost the sentence there. 

But got it back by varying the sentence length and putting in a short paragraph; keeping your eyes moving and not letting you rest.  

My point is that the last few paragraphs worked in exactly the same way that banks owning financial planning and advice businesses doesn’t. It never has. In fact, it’s not just advice and planning; banks are wired to get their reward pretty quickly whereas almost any long-term investment business learns the art of delayed gratification pretty quickly.  

I remember cutting around the place at various times over the last couple of decades with a presentation entitled “What If The Banks Don’t Screw It Up This Time?” and of course any time a bank has gone for it in this business we call show then it’s never gone well, which is good news for me because I’ve never had to update my slides.  

My point was then and is now that if a big bank genuinely got its act together and worked out how to deliver financial planning services people would love, at a price that would pass a value assessment, and restricting their more venal instincts to a level where the vertically integrated product set was…what? Not great, not leading, but at the same time not actively deleterious to client outcomes. Let’s go for “alright”. “Inoffensive”. “Mid”. Any of these would be fine. If they could do that, and if they could work out how to do something meaningful with the insane amount of customer data they hold, then that would be a force to be reckoned with.  

Evelyn is a serious business run by serious people. Not everything it does is flawless, but it is one of the sector’s big beasts and each element of it has some momentum about it. I don’t have a cat in this fight, but it seems to me that businesses of this type operate best where they can move quickly and reflect the fast-moving requirements of their large and very diverse client base. That’s antithetical to the operating culture of most banks, and of course we don’t have to look too far from NatWest to see what happens when the converse is true.  

So there’s more than a racing probability that a retail bank culture will choke Evelyn more than empower it and lift it to the next level. I have no doubt that there are smart people on both sides of the transaction with expensive Powerpoint slides with boxes and arrows on showing how that won’t happen, but culture eats strategy etc etc and it’s what happens when the highheidyins aren’t looking that really makes the difference.  

And yet…and yet…what if they don’t screw it up? What if this is the one that breaks the mould? What if they can find a way through like that bit in Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit or whatever with all the marshes and the dead beasties and that and the wee hairy guy finds his way but it’s a moment of peril but he overcomes it and it’s all fine eventually, sort of? Or is that Harry Potter? Might be.  

Nothing big changes from this acquisition. But keep your eyes peeled. Financial planning, advice and management just hit the point in the cycle where it moves from the private-equity backed tidying-up phase to the corporate behemoth phase. If it’s possible for something to be absolutely not boring and at the same time unbelievably boring, this is it. 

Your music choice this week is going to take a little bit of commitment on your part. If I say “seven minute Australian prog rock epic with bagpipes” I know how many of you will react, right, but hear me out. Salva by Karnivool from their first record in 13 years is incredible, as is the rest of the album and I commend it to your ears. Album of the Year material. 

PS the 2026 TCWU Spotify playlist is growing and is here…