Our regular round-up of the latest insights on investment distribution
Platform market M&A across the UK and Europe
There has been a significant amount of M&A in the platform market of late, in the UK and Continental Europe, across D2C and intermediaries. Here we take a quick look at just a few of the deals we’ve seen over the past year, starting in the UK. FNZ gobbles up...
Richard Bradley 28 February 2020
10 years of solid D2C growth – but with room for improvement
We will shortly reach our 10-year anniversary of covering the UK D2C market. Our latest UK D2C: Market Overview will come out next week and we have mixed feelings about progress in the sector. Online investing services are much better than they used to be: easier...
Jeremy Fawcett 21 February 2020
Assessing the value of value reports
The first batch of assessment of value (AoV) reports from asset managers have appeared on our desks from Hargreaves Lansdown, Vanguard and Rathbones. The FCA’s has ‘concerns that retail investors may be getting poor value for money’ and has chosen several...
Platforum 14 February 2020
Retirement advice: work in progress
The last 12 months have seen some significant shifts in retirement advice. However, adaptation to pension freedoms remains very much a work in progress for both advisers and providers. As well as shifts in retirement planning over the past year, we have also seen a...
Richard Bradley 07 February 2020
Robo 2.0
Investec Click & Invest, Tiller Investments and most recently Moola have all shut their digital wealth manager operations in the last 12 months. These closures add to the existing concerns over the long-term sustainability of robo advisers’ business models....
Cristina Puscas 31 January 2020
Clearstream acquisition further concentrates platform market
This week has seen further consolidation in the European platform market, with Clearstream acquiring a majority stake in UBS Fondcenter. When combined with Clearstream’s Fund Desk business, the new ‘Fondcenter’ platform will be the third-largest platform in...
Richard Bradley 24 January 2020