Our regular round-up of the latest insights on investment distribution
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
Investment fund industry: new decade, new thinking
“We believe that sustainability should be our new standard for investing.” This was written in bold characters in the latest letter from Larry Fink to BlackRock’s clients. It would be easy to dismiss these words as just an attempt to liberate the firm from its...
Victor Garcia Priego 17 January 2020
Why open a Stocks and Shares ISA?
Most British adults do not invest. More specifically two fifths of the British population have only ever had cash savings and a further fifth have neither saved nor invested. This poses a good question to start the new year: why should the average saver open a...
Ross Langbridge 10 January 2020