Swiss funds: life beyond the EU

Aside from great chocolate, stunning ski resorts and high-quality watches, Switzerland is home to a global hub for wealth management. There are 586 banks and more than 3,500 independent wealth managers operating in a country with a population of 8m. Fund groups of any...

Life beyond the robos

As from yesterday, Scalable Capital is now fully live in the UK. While it might represent the next generation of robo-adviser from an investment management perspective, the future for ‘independents’ looks challenging as they struggle to achieve scale. Having said...

Sun, yachts and … preferred routes to market

Ah, summer. The Platforum team is bobbing in the Italian med with buckets of gelato back on the beach. OK, not really. In fact, we’re stuck in our offices like you. And it has been a busy week. Between publishing three reports (Consumer Insights update, the Sweden and...

The fallout

We had the good fortune to sit round a few tables this week – round, horseshoe, oval and others – discussing the implications of the Brexit vote for the UK’s retail investment industry. Participants ranged from financial advisers to heads of sales at fund groups and...

The long view on pensions

It’s been a rocky week for the markets and for retail investors. Platforms and financial advisers tell us that sales were slow pre-referendum and things picked up in the days following the vote. But advisers also tell us that they are getting a lot of enquiries from...

Highlights from the D2C & Digital conference

“The great thing about today has been that all the conversations were about meeting customers’ needs and not products” – was how one delegate chose to describe the D2C and Digital Conference yesterday. The event was all about self-directed...