But what if you don’t trust? Not in an active ‘I hate you’ way, but in a low-level susurration of lesser angels on your shoulder sort of way. We saw instances recently where, as a consequence of difficult replatformings, some clients on Barclays Smart Investor (and never was there a better disproving of nominative determinism than that) and others saw zero balances where once there was a healthy Isa.
No one had a zero balance, and everything came back to where it should be eventually. But imagine what that does to someone who has handed off their investment to a bunch of folk they’ve never met – even if you as an adviser are involved – and their attitude to keeping in touch with their investments?
My contention is that we need to use the technology at our disposal from platforms, back offices, reporting tools or whatever, to bring investors back closer to their money. They don’t need trading access if they have an adviser, but it is surely right to let people see the seven things I popped on to the welcome screen about 1,000 words ago. We can’t dole information out like sweeties; our system is too abstract for that.
When it comes to client reporting, there are a few examples out there worthy of note. The True Potential client-side experience is nice. XPlan has a nice client portal; so does Intelliflo. Fastrak from Sprint still does a nice job; I like the Ascentric integration with it, and so on.
I don’t think we can expect clients to deal with ludicrous amounts of disclosure. I do think that taking the issue in both hands and taking back control (sorry) of what is important information, but also allowing the client to choose when to engage with that like a grown-up, is the right thing to do.
And with that, it’s back to the sun loungers for you lot. You’ll have noticed the FCA’s interim platform market study has now been published, and you’d better believe I’ll be writing about that next time. One to look forward to.
Mark Polson is principal of platform and specialist consultancy the Lang Cat
